Things that happened in September (there was a lot) 🧅

Sep 29 2024

Autumn 🍂

I’m glad that it’s getting colder again. Summer was busy for me, and I’m still not used to how hot Austria gets now. I feel like I can finally think clearly again now that autumn is here.

Pickles 🥒

We grew so much food in our garden this summer that it almost became a job in itself. I’m grateful that my partner did most of the work, but there was still plenty left over for me and the kids. I PICKLED SO MUCH. I BECAME THE PICKLE. I don’t think I ever want to pickle anything again. (I will have to pickle things again. 👀)

Things I’ve pickled and preserved this summer:

SPLASH / LIVE 24 🌊

Martin, Elliot and I spent a good chunk of time preparing our LIVE/24 submission. We’re still working on it a lot, and we’ll all go to LA in October to present it. I think we have something interesting, but time is running out, and I feel we might present something that could be much more compelling if we just had a little more time.

We include our different viewpoints and how each of us feels about certain topics or where we disagree as asides in the paper. Since this is an experience report, I think it should include, you know, the uh… actual experiences! The reviewers liked it. I’m wondering how we can incorporate it into the live presentation.

I think I’ll write more about it soon.

Mirror Mirror 🌍🪞👻

I’ve been thinking a lot about mirrors, specifically cylindrical mirror anamorphoses.

They produce the strangest images, and reading about them sparked all kinds of mirror-related questions for me. ‘What would it mean if two concave mirrors could intersect?’ I started building a little cursed math tool to explore some of these questions. I really enjoy working on it, and I feel it’s teaching me a lot about geometry. It also makes me think about mirror universes and what it could mean to interact with them. I’ve started posting some of my progress on Masto.

Heart of Clojure ☯️

Our entire team visited Leuven for Heart of Clojure, and it was sooo nice. It was sunny and warm, and the people were sunny and warm too. It felt un-conferency and intimate, even though there were actually a lot of people. I got to spend time with people I really like but see far too seldom. I’m grateful for all the work Arne and the other organizers put in to make it happen. ❤️

Martin and I gave a talk about our current main gig, which is (re-)building this old enterprise software for a fairly large automotive company. It’s actually a talk about humans and change, but it’s disguised as a tech talk. I think people liked it.

I was a bit sad to leave Leuven. It’s so clean, beautiful, and progressive in so many ways. I wish I could have explored it a bit more. It gave me major Star Trek city vibes. I hope to go back soon.

The heavy rains ⛈️

Heart of Clojure was a bit overshadowed for me. Three days before I went to Leuven, the heaviest rains in a long time started in Eastern Austria (where I live). Many of my friends’, family’s, and neighbors’ houses were badly damaged. You could see park benches floating down the streets next to our house. Our house is about a meter higher than most of our neighbors’, so we were spared. 🙏

Houses, farm land and streets partially under water
Streets, houses and farmland under water (Photo: Daniel Trippolt/BMLV)

After two days of heavy rain, some highways were closed, most trains were canceled, and it wasn’t even certain I could go to Leuven at all.

I fear this will happen much more often now. 😭
(Please, Austria, start voting for the Greens again! 🙏)

Animation of a diagramatic tent swaying left and right. It’s end points are being dragged and re-arragange by a mouse cursor changing its perspective.

New thing ⛺

I’m starting something new with friends! It’s a people-focused thing, not a technology-focused one. I won’t say much about it yet — maybe another time!

This website 🦚

I suppose the new thing prompted me to publish a website. I’ve been working on it on and off for a while. I always wanted to create a website that was more about finding Easter eggs (I love Easter eggs) and less about the content. The Easter eggs I have in mind are all a bit high-production. I realized that if I keep chasing this idea, I’ll never launch the website, so I decided to flip it around. I’ll publish the website now and keep adding Easter eggs as I go (or maybe I won’t — who knows… maybe there are already some eggs hidden in there somewhere).

I hope this website will also be an ongoing exercise for me to stop overthinking and just create. It’s literally something I cobbled together in a day, using a bit of PHP, and it’s hosted on some FTP server somewhere.

I’ve been a big fan of Devine’s wiki since I met them on a train last year. I didn’t know about it before then. In some ways, it feels like one of the last holdouts of a bygone era of the internet that I was very fond of. I find it very inspiring. It’s a rabbit hole I get lost in every now and then. 🐰

I grew up during the heyday of the blogosphere. RSS was the new hot thing, and there were so many nice, quirky, weird, and interesting websites to subscribe to. Most of them are gone now. For a while, it seemed like all the interesting bits migrated to Twitter. I turned to Masto when Twitter went to shit, and there I found that the types of websites I love are slowly making a comeback. Here are some that I enjoy a lot:

I hope this website can be as good as theirs some day.

👈 Index