The blog home of Jeff Putz

Imagine, if you will, it's 2012. Barack Obama is on the campaign trail for re-election. A female reporter asks him a question, and he responds by calling her "piggy," and telling her she's a horrible person and a joke of a journalist.

If you really believe that there is any chance that he would have been reelected, or have any relevance today, I would tell you that you're among the most intellectually dishonest people I know. You know that's bullshit. But today, it's standard operating procedure for Trump.

It's crazy to see Republican candidates talking about affordability and threats of "socialism," in light of the fact that their leader has openly been at war with the First Amendment and engaging in fascist tactics to quash disagreement and disloyalty. Those cats don't even understand what socialism is, whilst enjoying public schools, libraries, police and fire protection, etc. We've literally landed at, "Papers, please," as thugs in masks move about shooting citizens without accountability. Does that sound like anything you know from history?

The right always had certain undertones of "-isms," but at least they felt grounded, if not morally sound, in an intellectual argument. But ever since Trump came down his tacky-ass escalator, racism, misogyny and xenophobia has been blatant and uncoded.

It feels like we're on the verge of change. As inflation gets worse, pointless wars are waged, Americans may finally be realizing, this is not normal. It's a realization that should've happened when he was caught saying, "Grab them by the pussy," or he mocked disabled people. Honestly, it doesn't paint a great picture of American culture that it was ever OK.

The constant lying is the worst. The Florida governor's race has a new ad on the Dem side, where he flat out says, "My opponent is lying about me." I don't know if that sort of thing lands these days, but it's the most direct callout I've seen in years.

I am strangely not cynical, when the world has barely given me a reason not to be. The polls and prediction markets are really leaning toward a correction. We have to be better than this.

It has been almost a year since I involuntarily left Facebook, and it has been great for my mental health. There are some folks I miss seeing there, but there were so few of them left in the first place. What I have noticed, going to Instagram now and then (mostly for the cats), is that filters and glow-ups of humans have completely distorted the reality of what real humans look like.

Two examples immediately come to mind, and oddly enough, they were given to me by the algorithm. First, a tattoo artist named Pamela made a series of posts about how tattoo artists were touching up their portfolio pictures to the point that they looked like electronic drawings. Her policy is to post her work as-is. She pointed out that if you can't see the pores on the skin, it just ain't real. Skin is not a perfect medium, and that's a constraint of tattoo art. Another, more recent one, was a woman who calls herself "Saggy Sara." She captures the "plasticization" of people on the Internet in vivid detail, by showing before-and-afters of herself, filtered. She shows how the world creates unrealistic expectations about weight, skin, hair, teeth and the rest of it.

It got me to thinking about my earliest intimate encounters. What I remember most vividly is the textures, freckles, tiny hairs and the way that skin bunches up on itself. And mind, you, that was not-even-20 skin at the time! (Also, pre-WWW, because I ain't young.) But even daily dorm life painted a different picture than I expected. The archetypical "hot girl" from my high school ended up going to the same school as me, and lived one floor above me my freshman year. Seeing her without makeup, messy hair, in frumpy pajamas, totally reframed my understanding of her. She was human, like any of us. To this day, that natural, imperfect thing is what I find most attractive. Fake Internet people don't do it for me.

I'm not railing against makeup or fitness or whatever, or even the "influencers" (not a job) that peddle tutorials on the Internet. In some ways I admire the people who are good at that sort of thing. If it helps you feel good, more power to you. What I don't like is the fake, filtered view of humans. I saw someone famous on TV the other day, dealing with a bit of acne, and I thought, that's a real person. That's acceptable. I hope we can get back to that sort of thing.

Everyone knows that the facts are that voter fraud is exceptionally rare. The research says it's about 0.00004%, or 4 in 10 million. The system is surprisingly resistant to fraud, and the decentralized nature of it helps a lot with that. It's why the feds don't need their hands in it. And you know how the right says that gun control laws interfere with "law abiding citizens rights?" That's exactly what voter ID and other suppression laws do. Seriously, if you want to look into election manipulation, let's talk about gerrymandering.

I've voted by mail in all but a half-dozen elections since I turned 18. Actually, my first time voting was by mail, because I was away at college. It's convenient, sure, but the real win is that it give you time to look at the ballot and properly vet everything on it. That means you can look up information about every candidate and every issue. That's how it should be.

An informed electorate leads to better government. No wonder certain folks don't want that.

I remember when having a 10 Mbps Internet connection felt like something of a modern miracle. When we moved into our current house, nine years ago, I was excited that the neighborhood was wired with fiber. Until I learned that they were using RF-over-glass, which is to say the fiber got to your house, and a converter put the signal on good old fashioned RG6 coaxial cable, for a cable modem. Over the years, they kept upping the download speeds, and we were at 500 Mbps, but uploads were still a dismal 20 Mbps. Most people probably don't need more, but because I backup everything outside the home, things like video files have always been miserable to upload.

Then over the last month or two, that fiber-but-cable connection kept dropping out, almost every evening. I don't know the reason, but others in the neighborhood experienced similar. I called Spectrum once, and they gave me the run-around because their cable modem (which is locked down so you can't see what it's really doing) didn't report any outages. But I tried three different routers and a direct laptop connection, and it was definitely not my equipment. I kept meaning to call to complain more, but then a dude from Spectrum was going door-to-door, asking if folks wanted actual fiber connections. So duh, of course.

My concern was that they would show up and find some way to do it wrong. All of the houses in the neighborhood have two ethernet cables from the laundry or closet to the outside, one apparently for analog phone, for which there aren't any lines buried. Anyway, the ideal set up is that you have power-over-ethernet (PoE) sent from inside to a network interface outside, and then on the inside you connect your router. A neighbor who finally got fiber said they drilled a hole into his garage to set this up for some reason, which seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was concerned that this wasn't going to work.

So when the dude got here, that's what he wanted to do. The problem is that their network interfaces don't do PoE, they need to be plugged in to regular AC power. I explained to him that there was no power in the garage there, but that's also where my house backup battery is. Pretty sure the main electric lines are in the wall around there, too. I do have an outdoor plug there, so extension cord it was. He initially insisted that the interface had to be inside because it's not rated for outdoor, but I told him the old RFoG adapter had been in there for nine years in the weatherproof box, with four hurricanes. Fortunately, he went along with it.

A few months ago, they started using these "invincible" routers, which have an 8-hour battery backup and a 5G cellular connection. I don't technically need a router at all, since I have my mesh units, but the cellular is intriguing. As is the case with their other gear, it's locked down and you can only change a few settings via their app or web site. So now I have this router spewing wifi into my house next to my own router, because I can't turn off their wifi. Whatever.

The speed tests now run between 940 and 1050 Mbps in both directions.

I used the opportunity to rewire some stuff, and get my "network rack" out of my office. I previously had the cable modem in there, along with a switch, a UPS, my NAS and a Hue hub (for lights). I emptied it out, and mounted it high on the wall in my laundry room. It feels secure, screwed into the studs, but it makes me a little nervous. In any case, now I just have the single ethernet cable in my office and the second mesh node. The primary mesh node, the NAS and two Hue hubs, along with the switch and the Spectrum router, are all up there, out of the way.

It felt like the longest wait ever, but our Broadway season finally started this year with Hamilton. Our last show was Six on June 3. Typically we see the first show in September, so maybe that's part of the reason it felt so long.

This is a show that I've now seen eight times, mind you, but it was just staggering that after spending so much time in my head with all of the things that trouble me, I can't remember a recent time that I felt as present and in the moment. OK, seeing Come From Away with our local company down the street was close.

Live theater, which unfortunately can be pretty expensive, is one of, if not the best kind of entertainment. There is something about people pouring it out on stage, in front of you, in real time. It will never be done exactly the same way again. You're there for a moment that will live only in memory. There's something wonderful about that. This year we have three great returning shows, five we haven't seen (of various levels of acclaim), and, ugh Sound of Music.

We've changed up our routine, where we go to a local pizza joint and bar down the street before the show. Drinks are stupid expensive at the theater now, so we drop in the donor room for snacks and spend nothing there. The tickets are obviously paid for already. I like the vibe at the pizza joint, and the bartenders are pretty cool.

Still, I love being in that building. We've been going now for 12 years, and it's one of my favorite things about living here. It's just strange that Diana doesn't work there anymore.

I'm definitely at a point in my career where I don't generally see new things in my work. Sure, the tools change, but the people and process problems really don't that much. Even the technical problems, they haven't changed that much, not even with AI.

As I understand it, it's not unusual for people with autism to observe a situation and instinctively say, "You're doing it wrong." My kid is like that, too. The difference between us is that he will blurt out obscenities at poor drivers, whereas I'll take one of those work situations and say, "How can I help make this better?" The underlying sentiment is not that different.

Oddly enough, when I've been in a position to have more influence and responsibility, I didn't have the experience that I do now. I also realized at one point that I like being closer to the makers, getting into technical design and having real accountability in shipping stuff. Being a line manager is far more satisfying than trying to be a CTO. Still, I have this strong urge to fix things that I know could be better. But if I can get beyond the instinct to correct that which is wrong (in my perception at least), I still have the moral dilemma of whether or not I'm being professionally negligent.

At my last job, for example, there was an opportunity to greatly simplify system architecture by consolidating API's instead of having a ton of one-off things to maintain. One gateway to rule them all, without the complexity of dependencies and coordinated releases. This was not my problem to own, but it felt like an obvious thing to make life easier for many folks, and shut down a lot of redundant compute. However, the more involved that I got in trying to make it happen, the more distracted I got from my core responsibilities. Getting nowhere in building consensus and priority, this time I eventually walked away from it.

I think there are two things to think about. The first is that we rarely understand the depth of experience for any given individual. Sometimes we'll remember something on a person's resume from their interview, but most of the time, we just don't know. The second thing is that it's too easy to get sucked into the idea that we can solve all of the problems. It's not that we shouldn't leverage our experience, but changing lanes means you might not be as good at your primary thing.

The bottom line is that I need to learn to let go of some of the things that aren't mine. The idea that I can fix all the things may be hubris.

Diana and I went to our local Outback restaurant the other day, while Simon was at the parks. I don't remember how we ended up with a gift card, but ordinarily this isn't a place we would go. In fact, we don't really go to national casual chains very often in the general sense. There are just better options with better food (not to mention a ton of great restaurants on the theme park properties). Outback was fine. You can't really screw up chicken and a baked potato, as long as they're seasoned right.

There was a time though, in Cleveland, where I would frequently visit the big chains. This was before the foodie scene started to expand there, and before the chains seemed to mostly just microwave all of their crappy food. Stephanie and I periodically went to Outback as part of a cycle that included Best Buy. That was in my buy-lots-of-crap phase. And I know we went there on credit sometimes, too.

The crazy thing that I remember was putting your name in and hanging out, sometimes for a half-hour or more, to get a table. That's nuts. If we went anywhere today, if there was anything more than a 10-minute wait, we'd turn around and go somewhere else. We were so tolerant then of waiting. This would happen at TGI Friday's too (again, when the food was OK). I vividly remember going outside if it wasn't too cold, because I couldn't deal with waiting in a crowded, noisy area inside.

The other variable is the invention of fast casual, where it's not exactly fast food, but it's not a sit-down restaurant either. Chipotle is likely the most brilliant example of this, where they have real and fresh food, but there others. A lot of them have come and gone, but Pei Wei is still a thing, and locally we have a sushi/fusion place called Bento. These are not the crappy fast food stuffs like McDonald's or Wendy's. It's measurably better stuff, and oddly enough not that much more expensive than a McMeal. As a percentage, those places get more money from me than regular sit-down joints, and fast food is off the table completely.

I never really noticed the change, it happened so gradually.

I'm sure I wrote about it back in the day, but the merger of Six Flags and Cedar Fair was a terrible idea. CF was making some missteps, but generally the company was functional and making money. Six Flags was cratering with an already damaged brand and management that had no idea what it was doing. All of the people responsible for that train wreck are gone, but the new leadership is probably making things worse. I wrote some thoughts on LinkedIn that have had an awful lot of views given my limited network.

If you go back to the start of my roller coaster and theme park fascination, say, 1998-ish, there was a consistent, decades-long dominance for Cedar Point, the "home park," if you will. There were others, not part of Cedar Fair at the time, like Kings Island, Kennywood, Holiday World and such. In 2006, Cedar Fair bought the Paramount Parks, and the transitions was pretty rough. The CEO, Dick Kinzel, after decades leading a smaller company, engaged in hubris believing he could just apply the same practices to every park, which did not work out. He did the same with cross-town Geauga Lake. He kind of overstayed his time, instead of leaving on top.

But then Matt Ouimet lands the CEO job next, and brings a ton of Disney and hotel experience, unlocking a lot of the potential of Cedar Point specifically, but also finding the different potential at all of the parks. This is all through a stretch of time where I made a lot of friends working in various roles there, including the GM for awhile. It made me realize that regardless of the rides, it was the people that really made it special.

Since the merger, and a revolving door of leadership, the company has let go of so many people, that it's unclear who is still there to run the parks. For the first time in 28 years, I don't really know anyone at Cedar Point. That's pretty weird. Mind you, I don't live close, so the park doesn't nearly have the importance it once did. But it feels like the end of an era.

Amusement parks and theme parks are not a slam-dunk as far as success goes, but there are proven fundamentals that have worked for decades, and still work. The private park companies are all doing pretty well, and Disney is killing it too. Comcast says their Universal parks missed targets, but they're not hurting, as best I can tell. Above all, these are hospitality businesses, and those are built on people. Letting go of all the people will not make it better.

It took a lot of trial and error to arrive at a place where I was confident that I could get fast, high quality results from dev teams. I got a lot wrong, and ended up on side quests to have more influence and responsibility. But getting back to the makers, the teams of software pros, revealed some basic truths. The adoption of AI seems to have cast those truths aside, resulting in a lot of expense but not better outcomes. That's a bummer because AI can absolutely improve delivery.

First truth: We don't know what we don't know. Obvious, right? We stopped doing waterfall development decades ago because we never delivered the "right" thing. A lot of time up front is spent getting the "what" and "why" set in excruciating detail. Much of that generated detail is wrong or unnecessary. Some folks today are obsessed with throwing extreme detail over the wall to the bots, none of which has been vetted as necessary to real users.

Second truth: Iteration yields faster and higher quality delivery. This is where the self-appointed AI influencers get it right. But "loop" engineering wasn't invented yesterday. A tight feedback cycle gets you to delivery faster. It always has. The problem is all of the aforementioned detail. When you reduce scope, there's less to get wrong in terms of functionality, quality and defects.

Third truth: Code review improves outcomes. By this I mean, human review. If an LLM is trained on anti-patterns and garbage (because it doesn't know the difference), you can't rely on it to get it right. But there's a bigger thing folks are overlooking. If a human doesn't review the code, no human understands how it might break, or what to do if it does break. You can't expect the machine to do better when it didn't in the first place. The non-deterministic nature of agentic coding is the reason you need people to understand how things work, so they can predict failure modes at a granular level.

What AI has fundamentally changed is the ability to turn requirements and ideas into working software, faster. That in turn makes it faster to interpret and respond to user feedback. Even better, it means the cost of experimentation is lower than ever. We can try stuff with less risk and expense. This all relies on keeping scope smaller, not large and detailed, just so you can say you threw it over the wall for the bots to do overnight. That feat of engineering has never been the goal. The goal is to make delightful software that makes you money. This exciting new tool doesn't mean you throw away these known effective practices.

If you're not from around here, we get these little critters called love bugs (Plecia nearctica). Apparently they only live for a few days, but boy do they muck up the front of your car. They're not as bad as midges or mayflies around Lake Erie. They call them love bugs because you generally see them in pairs, connected at the ass. When you see them, they signal roughly the start of swamp-ass season, and the end. They show up in June, and then again in September.

So it was with great relief that they've been out lately, because it means we've finally crossed that bridge back to the weather people move here for. Last week we had a day that didn't even reach 80, and it was glorious.

Weather is always the go-to for smalltalk, but there isn't as much to talk about when you don't have serious seasonal changes. We just have our three to four months of "gross" and then it's amazing the rest of the time.

Way back in 2000, I bought a Data East Jurassic Park pinball machine, a fun reward for selling popworld.com for $100k. It was $1,800 at the time, which in retrospect was a great deal. I bought a laptop around that time that was $2,500, which is an absurd $5k now (not sure what I was thinking). But in 2009, I sold it, because it didn't seem like a great idea to move to Seattle with it. That was kinda dumb, considering we didn't have to pay for the move. When I thought back about the joy that brought me, and the hit that it was at parties, I always thought I'd get another one.

But life kept happening, and I kinda forgot. A few years ago, Stern put out a newer JP machine, and I thought about it getting one. New machines cost as much as $10k these days ("NIB," new-in-box, as the nerds say). I fancied a new one because the tech had evolved so much, and the idea of having something that I knew all of the maintenance history of was neat. The old JP machine was pretty solid, and I think I replaced only one rubber part. Everything else was minor, like the shaker motor getting loose from its mount, regular cleaning and dirty sensors.

About a year ago, Stern released Star Wars: Fall of The Empire, and I was pretty excited about it. Neat IP, obviously, but also the game was very straight forward, with just a couple of cool toys in it. I barely had to think about it, and Diana had no objections, so I bought it, "NIB." I still vividly remember unpacking it, the smell of wood and paint when I opened it up. Can't believe it's been a year. As of right now, it has 3,620 plays. Almost 2,500 of those are me. As was the case with the old JP, this machine has brought me a lot of joy.

In terms of maintenance, right out of the box there was a bad light socket that was shorting, and that caused the bottom half of the playfield to stop working (including the flippers) until I disconnected the string of white lights (what they call "general illumination"). I probably could have replaced it myself if they sent the part, but out of the box, I insisted that the distributor fix it, and they did. There was also a design problem with the bracket around the entrance to the Death Star. It was too narrow, so the ball would bang around and not go in. Stern had a replacement bracket, and they sent it, I installed it. It was night and day better. I got Death Star multi-ball on the first game after the fix.

I also added two parts: A shaker motor and the expression lights along the sides. These both come in the LE models, but that version costs $4k more. Together, the motor and lights cost under $400. Beyond that, the difference from premium to LE is mostly the outside graphics and paint. The only case I've seen where this really matters is the new Fallout machine, which sold out in the LE variant in the first day anyway.

Beyond that, I've replaced all of the rubber bits. As best I can tell, these were the source of much of the dirt building up and making ball trails. I replaced them all with silicon parts, which are more durable. When you rub your fingers on them, it doesn't turn them black the way the old stuff did. They can break too, as Diana found out mid-game once. The band around the right sling takes a lot of abuse at the bottom corner, when you have the flipper up and trap a ball there. Now I know what to have on-hand. The post pads wear the most, slings second. I have an even better alternative for the slings (more expensive, but still like 90 cents each), but I'll let what I've got wear out fist. Oh, I replaced the balls, too. They were visibly pretty scratched up and dull, which isn't great to have flying around the playfield.

Mechanically, everything should last a good long time, though they suggest rebuilding the flippers every 5k plays. Slop builds up in the linkages over time. That should be straight forward. I really enjoy the maintenance, because it's easy and predictable, and satisfying. Like taking care of a car, but without all of the oil and grime.

Now, the question is whether or not I can justify getting another...

I'm not a particularly sentimental person. While I admittedly need to back off my obsession with the future (which includes my end), I'm quite content to live today, in this moment, with little desire to go back to a previous time. Age and experience brings wisdom, and new things to learn every single day. That is a gift. With that in mind, there are certain conditions that I wouldn't mind being more prevalent today.

The irony is not lost on me that to be disappointed by the effects of technology on society is odd given that technology is the underpinning of my reasonably comfortable life and long-term (read: not liquid) wealth. But over the last year, I just want less tech. I get increasingly bored with phone screens, find that the legit uses for AI rare and I'm kinda sad for folks that don't look up at the world now and then. You know, "touch grass," as the kids say. I've been very intentional in the last year of the impulse to pull out my phone for even the most minor moment of boredom. Even for someone who deals with the worst brain spirals, I revel in the moment to just stare into space and be bored. If anything, it reduces the spirals.

Short attention spans also seem to have reduced our ability to take in long-form entertainment. No one listens to albums anymore. I mean, sit down, turn it on, and just soak it up for a bit, no visuals to accompany it. Go see a play or a musical. Don't flinch at a movie that's two hours long. Play video games that really require some time invested.

Be weird. The performative nonsense that the Internet has created seems to have made it even more important to conform, and it's fucking boring. If there's one thing that was satisfying about the 90's, and to a lesser degree the early aughts, it was that questioning authority and institutions was cool, and in the interest of making things better. Even if it was divisive then, the dividing line wasn't created by one side endorsing cruelty toward anyone different as the default cause.

I feel like this might be a returning, emerging vibe. My generation doesn't look anything like Boomers, or appear "old" in the same way. Millennials are moving beyond, "Is this it?" and driving change. And for whatever reason, Gen-Z is looking at us and emulating our scene, pre-Internet. Not sure why they want to go back to vinyl and film cameras, but who am I to judge?

Let's go back to real things, human connection and the wisdom to know what things to be serious about.

This has been a great year for me making stuff. There's a lull right now, and for a change I'm totally comfortable with that. This happens pretty much every fall, which is strange if only because it's not associated with the usual cooling weather I experienced most of my life elsewhere.

What feels different this year is that the seasonal trend to engage in passive activities (as opposed to making stuff) is not accompanied by a desire to do nothing at all. That was the signature trait of fall in the Midwest for me, that desire to almost "hibernate." Now, I want to watch movies, play video games, see more shows. This shift started when we moved down here, but only for the first two years. It creeped back into the cycle until I started taking bupropion about four and a half years ago.

It feels like a rare instance where I feel like my mental health is in a good place. That's a huge shift from earlier this year, so I'm gonna take the "W" and run with it.

Brains are weird.

There's a subplot in season 1 of The Newsroom where one of the younger producers pitches a story to uncover an online troll. It's fresh in my mind because we were rewatching it last weekend. Then today a troll shows up on one of the sites, and lasts all of an hour or two. The pattern is as old as the Internet:

• Show up and try to be the life of the party, or immediately try to cause trouble.
• Attack the moderators or owners, declaring that they need to get a life and that they're terrible people.
• Assert that they don't need that community anyway.

Younger me used to get more annoyed by this sort of thing, but now it's "meh." The worst of the trolls, like much of the Internet, seems to have moved to the major platforms, which is fine. There's a guy who drops into my blog about once a year, and never comes back to realize that I publish his email address (he was a previous troll on one of the sites). I don't know what compels someone to obsessively engage with people they don't know, but honestly, the Internet has made a lot of people more lonely. Sometimes it's hard to reconcile that with the truth that it has also brought together communities and friends.

I'm surprised at how much my online engagement has tapered off compared to a year ago, but I feel like my mental health is much better. Or at least, it's not the source of negative mental health issues. I've posted around a dozen photos on Instagram in the last few months, and some of those were just to reflect on something else (9/11, past cruises, bringing the ragdolls home).

I like that there seems to be a growing backlash against life online, despite the kids who think that "influencer" is a career. All of the performative nonsense is so tired. I much rather be around people in real life, which is saying something for someone who is easily exhausted by people. Real life doesn't quite have an equivalent to trolls. That's pretty great.

One of the engineering leaders at work attended a conference where he could see a trend or theme among the speakers and their research. It showed that delivery was not increasing, small iterations in software are down, quality is down relative to defect rates, etc. In other words, it feels like we're all doing more stuff, and what a time to be alive and spend money on AI compute.

We're suddenly boomeranging back to outcomes, I think, and a lot of folks (including me), are asking how it is that we're spending all of this money and not actually getting better results. Meanwhile, the AI bros, if they were ever humans in the first place, have almost entirely disappeared from LinkedIn. No one has told me I'm doing it wrong in like a month! But I still haven't been more excited about making software, and that's after two-plus decades. What's going on?

For better or worse, I think about almost everything in terms of time to delivery. I built my reputation at my last job as leading the team that delivered fast at the highest quality possible, and had the stats to back it up. We did this by ruthlessly cutting scope, validating the work against real usage, and continuous iteration. That's not exactly innovative, and I didn't invent any of that. If it gets in the way, ask if it's even worth having around. That goes for process especially. Got something greenfield to build? What's stopping you from getting some minimal thing out in two weeks or less?

Toward the end, when we had access to agentic coding, the coding part got faster. Delivery got a little faster, but what I observed was that we spent more time deliberating and debating stuff, while using more time to reduce tech debt. AI wasn't making us that much faster, but it was making our outcomes, and software, better.

That, in my opinion, is the problem. AI bros had everyone obsessing over one-shot, throw-it-over-the-wall development, as if the machines without wisdom and judgment were going to get there faster. But remember when you trusted that one alpha-dev to go off and build something? When he came back with the thing, it was never the right thing. Many of the assumptions about requirements were wrong once you got them in front of real users. Why did anyone think that the you'd get a different outcome with the robots?

Agentic coding has given us the gift of time, and we're squandering it by giving away our attention. We're obsessed with things that have nothing to do with delivery, and worse, do not improve quality. Our attention could be directed at figuring out how to make software better, in a world where frankly most of it sucks. Instead, attention is spent on token usage and parallelization of work. There is little evidence that suggests this makes software better.

Let's fix our attention.

I replaced a trio of TP-Link Deco mesh routers/access points from almost five years ago with a pair of Asus units. It's weird, wifi is still evolving after all of this time. As it turns out, three was overkill, because I can put two in opposite ends of the house, connected by ethernet, and the whole thing is covered.

There were a few motivating factors. First, the Decos have really crappy logging. I got interested in logging when Spectrum started sucking a few weeks ago, with random, but brief-ish dropouts in the evening. The Asus logs are a little more verbose, and I can feed them into a robot for detailed event analysis if I have to call support. Also, it's possible I might be able to get bidirectional gigabit speed if I get the right person at Spectrum on the phone. There has always been fiber to our house, but they use RFoG (radio frequency over glass) for reasons unknown to me. In new construction, there's little reason to do that. Anyway, the old routers can't quite go that fast if we do get real fiber.

Infrastructure stuff is the most boring electronic gear. I mean, unless you nerd hard on that sort of thing, and I have friends that do. I'm surprised at how many routers I've had. I have one that's about 11-years-old that I need to recycle. It's not secure at all because of the older protocols it uses.

It's an interesting time for people in middle age, and to an extent, Millennials getting closer to that time. A lot of us have gone through the gauntlet of an autism diagnosis, often motivated by seeing our children navigate one. I got mine about five years ago, and I kind of knew. Watching my kid grow up was like seeing a movie that I was in. For me, along with an ADHD diagnosis, it gave me permission to look at my entire life with fresh eyes, and give myself a little grace for things I once saw as personality flaws.

I was between jobs at the time, but I wondered if I should bring it up in organically in interviews, or if I should tell my new employer. It's a somewhat personal and private thing, and it brings up a ton of legal issues. But three months after that diagnosis, I told my new boss. I explained to him that, as best I could tell, I sometimes have blind spots, and don't always read a room correctly. It's even harder working remotely. My motivation to ask questions isn't to challenge authority necessarily, but because curiosity makes me want more context.

Years later, I asked him if he treated me differently, and he said, "Not really, I was just looking for reasons to put up guardrails, but you didn't need them." That tracked for me, and what it really bought me was the freedom to have great discussions about my leadership. It also confirmed what I had understood about management for a long time... the job is enablement and outcomes, not telling people what to do.

Is this the right thing for you? It depends a lot on experience, I think. I try to look at autism as an explanation for certain aspects of my personality, not an excuse. This may annoy some folks in advocacy circles, because they focus on how many of us need to work harder to conform to certain expectations ("masking," as it's often described), and should get a pass for that. I get that, but neurotypical folks are also emotional humans that are not exactly naturals at social contracts. My opinion is that being wired differently isn't hard because of the wiring, it's hard because it's misunderstood. To me, that's all the more reason to talk about it.

But those of us who are "late bloomers" also have the benefit of years, maybe decades, of experience building coping skills to account for things that are harder. What a strange thing that it's a huge benefit now, but the lack of understanding was suboptimal growing up. What I see now with my son is that accommodation is vastly favored over accountability, and I don't think that's serving him in the long run. There's no incentive to learn about how your differences affect you and others, negatively or positively.

Whether or not you choose to reveal your diagnosis is up to you, but I think you need a deep understanding about it first. There are so many issues of identity, self-care, relationships that go along with it. What you shouldn't do is declare, "Look at me, I have this thing, now accommodate me!" As a spectrum disorder (and I sure hate the "disorder" part, something I hope the next DSM fixes), as we know, some people need support to live, some are billionaire tycoons, and there's a lot of room in between. Knowing where you are, and being able to articulate that, helps folks "get" you.

It's no secret that I'm a volleyball junkie, especially during the Olympics. I've been around it most of my life. When I met Diana, she was playing USTA tennis, and one of our earlier trips together was to see the Cincinnati tournament. For the brief time we were back in Cleveland, we both joined the tennis club two freeway exits down. I took lessons and played a season myself. I really got into it. I'd love to play again, but it's too damn hot here for that, and for some reason the clubs don't have indoor facilities.

I don't have much in the way of technical expertise, because I just haven't played enough or had enough in the way of lessons. Still, I really love watching it on TV. The US Open in particular is something that we routinely watch, in no small part because it's in our time zone. (Wimbledon we rarely catch more than the semis and finals.) ESPN covers most of the big matches from the start, and these days you can subscribe via Sling for $20 for one month. Totally worth it, because we tend to watch a ton.

This year has been extraordinary, because there have been upsets and comebacks and it has been completely unpredictable. Tonight we saw a match going four and a half hours between Americans Tiafoe and Michelsen in the quarterfinals. Michelsen wasn't even ranked, and he won the first two sets, and served for match point in the third. Tiafoe went on to win that set, and then won in the fifth set tie break. I don't know what the odds are to come back like that, but they've gotta be very small.

I'm looking forward to the finals this weekend. It's been a great tournament so far.

When we first moved into our house, I felt pretty excited about it. As a regular remote working person, I couldn't wait to have more room. Diana was pretty avidly quilting, and having a room big enough for that was awesome. And we had a ton of room for entertaining. We probably don't have people over enough, but when we do, it doesn't feel crowded. For the first time, I felt good about where I lived, like we could be there for a good while.

Nine years later, I'm frustrated with how cheap the builder, Pulte, was. We had to paint the exterior after just four years (looks good as new in the five years since). The primary shower started leaking after three years. We had to replace one of the HVAC systems at seven years, and that's after repairing it periodically since the start. I imagine the roof will be a problem next year.

But the daily reminder of the cheapness is the carpet. They didn't even have an option to upgrade it. So by the third year, it looked like a dozen people lived here for 20 years. It wrinkles up in every room, and no amount of vacuuming ever made it look fresh. It just looks and feels terrible. So as soon as I started working again, I wanted to pull the trigger to at least replace the carpet in the two downstairs rooms, my office and the front room. And I went with the thickest possible pad and the highest pile. If I'm gonna spend 40 hours a week in that room, it's gonna be the best. And when it's just two rooms, at least it's not the worst expense.

So tonight, everything is disturbed. We had to empty those two rooms. My office in particular is challenging because my desk weighs like 200 pounds (it's a large, L-shaped standing desk). That's also where the pinball machine is, a heavy ass file cabinet (full of stuff I need to toss) and my big chair and love seat. Like I said, I spend 40 hours in there, I want it to be comfortable. Everything is out now, and there's so much room for activities.

Tomorrow, it'll feel like new again.

This is, in some ways, a continuation of my previous post, about finding meaning and fulfillment from winning. Pulling off perfect service in hospitality, or putting on a great show, these are definitely time-boxed things that feel like winning when they're over. I remember feeling this with community theater, or when we would do remote shoots with my TV job right after college. Then there was literally winning in any kind of athletic contest, especially as a coach. It was so satisfying.

Outside of putting on a show or crushing a volleyball, that satisfaction, that feeling of winning seems harder to come by. Yes, in the moment, there are big feelings and adrenaline, I get that. But there should also be lingering satisfaction for winning. Why don't I feel that? Some of it is the challenges still ahead, which we're definitely feeling in my house right now. But big picture, fuck, I've got a lot of wins under my belt.

This is just another aspect of the struggle required to live in the moment, I suppose. It's so hard not to focus on that next milestone, getting beyond that challenging time. I have so much to be happy about. The career milestones, a great relationship, and sometimes even a parenting win. I should be celebrating more.

Perhaps this upcoming long weekend will be right for celebrating.