Hello, welcome to another weeknote. It has been another busy week and I feel like one of those adults who never have time for anything. I'm also in the middle of a creative block which is bad for reasons you will find out later in the weeknote (suspense).

Work

• So far every single Monday where I'm supposed to have had a day off I have been working. Sometimes, weekends too. Seems like I got a pay cut for working more 🤡
• I'm working so much because I'm writing design documentation and it's really boring. In my pursuit to use AI more I tried to get Claude to write a first draft by what I understand as "one-shotting" the prompt. Spoiler: it couldn't, and by the time I realized it was terrible I was already in too deep to start afresh. I spend a LOT of time editing reductively. I also used Claude to convert files from Markdown to reStructuredText and it did an okay job.
• Community PRs being vibe-coded is my default assumption now. I had to review a big complicated looking PR and immediately thought "Ugh, more AI-generated nonsense, time to pull out the 'Please follow the guidelines' spiel," but based on the comments from the core engineers, it seemed to be a real person? I wrote an encouraging review with a mix of specific and abstract feedback, and was pleasantly met by a very earnest reply from the author! Go actual human beings!

Not work

• Music! I had my first ever music theory class with my friend where he taught me about the intuition behind major and minor scales, modes and chords. I learned so much in the one hour I talked to him but feel much more intimidated than I did before, and I see this as progress.
• I caught up with a friend I hadn't talked to since last August. It was a very adult catch-up. We talked about her decision to buy a house in Sweden (it is suspiciously east, she said) and how frustrating it is to have your best friends live around the world.
• I sent in a last-minute talk to the IndieWebClub Anniversary Extravaganza, and after a very long week my creative bandwidth had reached its limit. I actually feel incredibly nervous about this talk even though I've given multiple talks in the past 5 years. My guess is that this one is the one where I'm expressing my opinions the most, as well as the most rushed one. Bear reminded me to not take myself so seriously, and that I have made a fool of myself before and lived to tell the tale. After I felt better, I workshopped the structure of the talk with him as a rubber duckie, reached a narrative that I was satisfied with and started the script.
• Lots of good home-cooked food this week. Highlights:
  • A classic tomato pasta.
  • Kadhai paneer.
  • Avocado on sourdough from Brik Oven. I am a sourdough person now.
  • Egg whites in all forms – boiled, scrambled, omelette-ed. It is inoffensive to the egg ick.
  • Thai yellow curry.
  • Mom's kokum rasam.
  • Like 4 salads? Man I love a good salad.
  • Chicken karaage and noodle soup.
  • Rice paper spring rolls.
• The kaarage and noodle soup was the accompaniment to a movie night at a friend's. We watched a fantastic movie from 1933 called The Gold Diggers of 1933. It is one of the last films made before the Hays Code went into effect. The plot follows the shenanigans of 3 showgirls trying to make ends meet during the Great Depression and it was quite provocative for its time.

Discoveries

• FOMO in Indiranagar has great starters but the portion sizes for the mains are unforgivable given we had to wait for 30 mins for them to arrive.
• Omm Nom Nomm's rose and raspberry ice cream is good, but not as good as the peppermint ice cream.
• Dominoes pizza is the superior pizza for delivery (I checked again and it is still true).
• The most ergonomic chair position is the one that is just uncomfortable enough that you have to move every 10 mins.

See you next week!