I'm in kind of a funk. A weird existential funk, thinking about jobs, the communities I'm apart of, what I want to accomplish with my life, etc. Interestingly enough, creating these #happy posts is a really easy way for me to get my mind off of things. My blog's "new post" UI just provides me with a list of page titles (hence why I complain at people when they don't have unique per page title tags). So I just slowly read through subject lines trying to remember what this post was I read sometime in the last ten days.
Searching my memory requires enough focus that making these posts is a pretty good way to force a context switch. So, conveniently, I was writing a rant, and remembered I hadn't written one of these in a while, and lo and behold, it was exactly a week ago.
So. Here. We. Go! Things on the internet that made me happy last week.
Unsurprisingly, @mattjoanou is doing really well working at Reddit. I particularly liked his RedditLA in 2016 retrospective article.
The Top 5 Billy Joel Songs, Ranked By Billy Joel was quite funny. I had never seen Billy Joel talk before. He's a riot.
Working Out, in a Museum -- I just. I'm jealous. The privilege amazes me. The Met still doesn't let you take backpacks in it. And here are people running around waving their arms.
Shia LaBeouf Is Doing an Anti-Trump Livestream. I've been watching this randomly. I love live-streams. I love art like this. I love the stuff Shia has been doing the last few years. So good.
I've watched two great episodes of Hot Ones recently, and they are polar opposites: Padma Lakshmi & Eddie Huang.
How to Meditate is interesting. Haven't put it into practice yet, but normally I like the NYT health guides.
One of my favorite things to come out of HFA in the first few months since the election is Run for Something: A strategic plan. I have mad respect for the people working on this, and I really think it can do good. There are a bunch of PACs around the same idea which excites me. Hopefully we'll get great progressive candidates out of it.
A Grandmother’s Secret Turmeric Prescription made me want to try this. When I get back to NY next week, I'm buying turmeric.
The @USDS, in my opinion, is one of the greatest things to come out of the Obama administration. Two great articles came out of the USDS in the past week. One of which brought me to tears. I'll let you figure out which one that was.
Journalism That Stands Apart by The New York Times is inspiring:
While the past two years have been a time of significant innovation, the pace must accelerate. Too often, digital progress has been accomplished through workarounds; now we must tear apart the barriers. We must differentiate between mission and tradition: what we do because it’s essential to our values and what we do because we’ve always done it.
Andy Rubin is at it again, and that's always kind of exciting.
I really enjoyed Coinbase's Early January Outage Post Mortem. I'm an SRE, so this stuff is super fascinating to me. Not only the discussion on process and timelines and what failed, but also thinking about how you convince a company to put this kind of detail public.
I have a strong fascination with bust sculptures. Because of this I went tearing through Thingiverse and Etsy today looking for a cool one. Stumbled across a Tintin bust which I really like, but it is neither the Kanye bust I have always wanted, nor this.
I think that's enough. I hope you have a great week.
Cheers,
/Nat