A Memory Ambush
Welcome to the 32nd entry of my public journal, where I share *some of the things* I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
Have you ever had a memory pop in your head with such vivid clarity it feels like you are reliving it? Where you actually recall the exact smells and emotions of a moment long ago?
I call it a memory ambush and it happened to me this morning.
A memory of heart ache
The first time I traveled overseas to India for work was in 2012. I was in my early 30s and had 3 little kids; at the time they were 11 months old, 3 years old and 5 years old. I was gone for about a week and with the 9+ hour time difference I barely had a chance to call home. This was also in the times before reliable FaceTime or iMessage because I remember using Skype for when tried to call home.
Coming home, I sat in the very back of the airplane next to a father and a baby. The baby was on his lap the entire 14 hours, mostly cuddled and quiet. My heart ached as I sat next to them. I couldn’t wait to go home and hug my babies. It was the first time I was away from them for so long without seeing or speaking to them. I didn’t sleep the entire way home (and I can usually sleep on flights) because I was so anxious to get home.
That was the memory that came rushing back to me this morning. It hit me like a ton of bricks, and it felt like it came out of nowhere. There wasn’t anything exciting or dramatic about the memory, yet when I thought of it, the ache I felt on the plane came back and I could feel it as if it was happening to me today.
I’m glad to remember how hard it was to be a full-time working mom with young kids. I’m in such a different place personally and professionally today. So much so that business trips have become easy and enjoyable, and I’m pretty sure my family doesn’t miss me all that much when I travel. I don’t think working full time and raising a family has gotten easier for young parents, but it definitely has gotten easier for me.
I don’t know why this memory came back so hard. Maybe it’s recognition of being in a fundamentally different place today than a decade ago. I’ve been teasing myself about being in a mid-life crisis, and while I don’t think crisis is the right word, I’m certainly in the midst of a lot of life changes - major career shifts for both my husband and me, loss of a parent, about to see my oldest leave for college, and seeing my youngest working towards his bar mitzvah.
I’m doing my best to embrace life transitions, leaning into the things that are bringing joy, and keeping my focus on creation, creativity and continuous learning.
Change is the only constant.
(note: interesting timing… after I wrote the above paragraphs in the midst of processing major life changes, I read a line from a book I’m reading that is just what I needed to read)
“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives” - The character Marx from the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
Is The Internet Crummy?
Ezra Klein recently wrote about how he’s leaving gmail for the email service hey. His opening line: “There is no end of theories for why the internet feels so crummy these days.” And he goes on to list a few theories that might explain why it’s so crummy, including his thesis that our digital lives have become shame closets - a space jammed with too many things that it becomes impossible to organize.
Do you think the internet feels crummy?
I don’t! One of the reasons I originally started this substack was to keep track of the incredible things I was finding on the internet. There’s an endless amount of learning. Entertainment. Interesting people. From all over. I was feeling so inspired I wanted a place to capture all the things I was discovering and learning.
I wonder if I feel this way (inspired, optimistic) just because of the corner of the internet I’ve found myself in these days - the cyperphunk crypto world. In Read Write Own, Chris Dixon makes a very compelling case that blockchain networks are the answer to everything that sucks about the internet today. Blockchain networks are by design open, composable, permissionless. Through cryptography, users are in control and have ownership over our digital assets.
If you can compare the internet of today like Disney World, the internet of the future will be more like the great cities of the world.
The article was a wakeup call. If the general consensus today is that we have a crummy internet, then I suppose this is just more evidence that the world is ready for the next era of the internet. Blockchain networks are becoming even more of an inevitability (forget about the fact that we’re about to enter the first major election cycle in the era of deep fakes and cryptographically signed digital media is probably the best defense we have).
Back to the article - there was one line in particular that hit me hard: “We are digitally connected to more people than ever and terribly lonely nevertheless. Closeness requires time, and time has not fallen in cost nor risen in quantity.” Closeness is possible, it just requires effort. On GM Farcaster we often talk about how Farcaster requires proof of work. Or as a pop culture meme, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Some Of The (other) Things
As always, some of the things I’ve been reading, creating, thinking or learning about since my last post:
I read a great article about a single engineer at Microsoft who prevented a massive cyber attack. It’s a fascinating story with some commentary about the imbalance between the ubiquity of open source libraries and the investment into maintaining them. I’m appreciating the people like Andres Freund - the hero in this story - for not ignoring error messages when it’s so much easier to ignore them than to chase them down. He describes himself as “… a fairly private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.” Haven’t we all worked with someone like that? At Tenger we talk about “elevating the creatives” and people like Freund are exactly the people we are thinking about.
Read a raw and vulnerable personal account by Chic Bangs, a mother and artist who discovered she had Ramsay Hunt Syndrome when her face became paralyzed, and how’s she has accepted and adapted to her diagnosis and learned how to move on.
I enjoyed reading this somewhat ridiculous story about Matt Farley who is one of the most productive song writers of our time. I use the word productive to mean “produces a lot” with no opinion about the quality or value of output. There are some interesting insights into the creator economy, and also has some nice lessons about creativity. I also noted some one parallel between song writing and DevOps: flow is a prerequisite to quality or value.
“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop,” he said. “You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.”
— Matt Farley in NY Times article
I listened to this podcast about Observability and LLMs. It’s been about 3 years since I pivoted from software engineering, but I still love hearing about the craft. Observability is a debugging technique based on observations, using telemetry, as opposed to stepping thru code line by line locally. LLMs can’t be debugged in the traditional sense, because outputs are unreproducible and non-deterministic, and the inputs are almost infinite. Working with LLMs requires the mindset of understanding you aren’t done once you ship a feature, and in fact the real work only begins once you are live in production. If you’re unable to ship to all users at least daily, you probably aren’t ready to start playing with LLMs.
Name changes are hard. When twitter changed its name to X, developers started doing string replacements to replace “twitter” with “x”. Seems innocent enough, but it opened up an easy and obvious attack vector for phishers.
Some of the Pics
Top row: Spring skiing is great! Tons of snow, warmer weather, zero crowds.
Bottom row: Happy pup; went to a preview of Suffs the Musical, a new Broadway show about the suffrage movement with ~30 women from the NYC tech scene
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️