A Little Update

Summer is coming to a close, and it’s been mostly OK. These last few weeks, especially. The weather has been super nice, and at times you can already feel Fall approaching. I miss the extra long day time already.

I’ve spent the last few weeks really focusing on the site. The last “update” was honestly kind of weak. I got hyper-focused on the overall layout specifically, and completely neglected small details. There was this idea of making a very Swiss/International style-inspired design with heavy grid and subgrid use. But the way content flows on the web was making some of the things I was trying difficult. It just ended up being way too many columns and rows to juggle with @media queries, and I just couldn’t get it the way I wanted. I really love simple, single column layouts like you see a lot of on Dead Simple Sites , but at the same time, I didn’t want to just do the same thing. So I kind of kept with this four column layout but stopped trying to use rows. I’m already thinking of changing it again. 🙃

It’s still a work in progress. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what to do with the home page. But, at least I’ve fixed a couple more accessibility issues, removed a lot of unnecessary CSS, and have started to make a lot of templates more reusable. I’m starting to add more new-to-me CSS rules that I haven’t played around with before, like :has() and @container queries. Although, I don’t think I really needed the @container query in my one particular usecase, as a @media query would have been fine.

I’ve still not found a new job yet, and I sort of stopped applying to places in order to get this site functioning a lot better. That time slot will now be replaced with studying leet code or some shit, I guess.

I hope to find something close to what I was doing before, which was a “Design Engineer” which is just another name for “Design Technologist” or “front of the front-end” developer. I don’t know when we started calling ourselves engineers. I felt like my design engineering position at Indeed was really more of a front-end engineer position anywhere else. It would be great to land a gig where I get to work with designers all day and design and prototype things, working on accessibility, responsiveness and design systems. I’ve noticed that when I do find these positions, they like to see a portfolio, which I do not have. The last time I did design work was at Charter, but I will have to put together something. Or start designing things in Figma for fun.

We’re getting ready to head to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to celebrate a friends 50th birthday. This will be our first time visiting PV, and we’ve only ever heard great things. Thankfully this whole trip was paid for before the layoff.

Media Consumption

🎧 Heavy Rotation

I’m dumping the Heavy Rotation series idea (the posts were set to drafts), and decided it can just go into a Now-related post. I wasn’t keeping up with it, and the format/layout was kind of annoying to work with the way I had it setup. I’m just trying to simplify things, here. Less friction == more posting.

Greg Foat - The Glass Frog

I’ve been really into Greg Foat, who I hadn’t heard of until this year, but has a fairly massive catalog. Especially if you count his work with the Greg Foat Group, too. His latest solo album, The Glass Frog has been on repeat for the last few weeks. Blue Lotus , an album from 2022 with his band has also been a pleasurable listening experience. They even did a Boiler Room set a long time ago!

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ - Hex

has been on heavy, heavy rotation. My god, I cannot get enough of this album! It’s very lengthy, clocking in at over two hours. However, that’s actually short compared to her other works. Do yourself a favor and jam this one straight through.

Misha Panfilov - To the Mesosphere and Beyond

Misha Panfilov has already released three albums this year and that’s not counting the work with his band Penza Penza. He’s recently released a live album, which is really good, but it got me listening to his two-track EP To the Mesosphere and Beyond a lot recently.

Letherette - EP6

Letherette released a new EP. Never sleep on a Letherette EP. These guys have been dropping some of the best house and electronic music since the early 2010s. I’d say this one leans heavier into the French house side of the spectrum.

Alex Kassian - E2-E4 (A reference to E2-E4 by Manuel Gottsching)

Lastly, an EP by Alex Kassian which seems to be a rework or remix of this Manuel Gottsching album. I’ve never heard of either artist, and I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon this one, but it’s really good.

📚 Reading

I’ve been reading a lot more. The key has been to setup a specific time every day to make an afternoon cup of coffee and read for at least 45 minutes. It’s been working really well, so far.

Tiago Forte - Building a Second Brain

It was a pretty good read. I don’t think I’ll dive into using this setup any time soon as I’ve started a Zettelkasten in Obsidian, complete with scripts to quickly start and save a note to my inbox from the terminal. It’s working pretty well.

Cal Newport - Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

I enjoyed this one, and I’m trying to implement some of the ideas in my day-to-day.

George Alec Effinger - When Gravity Fails

I stopped reading this for a bit, but I’ve jumped back on it and dividing my time between a fiction and non-fiction book.

Manuel Matuzović - Web Accessibility Cookbook

Really good so far. I’ve already learned a few new things and am trying to implement them where I can on my site. Accessibility is a top priority around these parts.

📺 Movies & Shows

Deadpool & Wolverine - Loved it.

Alien: Romulus - Loved it.

A few weeks ago, maybe months at this point? 😅 I started watching a movie before bed rather than reruns of something I’ve seen 100 times. I have quite the backlog growing and I thought this would be a good way to get through it.

First up was The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky. Wow. I didn’t really have anything going into this other than my friend saying “you have to see this movie.” The only thing I’ll touch on is that if you paused this film on any frame, it would be a spectacular photo. That’s just how good the cinematography is.

The next night was Planes, Trains and Automobiles . I may have seen this as a kid, but I don’t recall. It’s definitely as good as everyone says it is. Could be one of Steve Martin’s best performances.

Then I watched Licorice Pizza (finally.) I’ve been wanting to watch this since its release, and overall I really liked it. It wasn’t anything like how I thought it would be, but then again I don’t really know what I was expecting. Cute story, hilarious at times, and nailed the 70s look and feel.

That was the last one. Consistency is something I struggle with, but I really want to jump back onto this. One of the issues is that there are a lot of films I want to watch with Mitch, and we don’t go to bed around the same time.

Honestly, we’ve not been watching many shows lately. Football season will be taking up more TV time now, anyway.