I’ve been meaning to play around with view transitions since reading this blog post almost two years ago: 

, but I haven’t had a good reason to implement them yet in real (💰) life. So I figured why not do something on this blog.

The first thing I realized is that doing full page transitions in Next led me to a lot of heated discussions about server-side rendering and Next router and “are we building the web wrong” kind of conver-arguments. Not what I had the patience for on a Sunday. So I looked around for something smaller to try it on. About the only page that has same-page interaction right now is 

The code here is pretty minimal, and I went with the out of the box view transition of cross fade, so no CSS. Just:

After setting it up I realized there is a pretty good use case for this at my 💰 job. Just gotta get this tiny improvement prioritized over 46,789 other things.

Besides the Google article noted above, I also read through these resources to understand View Transitions (especially in React) better:

View Transitions

 ended up on one of my “want to read” lists after seeing it at a local bookstore. I think I mostly liked the cover, but if you 

 and you’ll see a fair number of books on similar topics. 

 has some themes in common with books like 

, specifically how do you change your routines and thinking about how you live your life to achieve meaningful change. Or, to use the title in a sentence: when something in your environment triggers you, do you respond without thinking, or do you introspectively look at how that trigger impacts you then respond. And can you get to a point where you respond to triggers in your environment as you want to without having to think about them.

One point that stood out to me in this book that was unique to it was the idea of looking at a set of goals with active questions instead of passive ones. The example it uses is changing this type of review:

And keeping a daily 0-10 scorecard of the answers to the active questions. Goldsmith recommends six as a default set anyone could use:

Asking active questions does two things: it prevents you from blaming outside circumstances for failures, and it makes you, over time, recognize the places you are actively not doing your best to give you the option to get better, or give up. As a simplified example, imagine you want to exercise every day. You make a grid with every day of the week, and check it off if you exercised for 30 minutes. Now say on Thursday you’re not feeling well, and on Friday there’s an interruption in the morning and work goes late and you meet up with friends after. Simple tracking you’d not check those days. In active questioning format you might put 0s for both days. Or you might put a 5 on Thursday, giving yourself some leeway knowing that rest is as important to an exercise routine as the exercise itself, and a 0 on Friday and make a plan for next Friday to get out for a walk at lunch. If you put 0s for an entire week, there's no need to dig into excuses, you just recognize “I’m not doing my best” and you either stop trying or do better.

The focus of the book is deeper behavioral change more than simple habits. Professionally, Goldsmith is a coach to CEOs and other already successful people who know how to excel in at least one domain in their lives. He states the point clearly later in the book: something like quitting smoking is a great change, but it’s not a behavioral change that’s going to impact the other people you interact with on a day to day basis (short of smelling less smoke). The book is more focused on the ideas captured in his six questions: did I do my best to find meaning, happiness, build relationships, stay engaged. The sort of things that will not only make your life better, but will likely cascade back to your environment as well.

The principle theme of the book can be summed up as “you can‘t control what happens, only how you respond to what happens”.  Goldsmith’s advice in the book is also entirely reasonable. He notes that sometimes you don't have the space or energy to change, or do the best thing in a given situation. It’s fine. The important part is acknowledging the triggers that got you to that state, instead of having things trigger you that you don’t notice or acknowledge, which lead you into traps of behaving badly or falling short of the goals you’ve set. Goldsmith references a Buddhist parable as an example of not blaming your environment for why you can’t change, which I enjoyed:

A young farmer was covered with sweat as he paddled his boat up the river. He was going upstream to deliver his produce to the village. It was a hot day, and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn't seem to help.
He shouted, "Change direction! You are going to hit me!" To no avail. The vessel hit his boat with a violent thud. He cried out, "You idiot! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river?" As he glared into the boat, seeking out the individual responsible for the accident, he realized no one was there. He had been screaming at an empty boat that had broken free of its moorings and was floating downstream with the current.

Certainly I can think of many empty boats I’ve yelled at in my life. Overall I recommend the book. If you were looking at it or 

 I’d go with this one, the strategies outlined in it target behavioral change in as simple of a format but in a more meaningful way.

Some notes on the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith.

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

It’s not quite yet a tradition but this year and last we dropped our daughter off for an end of Summer week at the Grandparents and then went to Rhode Island. Last year it was 

, this year Newport. It was a shorter trip this year, as we planned on spending the latter half of the week doing house projects / staycationing, but it was a good two days.

. We would definitely go back, it was close to everything, had a nice roof deck, and every room is a suite. We started to prefer suites after traveling with a child — it’s nice to be able to put them to bed and sit in a separate space — but even without the kid if feels more relaxing to be able to spread out in a small apartment’s worth of space. Also we did in-room massages, and it was set up great for that.

They also did an in-room Continental breakfast, which is exactly the amount of effort I like to put in to getting breakfast when on vacation.

Because we were only there for one full day, and got in late on a Sunday where a lot of things were closed, we primarily planned on doing a few mansions and walking around. On Monday we went to 

, and then before heading home we stopped at 

It is tradition that you take a photo that makes it look like you're moving in to your new house, of course.

If we had more time (and they had been open!) I would have liked to go to the 

. Also for all the times I’ve been to Newport I’ve still never made it around the Southern tip of the Cliff Walk to the beach!

I will note that one of the very appealing things about Newport if you’re staying in the heart of it is that you can walk everywhere, and if you don’t feel like walking there’s decent public transportation too. Obviously the weather has to cooperate, and you should avoid any weekends where some sort of boating event is going on that will push the restaurants to 300% capacity, but it’s a good town for wandering.

Trip notes from a quick little vacation in Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport, RI

. Start of the second paragraph this had me interested:

As a former English major and a sometimes writer, I had always been drawn to the idea that code is like literature…

I’m a former English major, and I’ve made the argument that coding and writing are similar in the past. But the author of this post went in a different direction than me:

…and that we ought to learn to write code the way we learn to write English: by reading good examples.

To which I recoiled, a bit. The article gets to a conclusion that matched my immediate reaction — no one reads code. We understand it by working with it, but it’s rare to even read it and rarer to appreciate it by reading it.

The overlap between coding and writing, to me, are the mental models you make while doing both. I keep application state in my mind the same way I do characters, locations, plot points. I look at a class with the mindset of “given this class, and the known business logic, how should this method behave”, and to me it runs down similar mental pathways to “given this character, and their known backstory, how would they behave in this situation”. In both writing and coding you’ll produce better output if you take multiple looks and pare down everything to its essentials. Kill your darlings is relevant in writing and code.

I like thinking about coding this way because it makes it easier to understand the challenges of coding collectively, or explaining to someone who doesn’t program one of the fundamental challenges of programming. Books with a single story are rarely written by multiple authors, although they might be worked on by many people. But code is rarely written by a single person — all of those mental models of backstory, plot, character models, need to be shared and internalized by everyone contributing. And that’s hard! Programming might be easier because you can’t argue at length about the motivations of an addNumbers method, but we also often shove the working notes into a “done” column, never to be seen again, or authors leave for new works, and expect new contributors to look at the final work and discern the why from only the how.

The post comes around to the conclusion that rather than reading code, in depth, we should approach it as naturalists:

I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: “Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs.”

Which I agree with. But if you want to keep the idea of code as literature, or writing at least, consider giving your code a director’s commentary. Record the little bits of deep knowledge about why a particular line got written that might be missed in scope of the full, final work, but will be dearly appreciated by a fellow programmer.

The overlap between coding and writing, to me, are the mental models you make while doing both.

Code is not literature

. I’m not halfway through it yet, and maybe it’s a bit of a 

 going on, but now I’m noticing the notion of shifting the perception of time in more places.

When I first heard about Empath units, I assumed that their main contribution to mental-health care was empathy. This isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. In my experience, nearly every caregiver aims to show empathy; the question is whether, in an emergency, we have the space and time to do so. In Minnesota, I started to think that the Empath unit’s real innovation is a structural shift in how we think about space and time. We usually consider drugs, devices, and procedures the kinds of medical care that make a difference, but physical spaces can be therapeutic, too. It’s also easy to forget that, in a crisis, every minute matters.

Speed is evidently important in many contexts. Quick reactions and instinctive responsiveness aid survival. But we also have a subsequent ‘slow’ response, which is conscious and deliberative, and may be beneficial for more complex social interactions and moral emotions. Perhaps ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking are really two sides of the same coin – intrinsically related, but with their own independent virtues. In our fast-moving society that frequently prioritises speed, the importance of slowness should not be forgotten.

Not online, it’s August 1st, and someone today said “August already, it feels like Summer just started”. Maybe it did? The humidity finally broke — I’m sitting on the back porch writing this because it’s finally nicer outside than in. What’s Summer but a state of mind anyway.

I’ve been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. I’m not halfway through it yet, and maybe it’s a bit of a Baader–Meinhof thing going on, but now I’m noticing the notion of shifting the perception of time in more places.

Time Warp

Found this video on a Hacker News thread about 

It’s about life and death and achieving your goals (or not). What I found interesting was Randy talks about wanting to be a Disney Imagineer, and when he got a chance to work with them, the thing he worked on was a virtual reality Aladdin ride. It jumped out to me because I remember that ride from one of our mid-90s trips to Disney World. At the time a bunch of people came in to see the event, but only a few got picked to ride — maybe four, if I remember correctly. Me and my mother got chosen, and my mom recalls someone else in line being mad about it because they thought the people picked should all be from different parties.

Anyway, it was pretty neat at the time, although I remember the helmet feeling clunky, and for someone pretty good at video games I found that VR world disorienting. But the experience is a well ingrained memory from my childhood, and as Randy says in the video, if you can bring that kind of joy to other people, maybe even lots of other people, you probably should.

On achieving your dreams, and helping other achieve theirs.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

It’s not a hot take, it’s a reasonable look at why you might stop writing on a blog, and a list of reasons why you should start again. My reason has always been simple, I just think it’s pretty fucking cool that someone can go to 

 and find thoughts from me, however stupid or smart, mundane or interesting, and it’s as easy as ending up on the home page of some international mega-corp.

Nobody cares about your blog

While I use Obsidian at work (mostly because of not having access to the App Store), I could get around how janky Obsidian is. It’s VSCode for writing, which is as distasteful as that sounds.

I have since then more or less stayed in Bear, with some daily logging in Day One. Today, 

 2.0 released, with pretty much all of the features I wanted from Obsidian, but with a nice, native UI, and native speed, and mobile and watch apps that are… native. I think you see where this is going.

The big features they added that I adore:

There are other odds and ends that would make me adore it even more (typewriter mode!), but hopefully all of the changes that went into Bear 2 means it will be easier to make further changes going forward.

Bear 2.0

. If you had a phone back then (the 3G, the worst phone they made, I broke three of them), you can look at your past purchases in the App Store. Looks like day 1 I picked up:

It's wild scrolling up from there how many apps I've downloaded that aren't being used any more. Maybe 1 in 20 stuck around. These days I don't even look at the app store, it's quite a disaster of ads and games and things I have no interest in, but 15 years ago it did feel a bit like a new era of computing.

15 Years of the App Store

Over the last two weeks I’ve cut my coffee consumption down to one cup of coffee, enjoyed first thing in the morning. The main reason was the caffeine didn’t affect me most of the time, except when I was already anxious or not feeling great, in which case it made those feelings double in intensity. Or triple. Or quadruple. Really matched 1x to 1 to how many cups I’d have.

I don’t recall when I started drinking coffee. I remember watching my Grandfather drink instant coffee with every meal, and my parents buying the extra huge tins of Folgers, but I never had any. I know in college I preferred soda for caffeine or hot chocolate for something warm. I think after that I’d start grabbing a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee when I had to do a late night or long distance drive. Then I started working and the community coffee pot became a thing, as well as the drudgery of cubicle living, and wanting to stay up late at night to recover any part of the day that I’d burned working, and coffee became a constant thing.

At its worst (probably after Lorelei was born) I think I’d drink 6+ cups a day, starting with breakfast and then going through until 5pm. Or that one time I was walking around New York City and I thought it would be a neat idea to try any new coffee place I walked past, leaving me with the heart rate of a hummingbird by 2 in the afternoon.

 the way coffee tastes. Like really, really, deeply enjoy it,  both hot and cold, in a way no other drink really comes close to matching. So if you have any suggestions for great decaf, let me know.

built with coffee