Weeknotes for 4/4/2025
I'm back home from my two-week long trip out of Florida. Spending some time in New York City and San Francisco was good as I've been meaning to catch up with folks and touch grass of different areas. Doing it during Ramadan was even more enticing[1] as the reflection of time helped me remain more grounded (among other things) while in different areas.
Readings
I'm getting towards the end of Distributed Blackness by Andre Brock Jr. This book has me going back and forth on being able to recommend it and determining who exactly should read it. His approach to examining technology and culture (technoculture) through his self-described approach, critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) has me agreeing in some places and furrowing my eyebrows in others. Either way, it's something that examines the holes in conventional understanding of modern computing, the labor it strip-mines for profit and the people who choose to exist despite it all. There's quite a few quotes I'd like to extract from my time reading the book that I'll probably upload to my Bookwyrm account at some point.
I'm slowly working my way through On Repentance and Repair, a phenomenal read that's already begun to change how I look at these ideas of care and reconciliation in my relationships; personal and beyond. Rabbi Ruttenberg's work in this space is informative; as I only know inklings around Judaism's tenants from cursory examination and reading[2]. I'd recommend this book to anyone who has and wants to strengthen the relationships they have in their lives - in all tenses of the term.
Writings & Learning
I haven't been blogging much outside of my week notes. Work has been all-consuming and my current state of life is changing, requiring me to focus more on it. I'm still working through my manuscript that I've gutted and rewritten about three times now for a fiction (once non-fiction!) book that I have to finish by the end of the year — for reasons. I expect it to be done by then but life is the dictator of my progress.
I've been taking Josh's class on React recently. He's a great instructor for a topic that I still find after ~5 years of working with this framework to be routinely exhausting. There's a reason why that I end up using Svelte each time — it just works with less of a learning curve and more out of the box that doesn't get in the way. It's a bit disappointing that what becomes popular is less about productivity and more about job security through obscurity and difficulty. But given the nature and formation of this industry, it's not terribly shocking. The course isn't cheap either; I'm fortunate that my job expensed the course and it's contributed to my productivity at work but having to do an additional hour each day to wrangle this framework due to constant questioning of its intent with me is more of a smell than I'd want to discuss here.