In the last few weeks, I left my position at Springbot, about six months after I joined the company as part of its acquisition of Matcha, and will be joining the engineering team at Relay Payments later this month.

I’ll leave it to another post to reflect on what I learned from the RootsRated/Matcha/Springbot chapter of my career. I do have a post in the works specifically focused on what I learned about management during that time, as I’m looking forward to stepping away from management for a bit as I join Relay, and focusing more completely on technical matters.

Inputs

I’m currently taking some time off between Springbot and Relay, so I’ve had a lot of time to read and listen.

In recent weeks, I have been learning a lot from the Downtime Project podcast, which tears down postmortems of notable incidents. I also found Russ Roberts’ conversation with Julia Galef on EconTalk to be quite stimulating, particularly on the question of whether more information is always better. Meghan and I have been enjoying season two of Blowback together, which is focused on the Cuban Revolution.

I read The Intelligent Investor, which has been on my list for years, and Here, There and Everywhere, a personal history of recording the Beatles. The latter got me into a bit of a kick of listening to those recordings, spending the most time with Revolver and Abbey Road, as well as Rubber Soul (although I’m not sure that Emerick worked on that one). I’ve had a lot of new music discoveries recently, as well; perhaps my favorite was Peter Cat Recording Co., particularly their song Portrait of a Time.

Outputs

Again, as I’m currently funemployed, I’ve been taking it a little easy on myself and trying to decompress; this new personal site is the main project I’ve been working on. I’ve been wanting to check out Hugo for a while, and this break was a good excuse to get a proper personal site up. So far my experience using Hugo has been fantastic, and I love the TeXify theme.

I’ve also been playing around with some browser APIs that I had not used in the past, such as Web Workers and Pointer Lock. I hope to have a post with more to say on these soon.