A quiet week of recovery and vigilance after launch, with two bright spots: medieval cosplay at a craft fair and a midnight show that I think genuinely rewired my kid’s brain.

Launch week is over, and this week was mostly about coming down from it. The round-the-clock in-person shifts ended once we got back off-site, but we’re still rotating through 24-hour support, answering user questions, investigating anything that looks odd, and generally staying close to the system while it settles in. We’ve got PagerDuty wired up to notify us of problems and wake us up overnight if it comes to that. So far it hasn’t come to that. The issues keep being minor and keep originating outside our own code, in things like single sign-on and the machinery of talking to printers.

The work I’ve actually been sinking my teeth into is the release process. I want to automate it end to end. Releasing software should be boring, whether it’s a scheduled version bump or an emergency hotfix, and the way you get there is by building a rigid process with gates at every step so each one happens correctly and in the right order. In a regulated environment like ours, with scientific and governmental requirements layered on top of each other, a documented and auditable release process isn’t a nice-to-have. Automation is how you make that documentation real instead of aspirational.

The rest of the week happened at home. My youngest had a rough year in high school, and we spent most of our waking hours trying to claw back a backlog of assignments and tests before the year runs out. We worked through the weekend and then every evening after that, and we made a real dent. It may turn out to be too little too late, but we’re doing everything we can to get her to the finish line and salvage what’s salvageable. That’s where most of the energy went.

We did step away twice.

Saturday was the Indie South Spring Spectacular, the big annual outdoor art and craft market that pulls makers in from all over the region. Juniper and I dressed up in vaguely medieval garb for no reason other than the weather was beautiful and it sounded like fun, and we spent the afternoon wandering the stalls and looking at everything.

Thursday was the one that mattered. It was opening night of a three-day festival celebrating the 30th anniversary of Kindercore Records, one of Athens’ own homegrown labels. The whole weekend was stacked with great bands, but the first night was headlined by Man or Astro-man?, who are far and away my favorite band to see live, and who I almost never get to see anymore. I took Juniper so she could see them for the first time, even though it was a school night and the band wasn’t going on until nearly midnight.

Coco in his orange flight suit playing bass in profile while bandmate Avona Nova leans back mid-performance, both lit by stage haze and colored light.
Coco and Avona Nova, somewhere in the haze.

It was, I’m fairly sure, a life-changing show for her. Their stage presence is incredible on its own, but what gets me is the creative whimsy they bring to everything, their personas, their props, the instruments, the music itself. There’s an energy and a drive to it that I’ve always found genuinely inspiring, and I had a feeling she’d feel the same way. We were front and center, so she got the full experience.

Coco of Man or Astro-man? in an orange flight suit with a COCO name patch and goggles, mouth wide open as he plays a theremin with his face beside a coil of yellow cable on stage at the 40 Watt.
Coco playing the theremin with his face. This is a thing that happened and I have proof.

At one point Coco, the band’s frontman insofar as they have one, ran through the venue in his trademark 70s TV-set helmet, came back up on stage, and put it on Juniper’s head. She wore it for the rest of the show.

A face seen through the screen of a vintage Emerson television set worn as a helmet, lit pink and blue by the stage lights.
Juniper, broadcasting live from inside an Emerson.

Then a surprise guest came out for three songs, wearing his own TV helmet: R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. I could not possibly have predicted that.

A guitarist wearing a vintage television set over his head plays a Rickenbacker on a rug-covered stage, drummer behind him and the 40 Watt light-bulb logo on the wall.
Peter Buck, sitting in. TV helmet and all.

It was an amazing night, and one I know Juniper and I will both carry with us for a long time.

Other than that, it was a quiet week, recovering from the hustle and bustle of the one before and building back up the energy for the next push.