Carnitas on the stove, noodles on the counter, goodbyes in the virtual conference room.

Shipped

I completed the back end work on a university’s community engagement portal this week, wrapping up the bulk of the development effort. The client is, and I quote, “over the moon” with the results. I want to get all the way to the finish line before the end of the month, and this puts me firmly on track.

After showing my team how I built that portal using a structured workflow around AI-powered development tools, they wanted to try it themselves. So I spent a day building a soup-to-nuts training program for them to follow — a mock statement of work from a fictional client, documentation on my process, and enough guidance to produce a complete application without producing slop. It was genuinely fun to create. I’m looking forward to running through it myself as a participant to see where the rough edges are.

Read

I finished Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, and I loved it. Fast, fun, hopeful, and cozy despite being set in a ruined San Francisco. A five-star mini-review is up on my BookWyrm site. I haven’t written a full review yet, but the short version is that this book is going to stick with me.

I’ve also been reading many, many onboarding materials from my new employer — the first trickle of what will soon become a flood.

Played

Dry spell. Con season is over and the groundwork for switching jobs is nearly done, so I think time will start opening up again soon. I’m eager to get back to playing Gloomhaven with my group and sitting down with the Xbox to explore more of Outer Worlds 2.

My partner and I did finally finish watching the first season of Pluribus. What a wonderfully weird show. Vince Gilligan doing something completely different, Rhea Seehorn carrying the whole thing, and a premise that just keeps unfolding in directions I didn’t expect. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Cooked

Two kitchen adventures this week, both involving pork and obsession.

When the pandemic hit and restaurants closed down, food prices in general shot up — but here in Georgia, where pulled pork BBQ is everywhere, the pork market cratered. Stores were regularly offering whole butts for 49 cents a pound or less. I found a recipe for instant pot carnitas that were spectacularly delicious and adaptable to whatever we could find at the store any given week besides the pork. We made it constantly. It was exceptionally cheap, could be made in big batches, stored well, and worked in any number of ways — our go-to was piled on top of baked potatoes. This week pork butts were on sale for $1.50/lb, a far cry from the COVID lows but still really cheap for nowadays, so I cooked up a big batch of carnitas on Saturday.

And then there are the noodles. Somewhere around the halfway point of Automatic Noodle I became obsessed with the idea of biang biang noodles — the wide, hand-pulled, belt-like noodles from Xi’an. I’d never seen them in person, and there’s nowhere in Athens to get them. After consulting a local Facebook food group I was pointed to a few places near Atlanta in Duluth, but I couldn’t get there soon enough to satisfy the craving. So I did the totally normal thing and watched a few YouTube videos and decided to make them from scratch on Sunday. The process is an all-day affair — short bits of hand kneading followed by many repeated rests — but apart from the time involved they were remarkably low effort. And they came out spectacularly. I’ll still find a time to try them in Duluth, but biang biang noodles have already entered regular rotation in my kitchen.

Noticed

I went to see a silly comedy at the community theater I’ve been involved with — sometimes extremely heavily, though in the last decade or so not as much — since I moved to Athens in 1997. Several friends of mine were in the show, and it was fun to watch them be goofy in a production about mad scientists in love, along with a few re-animated monsters who were also in love.

Thinking About

The realities of leaving what was in many ways a dream job for the unknown challenges of a new position. The professional challenges I’m actually looking forward to. The insurance coordination I am not. Pretty much everyone in the household is undergoing various treatment plans, and having to switch providers mid-stream is a major undertaking. I’m excited about the work ahead, but the prospect of cleaning up insurance messes terrifies me in a way that no codebase ever has.

What’s Next

The leadership team has known about my departure for a couple weeks now, but this week I had the difficult conversations with my immediate team to let them know I was leaving. These are extremely talented developers, every one of them. They’ve made my job easier in so many ways, and I’ll be sad to not work alongside them anymore. It’s been an honor to lead them.

Vibe Check

After both telling my team and filling out tax forms, my impending job change is very, very real.