Monthly Update: September 2024

Sep 1, 2024

It’s been about 7 weeks since my last update, and the time has been well spent. The school year ended for the kids, we went on holiday, I started a new job, and more.

The Lake District

We go to the Lake District in northern England every year with a big group of friends, and it’s one of my favorite places in the world. There are some places where I am just happy, and the Lake District is one of them. I look forward to the trip every year.

Highlights of the trip were climbing Helm Crag (405m) with the whole family, including Ms. 5, canoeing on Derwent Water, and enjoying a swimming hole with a waterfall below Easedale Tarn. But mostly it was a time to just be out among the woods and fells, drink tea, read books, and play games with our friends.

I was overjoyed to get a copy of the Wainwright books for my birthday, unfortunately too late for this year’s trip, but I look forward to getting many years of use out of them.

Cord Shutdown

I spent a little time before and after our trip to the Lakes helping with the Cord shutdown. This mostly involved writing down some operational know-how that was trapped in my head and answering questions, though I did do some contract work for a Cord customer getting their self-hosted version of Cord up and running. This was deeply bittersweet; we built a great product at Cord with a great team, and I’m sad that it didn’t make it, but seeing it get picked up by our (former) customers as a better option than signing up with one of our (former) competitors makes me proud. And the code will continue to run and do its job, hopefully for many years to come.

Da Terra

My wife and I traditionally celebrate our birthdays and anniversary with a trip out to a Michelin-starred restaurant, though we’ve missed a year here and there. This year’s was Da Terra, which was fantastic and is highly recommended.

The food was tremendous, as it is at basically every place we’ve been, but what really distinguished Da Terra was the presentation. The mushroom dish was served on a bed of live moss. The scallops came on a beautiful piece of coral. Every dish had a paired presentation that was reserved but thoughtful and greatly enhanced the experience.

Relay

The last three weeks have been getting up and running at Relay, which has been a blast. First off, everyone there has been a delight to work with; they’re all friendly and helpful, which I find really important.

As well, I love learning new domains, because effectively everything that’s nontrival ends up with a sort of fractal level of complexity that it’s really fun to dig into. Just getting a package from point A to point B is relatively straightforward, but getting thousands and thousands of packages to their destinations every day at a competitive cost requires optimizing every single little pathway and touchpoint, which means lots of little details all have to be right. And also everything gets more efficient with scale, but that means planning for scale. And the scale here isn’t software scale, it’s scaling warehouse space and the labor pool and other things that are much harder to do.

The actual state of things on the software side is a bit chaotic. They’re at the point where they’ve got a functioning product up and running, but huge portions of it were built early on and have mostly been hastily patched since. I don’t think they made the wrong tradeoffs, their early mission was to get a functional network going to prove out the business model, but having done that, now they have to pay off that technical debt. So a lot of my job is to try to get things onto a more stable footing, which is an interesting challenge in prioritization and making tradeoffs.

Anyway, I’m having a blast, and am really happy that I decided to join up!

Game Changer

During evenings, I’ve been too tired a lot of the time to do much of anything, and so my wife and I have been watching Game Changer, which is incredible. My favorite episodes are the ones where the players actually have to go to some effort to figure out the game’s rules, but everyone involved is hilarious and the concepts really go places.

Gaming

My limited gaming time has mostly gone to drafting Bloomburrow, which has been solid but not amazing. I’ve done more my normal share of winning (71.4% match win rate), which is nice to see after MH3.

Mostly I’m just biding my time until Factorio 2.0 and the Space Age expansion release in mid-October. I don’t really want to start a new game before then, but it’s still a long time to wait.

Books

After some amount of nudging from my wife, I switched over to The StoryGraph for tracking my reading, so if you’re on there, give me a follow.

As far as actual books go, I read a couple great ones I want to highlight.

The first was High Output Management by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. I’ve read quite a few books on management over the past couple years, since I was a manager until Cord closed, and this is by far the best one. It’s full of down-to-earth practical insights about the nuts and bolts of leadership. It focuses on middle management, so if you’re doing line management you’d want to supplement it with something focused on that (my recommendation would be Radical Candor), but I found it really useful.

The second was The Three-Body Problem, which isn’t much of a surprise (it won the Hugo, after all), but I loved it all the same. The pacing was a little slow for my tastes in the beginning, but it ends up being purposeful, as it plays out like a suspense novel. I’m not sure if I want to read the sequels, since I was very satisfied with how it left everything at the end, but I’ll probably get to them eventually.

Alright, I think that’s all for this month. See you in October!