What I Just Said
2026-06-29
It's been two and a half years and two jobs since my last post, and all of it holds true.
I'm in a job search, with the intention of using this time for learning and portfolio building.
The new elephant in the room for the job search is the role of agentic coding. The centralized providers are casting shadows from orbit on the landscape of software development. It's hard for me not to read this as the latest digital hype wave, where big pools of finance take the rest of the economy for a ride, shaking loose anything that can be, and leaving the mess for the remnants. But there's useful countervailing reflection: the value of actual software engineering, static analysis, and the cost of maintenance; the "ilities" -- observability, maintainability, reliability, auditability. And rational fear that we're destroying the brain trust of operational wisdom by replacing humans with a glib, blurry oracle that pretends understanding; the stochastic parrot.
But enough of that; the headlines, in proper world sense, are about the sport. The World Cup of (Men's) Football proceeds apace, hosted in North America in e.v. 2026.
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Intentions
I am OOB ("out of batch") but I'm joining along with a group of Recursers starting their batch, and coming in with intentions, as with my previous batch-and-hang-around time.
- Advertise your interests and skills. You're here for the people and their perspectives. Be a person who's reached out to, and reach out to others.
- Be curious and helpful.
- Reach out on topics of common interest or curiosity. Possibly Forth. Possibly TiddlyWiki and local-first web apps.
- Use others' energy shamelessly. The RC recruits and admits the self-directed. Play along with that, look for it in yourself, and share it as you can. A repeated piece of advice: you'll never feel like you've chosen the right balance of heads-down project work and heads-up sharing and learning together.
- Use your own energy fully, by recharging and recommitting to the next thing, even if it's five minutes.
- Develop personal daily and weekly routines. Choose tools to support that, whether it's Obsidian Daily Notes or your appointment calendar.
- Drive your own work by milestones and demos. Many More Much Smaller Steps (Michael D. "GeePaw" Hill's advice).
- Ask about what people are doing host and show off their work? Codepen (front-end), Disco (git-ops for self hosted work?)
- Efficacy cookies. Evidence that I can do the things. It's okay to ask how to do the things! Then do them.
Projects and Technologies
- JRuby for image compositing. PixieReport is a darling, and it's also evolved. Exercise the pipeline using new technologies.
- Local-first or browser apps.
- Small Web, Indie Web.
- Prototypes and mini-examples to mine directly, like the academic programmer I met with his code library on a nine-track magtape under his arm. Ruby on Rails did this brilliantly (
rails new ...) - Karsten Schmidt's thi.ng thi.ng project as little pieces of composable code.
- "UsesThis" - what are people's everyday carry / digital tool sets for at-home and on the go? Keep this in mind while pairing.
- Networked editors. Is there a way of piggybacking on the Language Service Protocol now that it's so common? Or just use TeamType, as someone suggested this morning.
- Targets of opportunity. Anything small and fun.
Reminders
- You thrive in peer learning communities. You are present by choice. Embody that. Perhaps you will be encouraged by dramatic identity prompts, such as the old C2 Wiki's dramatic authorship.
- Singing aloud is both a sign and a support of positive mood.
- And don't forget to Get Up And Dance.
You don't want to know how long it took me to figure out how Zola does image paths.
Briefly: More than one way to do it, but I used asset colocation as recommended, which means if you have images, etc., then blog source uses the compiled structure (a folder titled by the slug name with an index file containing the post text) rather than a single Markdown page for a post.