Weeknotes 2025W09

Happy Peace Corps week! JFK established the agency in 1961 and it is still going strong today. Volunteer openings are still being filled right now for those who want to learn and serve.

The Peace Corps gives us a chance to show a side of our country which is too often submerged: our desire to live in peace, our desire to be of help.

AM and I went to a returned Peace Corps Volunteer function to kick off the week. I got an email saying invite all your Peace Corps people and be at an axe-throwing venue on Monday. We were surprised how many other volunteers are in the area and we enjoyed mingling with everyone. There were volunteers there who served decades ago all the way up to me and AM who just got home a few months ago. It feels good to have a small community like that in the area.

For work, I’m waiting on other people so I decided to compile a list of potential clients in the area who might want a new website. I went to Google Maps, searched for an industry then clicked through their sites one-by-one and noted the ones that look like they could use a refresh. That’s the easy part. The next thing is doing “sales” which I’m not really looking forward to.

For the weekend, I went up to Seattle to visit friends that I haven’t seen in years. We talked, had good food and drinks, and went golfing. It was such a fun time, the weather was beautiful, and I’m pleasantly surprised I can still hold my own on a golf course after about three years of not playing.

رمضان مبارك! يدخل عليكم رمضان بالصحة والسلامة ان شاء الله.

Links

• Why Clojure? by Arne Brasseur. Well, I may have found a new language to learn for no good reason other than “just because.” I have been interested in learning a Lisp for a while and dabbled in Racket but nothing particularly useful came out of it.
• UI & UX micro-tips: 8-bit anniversary edition by Marc Andrew. Lots of quick little tips for making better interfaces with examples. An interesting one was “when working with long-form content, style that opening paragraph to draw the user in.” I have noticed some sites doing that but never thought about why.
• Why I Like Designing in the Browser by Tyler Sticka. Since starting to build websites for clients, I have really not liked trying to make a mock-up or prototype in a browser tool, get feedback, and then start coding. I can code quick enough now that it is much better to just start building and send clients a preview link for feedback.
• Weeknotes 29 by anh. Always a good time on this website.
• A knock at the door by Rachid Lamjaimer. An excellent story from a really friendly, jovial person I got the pleasure of working with in Morocco.

  To all of you out there, eager to make a difference and to open a world of possibilities, I invite you to begin a transformative journey with the Peace Corps. This is the knock at your door.

• A letter to the American People by 18F. A group committed to service.