Last week: new job at Chronicle, workouts and diet, photography experiments, and a couple of movies.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

• It’s been a long while since my last update. As I mentioned in my last update, I left Automattic, and then decided to look out for a new role. I also decided to do a digital detox, and was largely successful, but part of that process meant that I also skipped these weekly updates. In hindsight, I probably should have kept it up. But I do feel recharged now, and back on track.

• Let’s start with a few photos I took last week. We went to Amboori last week, and took some wonderful photos. Found the place on Google maps, and it looked nice. I used to do this when I had a bike: just find random places on Google Maps & travel there, and it was nice to go there with Ammu. I’ve been trying to recreate the magic of a CCD sensor (I have a Leica M8) with a modern camera, and I got really close.

• I joined Chronicle‘s engineering team March 10. It’s been really nice working at a smaller company again, and also coding full-time again. Here’s a comic I made about our designer Claire.

• Chronicle uses XState, and I’ve been really liking building interfaces with it. There is some initial grokking overhead, but I think I like modeling state this way. I do wish XState 5 had more robust in-browser debugging tools, but perhaps they will come in time.

• I’ve been dieting and working out off and on over the past 4 months. It’s been going well, and I feel like I’m in a much better space both mentally and physically now. Ammu has been on the same health trip as me, but she’s done a lot more workouts compared to lazy me 🙂

• I’m not sure I mentioned it before, but I’ve been using Reflect a lot to jot down thoughts, and it helped a bunch during my job search to clarify roles, and look back on past interview notes. A shout out from me if you’re looking for a better-designed Obsidian: the daily notes feature, and how it promotes backlinking is great!

• One nice movie to watch on Netflix: Officer on Duty. It’s a decent crime thriller, but the second half is a bit too much action flavor movie for me.

• I also watched Empuraan. It’s probably the biggest budget Malayalam movie production, and it’s shot pretty well. We got into the theater at 11PM, and got out at 3AM. It was too much fan service and loud noises and slow motion for me, but I think everybody else who watched the movie with me enjoyed it.

• I have a fascination with “what if” scenarios in history, and especially watershed moments and I feel we should be taught more in schools about moments like these. Just discovered one last week: the Jinnah-Sikander pact, without which Pakistan would probably not have been formed.

Links of the Week

• I’ve been watching the development of the Model Context Protocol, and now even Playwright has an MCP.

• If you like the CCD-like photos up above, this preset is a good buy.

• Pretty neat way to model engineering communication.

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