Weeknotes

Getting into Elixir again A few years ago I started a project using Elixir. I loved working with it. But my motivation for the project fell and I moved onto other things. Fast forward to this year. I started the project back up from with a different perspective. This time, I started focusing on analyzing OpenAPI schemas by looking at all the possible variations—what I talked about as schema entropy. I spent a morning writing a prototype in Python and got some interesting results.

We took a mini vacation with another family this week. Our friends rented a cabin on a lake with a pool. We spent all our time swimming, canoeing, and lounging around. I love vacations like that. You get a chance to unplug mentally from it all and do nothing or whatever you want. After our trip, we took the kids to see Garden of the Gods for their first time. It’s a beautiful place.

I’m into a habit of writing these every Saturday when my wife leaves to go to work building bikes. It’s just me and my kids here at home, and they spend the 30 minutes or so I’m upstairs yelling at me that I’m taking too long. I’m OK with it. One day I’ll miss them screaming their frustrations and disappointments at me from the bottom of the stairs. I’ve started spending a lot of time this week stretching to help my lower back.

I’ve had time this week to write more. I wrote a post for Optic titled The Missing Pieces of Design First Workflows. I also wrote a few posts here on this site—I think this is the fourth post of the week. In the last weeknote I mentioned I was considering buying a new chair. I had used my old one for the last 20 years. The padding on the seat and back were all but gone, and there hadn’t been any lumbar support for the last decade.

My experiment of starting over on this site is working. If I counted correctly, this is my 11th post here. I’ve written in a few weeks what took me several years before. I haven’t stopped tinkering with the site, though, but it’s a different tinkering. I started out publishing with make, but decided to switch to Rake because I can. I added a couple new tasks, one for writing posts and one for creating new weeknotes.

I traveled to Alabama this week for a golf trip with some friends from my college years. We played at Gunter’s Landing and Hampton Cove. We played almost 12 hours of golf the first day and probably 10 the next—that’s a lot of golf. But it was fun and the team I was on won our friendly tournament. All the practice over the last couple of months paid off. Thankfully, my back healed up enough to let me play.

I started out writing these weeknotes on HEY World. I liked how easy it was to write there—just send an email to world@hey.com, and it would create a post for you at https://world.hey.com. It also supported an email subscription feature. However, I set this goal a few weeks ago to start writing more, both for fun and professionally, and just this week I started from scratch on this site with Hugo.