Weeknote - April 27 2025
I love reading other people’s weeknotes, so I’m going to take a shot at writing some. We’ll see if I can stick to it 😅
Life
- 🛠️ One of my main side projects right now is building a site for myself to track various metrics from apps I use, journaling, and whatever I happen to want or need. This week I added a “one photo a day” feature that connects to my Immich library and prompts me to pick a single photo to represent that day. I’ve backfilled to September and it’s already been nice reminiscing.
- 🛠️ I follow the Seattle Kraken more closely than I’ve ever followed a sports team. I’ve had the idea for a site to track the “what ifs” of various hypothetical trades and signings, and the change in GM this week gave me the motivation to finish a first version - Trackin The Kraken. I decided to vibe code the entire project to get a feel for workflows, and it works great for this type of thing.
- 🐕 One of my dogs was got a bit of a gash in our backyard somehow and needed stiches. So he’s had the cone of shame and they both have a bit of pent-up energy from not being able to play as much, he’s handling it like a champ though.
- 💪 Managed to make it to the gym after about a month of not being able to. Hoping to get back into a rhythm of every 2-3 days soon.
- 🏠 We’re doing an addition to our house this summer that’s going to touch most of the rooms in our house. We’re getting to the point where we need to figure out where everything is going to go and that’s a lot of organizing our attic and garage.
Reading
- 📚 Rhythm of War - Read 305 pages (now 51% complete). I really like this world and this series, it’s starting to be a bit of a slog again. The first book had a ton of deep worldbuilding before hitting a stride of action so I’m hoping there’s more of that soon.
- 📚 Tiny Experiments - Read 11 pages (22% complete). Been a while since I read a self-help book, and this one is resonates with me more than others. Still a lot to go and I forgot how much I dislike the repeating “Study X shows Y” or “so and so said ‘quote’ and here’s how that’s interesting…”
Media
- 🎙️ Currently on Critical Role Campaign 3 Episode 54. Worked from home most of the week because of previously mentioned dog surgery, so didn’t make much progress. I’m overall confused at how this campaign is progressing, but it’s still a fun listen.
- 📺 We’ve spent most of our after-toddler-falls-asleep time for the past year or so reading, and we’re starting to mix in TV a bit more. We caught up on Doctor Who and The Last Of Us now that they’re both going again.
- 🎵 Listened to 107 tracks this week shifting to a more EDM vibe I guess, top artists:
- Gryffin - 24 plays
- Porter Robinson - 8 plays
- Julia Michaels - 7 plays
- Imagine Dragons - 6 plays
- Galantis - 5 plays
🔗 Cool Posts
Here’s some posts I found neat!
- A fluid CSS methodology: Still working on my re-learning of more modern CSS and this is seems like a great approach to typography.
- From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.: There’s been a lot of talk about enshittification recently, and I like the concepts of this post as a baseline for fighting against it…
- Writing the onboarding experience: First run experiences can be frustrating and lose users instantly. Some great practices that product teams should think about here.
- The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen: It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out. A minimal, hackable car would be a lot of fun.
- GitHub - microsoft/markitdown: Saving this become I’m sure I’ll want it at some point for LLM stuff.
- Sliger NAS Cases: Looking at building a new NAS since Synology is increasingly anti-consumer. This seems like a solid brand for cases.
- Working Through the Fear of Being Seen: This resonates with me a lot right now. I have a lot I want to write or half-written, but never finish. :(
- Mitigating Browser Fingerprinting in Web Specifications: As I’m working on web standards more, the care that needs to be considered about fingerprinting is both extremely important and mildly frustrating at times. This has some good info.
- Gumroad CEO’s playbook to 40x his team’s productivity with v0, Cursor, and Devin | Sahil Lavingia: I’m pretty familiar with everything covered in this episode, but looking forward to what other guests Claire has on this podcast in the future.
- The /llms.txt file: I feel like we’re going to hit five or six pseudostandards for sites to interact with LLMs and agents before one sticks. This one seems like a good baseline, but we’ll see.
- You’re using GPT-4o image generation wrong: This felt like clickbait when I first read it, but actually seems to have some good tips for interacting with however OpenAI is generating their images.
- GitHub - nari-labs/dia: Apparently a REALLY good 1.6B TTS model. I haven’t really had a need for one of these yet, but trying to keep a close eye on the space for when I inevitably need one.