Started the year with an extended dad-batical before starting a new job with Block (in September, of course). It’s been invigorating digging in on a bunch of new things all at once. I’m back where I like to be — outside my comfort zone, stretching, learning every day.
Both kids are in school now, and time feels like sand slipping through my fingers. They’re screaming towards the end of that first magical period of consciousness, where the world unfolds in front of them with unicorns and Santa Claus and questions and language. Any day might be the last blueberry pampake breakfast, the last time they stuff books and a lunch into their pack-pack. At school pronunciation is something to be corrected, tongues untied. We lost unicorns earlier this fall — Emma’s favorite animal is the turtle now1.
Was fortunate to do quite a bit of traveling this year. Spent an incredible ten days traveling across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Escaped the winter chill and laid on a beach. Weddings in Breckenridge and the Catskills.
Listened to a lot of Goose2. Didn’t get to read, watch, or play 10% of what I’d like to, as usual.
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New year, new fonts! 2022 felt like an exiting, a return to normal levels of 21st century chaos. In April we welcomed Honey, an Appenzeller puppy, into our home. She’s energetic, friendly, and loves nothing more than stealing pancakes from the breakfast table when you turn your back. Emma turned five (!!!) and started Pre-K at a school just up the street. Walking her to and from school has been one of the unexpected simple pleasures of my year.
In September I helped launch the next generation of Huddles for Slack, including video, screen sharing, reactions, and built-in chat. And then I quit! Something about a September job change that I just can’t resist.
Started to pull back from Twitter in response to the total, constant twitshow over there. I migrated my news list back to RSS and keep up with it using Unread. In addition to news, Twitter’s other primary function for me has been as a quasi-professional network, which is where Mastodon comes in. Elon’s decisions (ban links to competitors! cut off third-party clients!) provoke anger in new segments of nerds at a regular clip, driving more of them away from the bird and into the herd. The Mastodon migration (at least in tech circles) seems to be sticking.
Decided to try out one of the paid search engines instead of Google and switched to Kagi for my web searches. The quality of the results has been pretty good, but the quality of the integration with Safari on iOS leaves something to be desired. Hopefully Apple opens up better hooks for choosing a default search provider in a future version of iOS.
The rest of the best below.
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I’m retiring Later. As of today it’s no longer available for sale in the App Store. If you’re one of the 198 excellent people who have purchased it, it’ll continue to work (until it doesn’t). It didn’t require much upkeep, a few hours a year when the latest version of macOS inevitably broke something. But its very existence feels like a burden as I try to narrow my focus. So it goes.
Later was created to serve a number of purposes. The first, it’s raison d'être, was my aversion to using the JavaScript bookmarklets that were the sanctioned way of getting content from the web into the popular “Read It Later” services like Instapaper and Pocket. When Share extensions were introduced in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, they were quickly adopted on iOS. But without existing applications on the Mac, none of the companies bothered to create a native Share extension there — I aimed to fill that void. The landscape is different today. Some combination of Catalyst, SwiftUI, and Safari Extensions have finally made this easy enough to be worth the trouble, apparently.
The second reason was that at the time I was still writing a lot of Objective-C at work and was looking for an opportunity to write more Swift, the new programming language that had been introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in 2014. Final count: 10 files, 624 lines of Swift code.
The final reason was that I needed a project with limited scope. It was accomplishable, shippable, a valuable link to put on my resume, a showcase of my skill working as a developer on Apple’s platforms.
Almost 7 years later I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of Swift across jobs at five companies while happily saving content to read later from Safari on my MacBook and pocketing a tidy $846. I’d consider that to be a massive success.
// Created by Peter Zignego on 10/3/15.
Another year of our never-ending pandemic creeps to it's conclusion. An ebb and flow, but brighter than the last. The promise of the vaccine, the summer slowdown — spent a month on a lake in Wisconsin, took postponed vacations. Canceled others — fall resurgence, delta and omnicron. Said goodbye to our beloved dog, Lily. Bought stacks of books (unopened). Joined the Virtual HQ team at Slack and helped ship Huddles and Clips. Onwards.
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