Why is it that I can remember the lyrics to songs that I haven’t heard in 10–20 years? It blows my mind every time, it’s like my brain back then heard these songs and said “this is required for survival!”. Last week I played Better than Ezra’s “Good” for the first time since maybe the late 90s and I remembered every lyric. How can I channel this super power?

I’m up way too late tonight, but for an investigation into Jetpack Compose, Google’s declarative UI system like SwiftUI. After wrapping up my little SwiftUI project I thought it would be interesting to see what the Android developers have in coming. Also Android Studio runs on my M1 Mac now! Some early things I’ve noticed, State is not as easily definable as SwiftUI and getting all the right versions set up in gradle is a small hassle. I’m amazed at how easy it is now to get a small API client up and running on both platforms!

I realized last week that meetings are liquid—like cats! I cleared a few things off my calendar only to find things suddenly pop up in those time slots. I actually think this is fine, my role is about helping the team I work with but it can get draining. So depending on what I need to do, I’ll create some private meetings for myself to block off time to get focused work completed. I still leave gaps and am quick to move things if needed, but overall it’s helped me be available and still get some tasks done.

Now that we are halfway through 2021, I was looking at the movies I’ve watched so far. The count is already at 41 movies but we don’t have a goal like our 2020 goal of 100 movies. Some of the highlights for me are Nomadland, The Forty-Year-Old Version, The Midnight Sky, and Space Sweepers. All worth checking out if you haven’t seen them.

Using an iPad to take notes in a side by side multitasking is actually pretty nice. Tonight I loaded up a few more WWDC videos on the left and Craft for notes on the right. Of course this could have been an article, a YouTube video, or anything really. I’ve been trying to be more diligent in note taking and this is a pretty good option. I’m looking forward to some of the new features in iPadOS 15!

I’ve started taking a ten-week-long online Japanese class. The idea is to learn with stories. It’s been interesting and a large departure from just trying to learn Kanji. I’m about 1/3 of the way through Remembering the Kanji and I still can’t read actual sentences or understand content. It’s a fun book but I think I need to make more progress with basics first. I can learn Kanji as I go too. The stories this class uses are very repetitive but it seems to work well as I feel like I can understand some basic sentences already. Excited for more!

I’ve been starting to read more articles and books about being a better Engineering Manager, so far I’ve read some great books like Crucial Conversations and An Elegant Puzzle. Today I found this Github resource that’s a booklist for Engineering Managers by @jesselpalmer. It has the books I’ve already read and many more!

So… I’ve been thinking about replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro and Windows PC I built in 2016 with something new. I decided to pick up a new 13" M1 MacBook Pro. It’s definitely much faster than my old Mac, but the battery life is unbelievable. I’ve been working on it all night since unboxing it. It started around 60% and 8 hours later I’m only down to 30%.