Feeling energized this month! Mostly from finishing some projects and making progress on some others. Plus with the start of the holiday season spending quality time with family has been refreshing. Joining Bluesky has also been a refreshing change. Social media can be... pleasant? I'm surprised too, but so far that's been my experience there. I'm not really active with social media, but one daily activity I've been enjoying is finding smaller accounts on Bluesky of people doing cool things (or what I think is cool, which means mostly woodworking and programming), then make sure to leave a compliment with kudos for a job well done. It's a small gesture, but it's a nice positive start to the day. The vibes haven't shifted on Bluesky with the influx of new users.
🛠️ What I'm building
I finally finished installing flooring in the basement. Last year I installed some flooring in the basement playroom the kids use. There was a smaller room I didn't finish that I put off since we didn't have a use. As the kids get older we're thinking about moving the home office into that room. The first step was installing the flooring. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I'm way more confident installing flooring. Last year I botched a couple corners around the doorways. I also made the unpleasant discovery that basement walls aren't square. With those learnings The process this past week was much smoother. The
The RSS Reader is coming together. I'm putting together some of the architecture and playing with the UI. I started out building this just for myself to use locally, but then thought 'hey, maybe other people would want to use this too!' So I decided to rebuild some parts to make it work for multiple users in the very remote case case I want to host it as a service for others. I'm making consistent progress. There's a lot going on with work before the end of year code freezes, so I don't have a ton of time to invest in side projects, but every day or so I invest some time hacking away and it's coming together.
Another little hacking project firmly falls into the category where I'm certain there is a service that does exactly what I want, but I'm going to build my own anyways. I've found myself repeating patterns in Claude, using certain templates, asking similar kinds of questions, pasting information from websites/files etc. It's annoying having to do a lot of rework inside the Claude app each time. So, I started building a CLI tool to automate a lot of these actions. Again, I'm certain there are services that already provide these functions, but this seemed like a fun DIY challenge with very low stakes. So far it's really helpful when I'm working with websites and local files. There's so much to learn from these projects!
📚 What I'm reading
In the first half of the month I spent a lot of time reading enterprise blogs about how they're using LLMs in their organizations. I summarized what these blogs are in a new garden post. One immediate takeaway is how enterprises are using LLMs, but the use cases frequently aren't customer facing. A bunch of use cases are related to improving internal processes and productivity. Another emerging theme is smaller problems that weren't economically addressing with a team of data scientists are now feasible with LLMs. There's a lot of talk about the limitations of LLMs, but they are solving real business problems to provide value. So far only a handful of examples have been included, so I'm not jumping to definitive conclusions. As more samples are added I'm curious what trends begin to emerge.
Ordinary Monsters- So close to finishing this! Getting towards the end I'm enjoying the direction it's headed. The sequel is on my gift list for Christmas. Looking forward to continuing the story!
How to Win Friends and Influence People- There are so many highlights in this book. I highly recommend this book. Definitely going to review and summarize the highlights and maybe write about them. Now I'm looking for another book to expand on my soft skill development. Recommendations are welcome!
💪 Peloton Stats
This month I hit a milestone for four years of weekly Peloton workouts. I'm really proud of this one. I wrote all about what this means to me. Looking forward to four more years!
Active Days: 17
Total Classes: 36
Workout Time: 568 minutes