I forgot I used to have the “What I Did/What I’ll Do” format for these - that’s a nice way to structure them.

What I Did

Work

As I mentioned last week, my project has been put on a hard timelimit (of this coming Wednesday), so I’ve been scrambling to show some value. With good luck and a following wind - and people actually looking at PRs… - we should be able to get something functional running tomorrow. Here’s hoping. I would have run it over the weekend, but didn’t get review for the necessary changes.

I really, really, really hope that I don’t get to >6 months at Vercel without a single official¹ successful project to my name - that will be a precarious, scary, and insecure situation to be in, and all the worse because I still haven’t figured out how to feel comfortable or welcome there yet. I just feel scared, and I don’t know how to address it or to ask for help - any admission that I’m not 100% crushing it all the time feels like it would itself be an admission of failure that paints a target on my back.

Frankly I’ve been realizing that I was so shaken up² by the layoffs at LegalZoom that I’ve let it really affect my confidence, my willingness to take risks, and my fear of failure, in ways which ironically are making me far less productive and able than I otherwise could be. I’m scared of being seen as a failure (and fired), which makes me risk-averse, which makes me try fewer things (or wait longer before showing what I’ve built), which makes me less successful, which exacerbates the fear. Not a great cycle to be stuck in - but I don’t know how I can pull myself out of it, and I don’t think there’s anyone I can ask for help. Maybe asking my manager what the PIP process for Vercel looks like, so I can at least reassure myself that I’d recognize it if it comes? Oof, that’s bleak.

Personal

• Lanie and I celebrated a mix of our eighth dating anniversary (a month or so back) and our first wedding anniversary (next month) with a fancy meal in the city.
• After finding that a GPU isn’t sufficient to run AI stuff nowadays, I updated my PC with a new Motherboard, CPU, and RAM - Ship of Theseus’d!
• I’ve finally gotten back into the habit of going to the gym regularly (two-for-two weeks) - hoping this continues, it’s frankly ridiculous how much of a positive impact it has on mental health.
• Installed Immich on my homelab - my first installation that was almost entirely-vibecoded. Turns out that the spicy-autocomplete works really well for templatized changes that are almost-always almost-the-same in all environments
• Now that Bumi’s gotten (almost) all his shots, he’s safe to go for actual walks in places that aren’t “our backyard”. Said “walks” take a while because he, naturally, wants to stop and sniff everything - but I’m having even more of the overwhelming paternal pride of my l’il guy <3

What I’ll Do

Work

• …hopefully, have a successful project-demo in the bag?
• Work’s moving into a new office, so I’ll be going into the city to fill a seat for at least one day this week, which I’m told is going to be expected even more in the new year
• I just really need to figure out how to feel safe(r) there

Personal

• I’d like to run a “post-release” of the Avatar MTG set - a pre-release-like experience for folks who, like me, couldn’t make it to the pre-release. Turns out that prerelease packs are available for purchase by individuals, which surprised me!
• It’s getting to about that time when the mountains start calling my name - I should plan for when I’m going to go snowboarding this season…
• …but we also have plenty of planning and setup left to do for the second wedding celebration in January, particularly around caterers.
• Maybe get observability running on my cluster, like I promised way back when I reinstalled everything? Wait, no - backup of the leader Postgres cluster should come first.

• MentalHealth
• Vercel
• Weeknotes