We’re shifting from a jam-packed spring into the lazy days of summer, though there’s nothing actually lazy about them.

Shipped

I voted in the statewide primaries this week. There were plenty of state and local races on the ballot, and I did my part to push the best candidates through to the next round.

It was a good week for LocallyGrown.net. I shipped a range of improvements, from small conveniences for the market managers to performance work on the webhooks that handle email provider callbacks. The one I’m proudest of is a roughly 20x speedup on the page that lists all the products, which is the heart of the whole system. It was already fast, at least as quick as any typical e-commerce platform, but now it loads instantly. It got so fast that it exposed some infrastructure that’s normally invisible at slower speeds, so I got to clean that up too.

At work I’ve been laying the groundwork to take all the great work my team did before I arrived and apply it to other new systems on the roadmap. Most of it is making things internally consistent at the architectural level so the good patterns can be safely extracted and reused. Done right, it’s completely invisible to users, but it makes the existing application easier to maintain and the next applications much easier to build. It’s solid, satisfying work.

I’ve also been trying to leave my mark wherever I can, contributing where I see gaps and stepping in where I think I can make a difference. The most recent example is an internal documentation portal I built, a single Welcome Center that pulls together the architectural and design docs I’ve written, the educational presentations I’ve put together, and end-user documentation other folks contributed. Our launch went well, which means a lot of new eyes are on our corner of the company right now, and I wanted to give them somewhere soft to land and learn about who we are and what we’re doing.

Read

Reading time has fallen off a cliff lately, so my progress through Starter Villain has been slooooow. I’m still enjoying it, just a few pages at a time.

Played

The Athens Stomp Fest was a great time, ten hours of local-ish surf music in every flavor you can imagine. There was straight classic surf, surf that borrowed from spaghetti western soundtracks, southern gothic surf, post-apocalyptic surf, even science fiction surf. I love the variety and the creativity on display, and it’s a day I look forward to every year. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had this idea of starting a surf band themed around the classic Universal monsters. I’d play the Creature from the Black Lagoon on bass, naturally.

An outdoor stage under green pennant bunting and leafy trees. A performer in a red fez, glasses, a tan jacket, and white pants stands in profile, one hand raised to play a theremin, with vintage Fender amplifiers behind him. Stacked grey folding chairs and a few seated listeners fill the foreground.
Ten hours of surf music, and the fez was nowhere near the most whimsical thing on stage all day.

Tiki Taco Tuesday is back. My partner and I didn’t miss a single week last year and pretty firmly established ourselves as regulars. We won’t manage to be quite that consistent this year, but I’m thrilled to be back at it. We dress for the occasion, bring our own tiki mugs, and settle in for an evening of grilled tacos and great drinks. And there’s Rum School, which I can’t leave out. This week’s lesson was “The Raw Material,” all about how the sugar cane itself shapes the final product.

Eric, a bearded man in glasses, smiles in a selfie, wearing a blue patterned fez and a dark Hawaiian shirt printed with volcanoes and sailing ships. He holds up a tiki mug shaped like a small wooden cask with light stir sticks poking out. Behind him is a dimly lit bar lined with shelves of liquor bottles and a model sailing ship on the counter.
Dressed for Tiki Taco Tuesday, mug in hand, Rum School in session.

Cooked

Some friends were out of town and couldn’t pick up their CSA share, so they signed it over to me. I headed out to the farmers market early Saturday to grab it and ended up chatting with old friends for a while. A few of the vendors there are farmers I sold alongside some twenty-five years ago at this market’s precursor, and who went on to sell at my own market for decades. It was good to catch up with them. I came home with a bounty of fresh vegetables, which I rounded out with an assortment of mushrooms, some pork, a few baked goods, and a bouquet of flowers. It was a great morning all around.

A pile of fresh vegetables on a black glass cooktop: a large head of broccoli, a bunch of carrots in orange and deep red, a frilly head of red leaf lettuce, leeks with their roots still attached, feathery green carrot tops, and a clear bag holding yellow and green summer squash.
A friend's CSA share, signed over to me. Not a bad haul for a Saturday errand.

The neighborhood grocery had racks of ribs on buy-one-get-one, so of course I had to make a mess of them. My grill and smoker are out of commission at the moment, so I cooked them in the oven instead, low and slow, and they came out almost as good. They were at least as good as any pre-cooked ribs I can buy in town.

Noticed

Summer is here. This is Juniper’s last week of school, and I am so looking forward to not stressing over assignments and homework, though probably not even half as much as she is. It’s been a rough year, and I think we all need a reset.

A fluffy grey-and-brown tabby cat sprawled on its side in a patch of sunlight, eyes closed and one paw stretched out, lying on a green surface beside a folded plaid cloth.
Wil'em already has the summer reset figured out.

Thinking About

At work, my immediate team is still focused on rolling out the histology application to the other lab that needs it, but more and more my attention is drifting toward what comes after. How do we keep the momentum going, and how do we safely extract the patterns that worked so we can apply them to the next product and hand them to other teams building in the same ecosystem? There’s also the regulatory side. We operate in a heavily regulated environment, and a lot of my thinking lately is about telling the real rules apart from the ones that are really just internal interpretations of rules written for a different context and kept around out of inertia.

What’s Next

I’ve booked another trip to Austin in a couple of weeks, a low-key two-day visit to take advantage of some in-person time with a project manager who’s also a director, in town that same week. I’m looking forward to it.