Weeknotes 2025W20

This week, I attended some virtual career events provided by my university for alumni. One was a workshop for how to get a job. I learned some new places to look for jobs and some actionable tactics for how to respond to those openings. I also (re)learned that employers mostly do skill-based hiring these days. Rarely do they look at GPA or where you went to school. They want to know what skills you have and how you apply them. Another event was a networking function for departments in Oregon government. I wanted to be a civil servant working for the government but the federal hiring freeze put a stop to that. But state- and county-level government is worth looking into.

I added some services and testimonials to a client website over lunch and a beer. This client’s business is gaining traction and he is now eyeing bigger clients so we added some polish to his website.

We played some pickleball on a nice morning this week. It was a relatively serious game with higher-level players. I learned a bit and had a ton of fun. I think I’m a pickleball guy now.

One of my best friends is planning an annual boys backpacking trip and he sent over some options for where we are going to go. We’ve been doing this for a few years now but I wasn’t able to go the past two. It’s always so much fun to get outside and spend quality time with friends. Excited for summer!

To top off the week, we burned the pile of scrap in the pasture. It’s still burn season and it had rained the previous week so we went out there and had a fire. Good fun.

Links

• How to think by Kevin aka cliophate. This basically summarized how I view AI these days. I rarely use it because I never want to delegate my thinking and learning to a machine. There are also some great practical tips for how to stimulate thinking.
• Thoughts on thinking by Dustin Curtis. Similar to the above, AI stymies thinking and creativity. It’s a tool but can quickly become a crutch for one of the most amazing things we can do as humans.
• Your email can make someone happy by Kelly of Seattle. I love it when people email me about something I wrote!
• Cozy Garden by Andrew Wooldridge. A cute little idler gardening game.
• SMS 2FA is not just insecure, it’s also hostile to mountain people by maren of Asheville. I experience the horrors of SMS verification in Morocco when I didn’t have an American phone number. And now that I’m back and not using WhatsApp as my main communication tool, I’m remembering how awful SMS is. I think we’ve outgrown it.
• Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room by Jacob Voytko. A fun story about 50-minute meeting policies.
• If nothing is curated, how do we find things? by Tadaima. With the rise of AI, I think human curation is going to become more and more important.
• The time for designers to learn to code is now by Andy Bell. I believe everyone should know some coding basics but especially designers who are working on the web.
• We need your support to do free projects for good causes and publish free high quality education by Andy Bell. An interesting shift in business model from for-profit to something more akin to a social enterprise. Excited to see how viable this is.
• Not everything is on the Internet by Ruby Klover. The internet is a vast expanse of information—but it doesn’t comprise all knowledge.
• Codigo: The programming language repository. Basic information for pretty much every programming language with code samples and ratings for each.