Weeknotes: Week of 8/30/26
Published: Aug 30th, 2026 š
Some Personal News
Today is the last day of my funemployment, that is, the week off I had between my last day at Arrive Logistics and my first day at the new role Iām starting tomorrow at Grainger. I will be a Staff Engineer for the first time, something I am both excited and nervous about! There is a lot about this new endeavor that is in my wheelhouse, thankfully, as well as a lot to learn. I may do a post about the job search at some point, but for now all Iāll say about it is that Iām happy to be done with it and ready for the much more rewarding challenge of actually starting the new job.
Reading
Iāve been reading a more books again lately, which has felt really good.
- š The Psychology of Software Teams, by Dr. Cat Hicks
- I pre-ordered two copies (one for myself and one for Arriveās Engineering Library) and Iām about halfway through it. Unsurprisingly a lot of whatās in there is familiar to some degree from following Dr. Hicksā research and in various places online, but having it all in one place, neatly wrapped up and ready to operationalize makes it well worth buying and reading. Highly recommended for anyone managing a software team as well as for high level ICs (i.e. senior software engineers and up).
- š The First 90 Days, by Michael D. Watkins
- Turns out that there has been a surprising amount of research done on job transitions, some of it by the author of this book. Watkins walks you through that research and lays out tools for getting the most out of it. Iāve read the first chunk of this book a couple of times when starting previous jobs, and Iām on track to do the same this time around.
- Christine Lemmer-Webber on ātasteā in the age of LLMs, pointing out that aesthetic sensibility doesnāt come from nowhere.
Other Things Besides Reading
- Pop Sciās most recent episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week connects some dots between the history of bird watching and the Pantone corporation, maker of color standards. The book referenced in that story is available on Project Gutenberg and I really want to figure out a way to map those colors to RGB values so I can have a little library of CSS colors/styles based on them.
- IndieWeb is Punkāand donāt you forget it!
- Went to see the Chicago Puppet Lab WIP Showcase at Raven Theatre. A couple of our friends who are very much in the puppet scene got their start through the Chicago Puppet Lab, and when I can I like to go to their shows. Thereās something really exciting about seeing works-in-progress, kind of like peeking into an artistās workshop.
- Wikipedia Gacha - A friend recently introduced me to this mostly silly but still pretty fun game. You open packs of ācardsā, where each card is a wikipedia page and ārarityā is determined by the pageās quality. Sometimes you get interesting ones and get drawn into surfing Wikipedia for a bit. There are other parts of the game, I guess, but I havenāt really gone beyond cracking packs and looking at the interesting cards every now and again. If youāre the one who introduced this to me (and most everyone else at Craft Night), thanks!