First brew in collaboration with one of my neighbors. It came out pretty well. We got the water ratio wrong so it was a little thin, but the color and general flavor profile was pretty solid.

Most importantly, we came up with a bunch of elaborate names. We're calling our pretend brewery 'Antcolony Brewing' - a stretch, but this is a combination of two of our kids names - Anthony and Colin (get it?) The beer itself is called 'Coyote Defense League Pale Ale' due to the surprising Coyote problem we've had in the neighborhood this year.

Looking forward to another brew soon. Looking like something dark next time around.

Enjoyed listening back to this chat about adapting as a developer that I had with Mike Miles for his Developing Up podcast. We end up pretty far away from some of the traditional dev topics you might expect, but I think that is the improviser in me applying 'yes, and...' to our conversation. Mike does a great job reinforcing how some of my more tangential thoughts relate back to adaptability. Not to mention some great editing - you can hardly tell that we were talking at the end of a long day at a conference.

This January, they’re co-headlining the 3,700-cap Hollywood Palladium with Jeff Rosenstock, who they consider a fellow “last man standing” in their scene and the man responsible for Joyce Manor’s first paid gig in 2010. “As we were leaving, he asked ‘You guys get paid?'” Johnson recalls. “We’re like, it’s cool, we’re from around here, it’s fine. And he’s like no, no, no,” handing the band $100 out of his pocket.

Great profile in general, but this moment between two of my favorite bands stuck with me. Amazing to see Rosenstock give them what I'd imagine to be a non-trivial amount of money at the time just because he feels strongly that people should be compensated for their work. And I love that this impulsive moment also sticks with Joyce Manor eight years later as co-headliners. While I've never just handed someone $100, I can only hope that back in my improv days or now in the open source community I've had some small moments that have stuck with folks.

Current status: enjoying the beach.

Found this article especially relevant as I'm currently following just behind our UX team prototyping in code as they design early mockups using InVision. The spirit of what we're doing is aiming for the "collaborative" narrative outlined in this post, but the fact that there is still a handoff occasionally makes it feel like what the article calls “bridging the gap.” It is very early days, but I'm anxious for a future where more of our tools can speak the same language and actually impact code that will be used in the final project. Still a long way to go on that front though.

I found this embedded quote to be especially insightful:

Production code is a surrogate for decision-making power. Production code is the source of truth. It is the realtime sum total of all the conversations, all the decisions, all the politics…it is everything. Whoever is pushing code to production is running the product. Everyone else only has influence. Rebekah Cox  

I don't necessarily want all of that power. In a perfect world, I help enable others to assert control on the areas of the project where they are experts. With our current tools there is just too much risk of things being lost in translation. Today we're doing the best we can with the tools we have and against all odds we often find a way to make it work.