Shawn Medero @soypunk@friend.camp

Cooking adventures: Vegan Pizza “Baozones” last night and doughnuts this morning.

No big deal, just biked 51 miles from Redondo Beach to Claremont. Finishing a trip we started months ago in Seattle, Washington. (We took a weeee break in between reaching Redondo.)

cnn.com's homepage right now has this looping GIF of "dangerous" car driving but it also looks like every car commercial shown in the United States (minus that cool looking laser show.)

perhaps we should also dial down the "doing BAD ASS SHIT" in our personal car marketing? it is not just the movies giving folks ideas. the car was sold to them with the idea that they could go off-roading, race through the city, "corners on rails" and all other manner of non-sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good day for a new t-shirt

Now if you are the software architect attached to a prototyping effort - by all means - please find the bits of code that might have life after the prototyping effort so you can save some poor soul a bit of time in the next phase. Totally valid exercise, just not the primary goal.

only slightly related to user interface stuff but it was an uplifting moment when my partner pointed out that our kids dance studio has changed their online profile form's "gender" input label to say "costume preference"... that's a really huge step forward .. like at least acknowledging the root cause of why they are asking for the information.

One of the biggest challenges I've faced in design work is convincing people that prototyping multiple solutions is not "throwing work away." The learning experience is invaluable and the goal of prototyping is not to find a golden path from prototype code -> production code. You are working out the edge cases of different solutions to your problems and massively reducing the amount of risk you are carrying into your development process.

An older post from last month but yes, preach friend: "The big idea is to think of prototyping not as a single costly effort to build and verify a single guess, but as a way to learn, to uncover what we don't know, to find the best way forward for the unanswered question at hand."

https://world.hey.com/rjs/21-prototyping-to-learn-726e2d3e

yeah I'm going to a festival concert this weekend that's why i picked up these really cool.... COVID test kits. WHAT UP. earth is a weird place in 2022.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-27/elon-musk-abandons-plans-for-ontario-airport-tunnel

“MoRe tRaDiTiOnAl pRoCeSs fOr tHe eNvIrOnMeNtAl cLeArAnCe”

what a quote. (tunnels typically require quite a bit of environmental review -- AND RIGHTLY SO -- and somehow the boring co thought they were just going to "internet company" their way through it. lol, tech bros) meanwhile sound transit in seattle just keeps cranking out tunnels at cost, safely, pretty well on time given tunnel track records... like I dunno, maybe someone should talk to them?

I've been doing research on the state of the art when it comes to accessible "likert scale" based HTML forms - can someone explain to me why no one uses traditional form inputs in HTML anymore? There is some seriously bonkers stuff going on in the HTML/JS/CSS I'm seeing in the wild. Is it really just to have full visual thematic control over how forms are styled? If so, that's just ... well, I think the kids say "extra."

Been busy relocating my life from family sabbatical mode to regular family mode back in Los Angeles. BUT, next week I get to take a breather and see Alison Wonderland. Squeee.

Seattle’s cultural tendency towards activism (minimum wage and worker rights are issues you can reliably campaign on) may also be factoring in but the Times only choose to cover that issue as a pejorative. Something something competition in local news.

Read an entire article about cratering demand for ride sharing in tech heavy Seattle that fails to mention remote work once: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seattle-area-demand-for-uber-lyft-still-not-back-up-to-speed-an-outlier-in-the-u-s/

My youngest is very into crochet and helped me come up with a pattern to replicate the new “LO-LA” droid from the Obi Wan Kenobi TV show.

Really love the mindset of pedestrian shaming that is so prominent in America. Here's a completely unrelated transit article in a local community paper where the only comment is a nasty one from someone who I guess does not believe that pedestrians have the right-of-away.

I've entered some kind of hellscape where I'm laying out complicated visualizations using latex and tikz. save me.

Feeling pretty good right now about my decision to delete my 15 year old Twitter account last December. Still have the same feelings about the western tech world in general: it is terrible.

Work wise I'm transitioning into a CTO role for a small company that I've been a consultant with since 2004~ They are doing good & honest work with "boring" technology (my favorite kind!)