Jonathan Snook's Blog, page 2

Fifty One

The life odometer slowly turned as I awoke to a cherry chip cupcake on my fifty-first birthday.

It was a warm, sunny, but smoky day as forest fires from central Canada filled the hazy sky.

I joined my handful of high school friends for lunch. I had a burger that was quite delicious and sizeable enough that I couldn’t finish it. The server brought out a dense but disappointing chocolate cake where she sung the first two bars to Happy Birthday and then walked away while my friends continued the singing.

I returned home to enjoy a cigar and a cocktail on the balcony, seeing the birthday wishes stream in from various social media platforms. [Thank you, everybody.]

For dinner, my girlfriend made a delicious gochujang miso marinated salmon served on a bed of basmati rice. The appetizer was figs, pistachios, basil, honey, and balsamic on a bed of fior di latte. Really tasty flavour combinations that I would absolutely have again.

The evening was intended to include a couple hours of gaming but my son had a school assignment due at midnight and he had fallen asleep. I ended up needing to wake him up and making sure he had everything he needed. Mission accomplished. One step closer to seeing this kid graduate.

At one minute to midnight, I hopped online to join my friends in one game of Call of Duty. We won. And I got the last kill. A fun way to close out my birthday.

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Average

“The truth is, I’m… I’m not an exceptional person, you know? Nothing interesting really ever happens to me. I’m… I’m massively flawed, and I think I’m quite forgettable, if I’m being 100% honest.”

Randy Feltface ends his comedic storytelling in Randy Writes a Novel with this poignant bit at the end of his act.

“But must we leave a legacy? Must we make an impact? Do we have to leave a footprint? Is it okay to just settle? Seek safety? Nest, you know? Or must we constantly shake our lives up, or suffer the indiscriminate cruelty of having it shaken against our will?“

I grew up considering myself quite average. I still do, honestly. I was never the best hockey player but I wasn’t the worst. I wasn’t the best bowler but I wasn’t the worst. Even to this day, amongst my friends, I’m not the best Warzone player, but I’m not the worst. If I were in The Simpsons, I’d be in the Second Best Band. [n.b. from my favourite Simpsons episode.]

That’s not to downplay any of my successes over the years. Looking back on what has transpired in my life, it feels rather surreal and an un-average life.

“They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time.”

I don’t have any expectation to be remembered or honoured beyond my circle of friends and family. The time between my first and second deaths will be short, I imagine, and I have no problem with this. After all, once I die the first time, it won’t matter one way or the other to me how long the memory of me lives on.

I bring this up not in a woe-is-me or a sense of nihilism where nothing matters. I bring it up as for me, personally, I’m okay with settling. I’m okay with enough. My footprint has been made and is already disappearing into the sands of time as the waves of progress wash upon the shore.

For the billionaires of this world, however, it never seems to be enough. For many in the tech industry, there’s a culture of growth at all costs. When I was at Shopify, it was easy to fall into it. We’d have discussions about how to expand into various markets and then work to execute on those ideas. Move up-market, move down-market, move into foreign markets. It feels almost antithetical to even consider just refining a product without needing to hire more people to sell to more people. There is a fear that if you don’t continue growing, there will be somebody else who will and eventually you’ll die.

The idea of running a lifestyle business—one small enough to maintain a comfortable living—seems to have disappeared. Perhaps because those lifestyle businesses eventually got sold off to growth businesses.

Like a cancer, rapid growth eventually consumes a stable environment.

In much the same way that I have hoped that the enshittification of social media may lead to a resurgence of blogging, I hope that we see a wave of small, independent app creators, web or native.

While I don’t buy the hype of AI in its current form, if the expectation is that it’ll drive the speed at which we can develop, perhaps there is an opportunity for some to create their own little islands instead of heaping all creation into some mega-corporation just for the sake of growth.

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Wake Up

I don’t really identify with music. I mean in the sense that I don’t use music to attach to specific meanings or feelings. Lyrics are like instruments in that I couldn’t tell you what the words are or what they meant any better than I could tell you what the guitar or drums are saying. Everything comes together in rhythm and melody in a way that I enjoy.

Every now and then, though, a song will ingrain itself into my brain and become completely linked to a particular point in time due to repetition.

When I was a teenager, I collected comics. I bought the twelve issue series of Watchmen, which by the early 90s had already had multiple printings. While I read it, I’d listen to music on my Compact Disc player. I had maybe a dozen CDs at the time including Paula Abdul’s Spellbound featuring QSound technology, and Phantom of the Opera. Clearly, I am a man of impeccable taste in music.

The album I listened to on repeat, though, while reading these engrossing comic books was Soul II Soul’s debut album, Club Classics Vol. One. To this day, any time I hear Back to Life come on, I’m instantly transported to my teenage bedroom, the afternoon light coming through my window, as I sit on the floor, wondering what Dr. Manhattan would do.

After that, it wasn’t until March of 2009 that another song would create such an intertwining to an indelible moment. The song was Wake Up by Arcade Fire. While the song had been released in 2004, I first came across it when it was used in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are—a book I had and enjoyed reading when I was a child and that I enjoyed reading to my kids, then 5 and 1½.

My wife (at the time) and I were in the process of adopting our third child. Unfortunately, it never came to pass. We had gone through failed adoptions a few times before and the reason this time was no different than those other times: the mother chose to keep the child—a perfectly reasonable, respectful, and honourable decision.

Perhaps because I had been more open about this attempt, the failure hit me hard. (Failure doesn’t feel like the right word here. Nobody failed. It’s nobody’s fault. Circumstances changed.)

Wake Up was played on repeat.

To this day, 16 years later, whenever I hear that song, I’m brought to tears.

Somethin’ filled up

My heart with nothin’

Someone told me not to cry

Now that I’m older

My heart’s colder

And I can see that it’s a lie

That failed adoption precipitated events that led to my asking for a divorce three months later.

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Check in, check out

I enjoy those who do weekly or monthly life updates. I don’t plan (right now) on doing a similar cadence. Partly because I usually don’t consider my life that exciting—which, honestly, I’m enjoying things being boring right now.

Family

In my year-end recap, I mentioned my youngest was doing longer stretches splitting his time between homes. Little did I expect that less than two weeks after that update, he’d be at my place since and will likely continue until he’s off to college in the fall.

That has meant staying in Ottawa and keeping travel to a minimum. He and I went to Paris for March break where we stayed at an Airbnb in Le Marais. We spent too much money on clothes and food, including three Michelin-starred L’Ambroisie. We had a mostly decent experience there but not as good as I was expecting, given a lot of the online reviews I had read. We made up for it by going to Five Guys the next day.

It’s nice having more one-on-one time with him before he flies the coop.

He just went to his prom. I never went to my prom and my oldest missed out due to the pandemic so I’m glad my youngest got to have that experience. He won an award for Best Style.
Unsurprising. He’s always been a stylish kid.

As for me, I’m happy to be in a place right now where I can support those around me.

I’m focused on downsizing in preparation for the empty nest. I’ve been selling or giving away things I don’t need anymore. My spending has dropped considerably, which has been nice.

Reading

I’ve started to spend more time reading. I felt like I was spending too much time on social media in general and TikTok in particular. I enjoy the inspiration that can come from TikTok—especially with cooking and cocktails—but needed to…diversify the inspiration.

I finally finished Think Little by Wendell Berry. I appreciate the message of preserving the environment but I found the writing style a bit underwhelming. Having finished that, I went back to reading Romance Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is a light book about a comedy writer working for a fictional version of SNL falling in love with a celebrity host. I’m enjoying it. I have a few other fiction titles lined up for when I’m done that including The Perfume Collector, Service Included, and Food Person.

Music

I go in waves with music. I rarely listen to albums, instead preferring to listen to singles and then adding them to a big playlist. Again, TikTok comes in as my place of inspiration. Sometimes the algorithm will narrow in and give me just music recommendations and that’s where I’ll start adding different things. Dreamwalker by Dogpark has a Maroon 5 feel. Kilby Girl by The Backstreet Lovers. Indie Hills by Jonny K. Oh, and Dead Beat City by Kids That Fly. That’s a song to crank nice and loud while driving with the sunroof open.

For something more chill, Texas Sun by Khruangbin & Leon Bridges is so smooth. Love that guitar. Which lead me to Leon Bridges’ Smooth Sailin’.

I’ve added a couple songs from Galdive and St Paul & The Broken Bones to the list. And when I couldn’t get enough of Jungle, I feasted on Loaded Honey’s recent releases.

My playlists are on Apple Music and while Current Vibes is my main playlist, I’ve been slowly curating my other playlists, too.

The Bar

I stopped buying whisky as I wasn’t drinking it nearly enough to get through everything I was buying. My urge to “collect them all”, even with a particular brand, was getting to be a bit much. For example, I love Octomore but they release four bottles every year. I hadn’t finished off the 9 series but then I bought the 10 and 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 series. Now I have 20 bottles of Octomore sitting on the shelf.

Instead, I’ve been buying vermouth and amaro and other interesting liqueurs. China China and Fernet Branca Menta were the recent additions. I fear I am no further ahead in these matters. Now I just have 20 bottles of liqueurs on top of the 20 bottles of whisky.

Last cocktail I made was The Getaway. Although I just used lemon juice instead of a lemon/lime split. I’d totally have it again.

Summertime

Here’s to a good summer. With the warmer weather, I look forward to relaxing outside, having a drink, and catching up on my reading.

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Open Tabs

I enjoyed Anh’s open tabs post and thought I’d do the same.

Tabs open: none.

Well, on the computer I’m writing this post, none. I try to keep things minimal. I have a couple other devices with maybe a dozen tabs open.

Looking into Pages CMS for my Eleventy sites
A couple posts from Brett Harned that might get integrated into a post of my own.
Looking at automating the opening of casement windows.
Might hire someone to do custom woodwork
Do I need new glasses? Not really, but I’m considering.
I’ve been thinking of getting a large table for when hosting dinner for bigger parties.
I want to redo a bunch of kitchen cabinets to make them more practical.

Tabs usually stay open when it’s for things I want to buy. They stay open until I buy them or until I decide I don’t want to buy them.

I also use Safari Tab Groups but tend to use them more like bookmarks where things go in there for months. They’re more oriented around projects. For example, I am redoing the laundry room and have a tab group for wallpaper options. What do you think?

When Safari first introduced tab syncing, it was fantastic. Now it’s unreliable and inconsistent. No idea why. Restarting the browser seems to update the synced tabs.

In the middle of watching this interview of Natalie Portman. I enjoy the Dish podcast.
I play Warzone and like to watch certain streamers. I have Sally is a Dog queued up in a tab.
Doing some reading on AI and copyright.

That’s it for now.

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The Dependables

The biggest problem I run into with my side projects is keeping dependencies up to date.

I’ll not maintain a site for months and then when I come back to do a small update, I’ll discover something along the way that has been deprecated. It results in more time being spent on updating the dependency than it does to do the actual update I want to perform.

This latest one, much like it has been for the past year or so, was an issue with my deployment setup. I used to use a third-party service and now use GitHub Actions to deploy to GitHub Pages. I had my deployment pinned to using Ubuntu 20.04, which GitHub no longer supports. I’ve switched it to use the latest Ubuntu, which hopefully doesn’t come back to bite me down the road.

Anyway, problem fixed… now to actually work on the site.

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Comments Were a Mistake

George Carlin said “People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people.”

I enjoy what people have to say. I hate hearing what bots have to say. And the problem on many platforms is that it’s near impossible to tell the difference.

I used to have comments enabled on this site but since the rise of Twitter, useful comments from actual people declined quickly and useless comments from spammers trying to create backlinks found their place.

Twitter and Facebook and Instagram were once a linear feed of people you knew. They were replaced with algorithms that threw unknown people and advertisers randomly into your face.

Connecting with real people, creating and expanding a community, was replaced by engagement-seeking sycophants and mass manipulation. The more divisive one can be, the more engagement they can farm. The more engagement they can farm, the more “valuable” they are.

One of the more benign but frustrating trends I’ve seen is asking “what does it mean” on content, in spurring others to lift up their comment, perhaps driving people to their profile, and increasing engagement in their other content. A video of a bear eating a fruit: “What fruit is the animal eating?” “What kind of animal is that?” They ask questions that are extremely obvious and are often already answered in the caption of the video.

As Simon Willison reports, AI is ramping up the increasing uselessness of internet content by pretending to be real people with real anecdotes. “The idea that my opinion on an issue could have been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a research bot is abhorrent to me.”

I’d add that the idea of my opinion on an issue could be influenced by a friend who has been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a bot is abhorrent to me and is one of the reasons I’m extremely frustrated by the swaths of disinformation perpetrated by bots, foreign and domestic governments, AI, and disingenuous actors.

It is for this reason that I feel like comment sections were a mistake. Newspapers shouldn’t have them. News media shouldn’t be quoting random tweets. Blogs should be more restrictive in who can comment. Social media platforms shouldn’t let content from people you haven’t explicitly subscribed to become part of your feed—and that includes retweets/reposts.

In my attempts to maintain some sanity, I consciously have to tell myself how the verity of comment sections should be ignored and never engaged with. I turn off reposts on any platform that has them. I use platforms that have a linear feed with no injected content (currently, Mastodon and Bluesky). I haven’t accepted comments on my site in years and will avoid comment sections on other people’s sites.

Individual people are wonderful. I’m just a little more antsy when it comes to anything that is indiscernible from manufactured content.

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Subversive

“The most subversive thing you can do right now is blog.”

That was a thought I had and considered posting just that line. As I tend to do, I analyze it. And perhaps over-analyzed it.

“Most? Really? There are most certainly other things that are more subversive. We’re just talking about blogging here.”

It’s true, though. I quickly talked myself out of the blog post idea.

Then I saw a blog post which had a similar sentiment. I should’ve marked it down to give credit where credit is due but it’s lost to the ether now. The blog post was enough to revisit my thought.

Right now, blogging within ones own space feels like having a garden or buying from independent store owners and producers. They feel like net positive activities. They feel like we’re not just trying to funnel money and attention into large corporations hellbent on world domination.

Perhaps this leads to what (anecdotally) happened in the mid-2000s: a boon of independent creators, tending their own gardens, and the butterfly effects of more independent projects and products in the world—that hopefully don’t lead into new world-crushing monopolies.

That would be nice.

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The Best Tools

Growing up, my mom didn’t have much money. As such, pursuing hobbies meant making due with what she could afford.

Hockey gear was second hand and a few seasons out of date. My bike was a rust gold 3-speed that was neither the racing or BMX bike that I desired. I had skis that were a cross between racing and traditional, and not really good at either, all the while wearing jogging pants and an acid-wash jean jacket in competitions.

Hobbies can be expensive and my mom did a fantastic job of providing opportunities and supporting me with limited means. I don’t fault her in the slightest.

As an adult who now has the financial means, it’s quite possible I have over-compensated.

I spend days researching things to purchase. I scour the best-of-the-best lists. I watch YouTube videos. What are the best features to have? What do the pros use? In some ways, we’re spoiled by the availability of information. Pre-internet, I’d be picking up Consumer Reports magazine.

I end up having mixed feelings about it. Am I spending more money than I need to on something just because everybody else thinks it’s the best? Or am I truly spending money on quality that will last a lifetime? Am I spending money just to feed the capitalist system or am I buying something that will actually make my life better?

I bought an expensive espresso machine back in 2017. I can make a latte in about one minute, from grind to pull to froth to pour. Nearly eight years later, it’s still running solid.

It’s easy to think that a pourover or french press setup would’ve been dirt cheap in comparison and given me the same level of appreciation for coffee. And yet, that expensive machine provides a lot of joy every time I use it. I fully intend to have it for life.

For the most part, I’ve been happy with my things and when I’ve had a bit of buyer’s remorse, it’s usually because I bought something where I didn’t put in the research and felt like it would be good enough.

On the opposite end of the monetary scale, I’ve been getting into cooking more. (Well, more than a box of pasta and a jar of sauce.) Having the best tools in the kitchen has made cooking more fun. I like the weight of my pots and pans. I like the spoon rest. I like the salt box.

Diderot might warn me not to over-consume. I notice when my spending on things starts to go up. The salt box was an unnecessary purchase. The plastic container I was using before was working just fine. “But it wasn’t wood and black ceramic to match my decor,” I whine.

As the world seems to be taking a bee-line to a recession, I’m slowly divesting myself of a number of possessions that I no longer need, resorting to “buy nothing” groups to avoid contributing to landfills and perhaps help others avoid the Diderot effect.

It’s hard for me not to feel at least somewhat overwhelmed at the need for humanity to slow down on consumption but see a world hellbent on using up every last cell of energy on this planet for things we don’t need.

While they say “things” won’t make you happy, there is the short term burst of joy before hedonistic adaptation settles in. I’ll try to be mindful of that before I go on my next Diderot-inspired spending spree.

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Snook Dreams of the Web

A number of year ago, I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Here is a man that has devoted his life to creating the best sushi in the world. I admire someone so dedicated to the task. Jiro sought out the best fish and the best rice and refined his process. New employees spend years working on just a single aspect of the sushi-making process.

Maybe with some clichéd inevitability—and not unlike so many other people that have watched the documentary—I’ve thought about how this relates to my own craft of web development.

What does mastery look like?

What does it mean to master the craft of web development? Can something that changes so frequently ever be mastered? Can mastery be attained when we’re changing jobs every one, two, three years? Can mastery be attained when we’re rewriting codebases every few years?

Perhaps mastery is when the result serves its audience in the best possible way.

Of course, that goes down a rabbit hole of whom the audience is and what best means. Does McDonald’s serve its audience in the best possible way? Would anybody say they’ve mastered the art of food or service?

The imagery of a master of craft is that of a lone creator, toiling away for years, perfecting every facet of their creative output.

As a web developer, I imagine having an intimate knowledge of each of the layers of development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To understand each one also means understanding how much or how little of each one is required.

Where sushi—more specifically, nigiri—has its rice and fish, there’s also the rice seasoning, the soy sauce, and the wasabi. Perhaps a yuzu kosho to enhance the bite? Or aburi-style?

It’s one thing to build something with HTML. It’s another to know how to effectively add CSS and JavaScript without overdoing it. A master should also understand the user experience. How do we interact with the page?

Achieving Mastery

Any part of development that improves the end result leads to mastery. The end result is what people “consume”. It is the product. It is the experience.

Using a framework or switching frameworks or using a bunch of tooling doesn’t in and of itself lead to either of these. They might help you build more quickly but that doesn’t mean mastery if what you’ve built frustrates the people that use the product.

Therefore, when it comes to web development, mastery comes from understanding how people use your product and the different contexts in which they do, whether that’s desktop, tablet, mobile, finger, keyboard, mouse, screen reader, day, night, over fast or slow speeds. Are they a first time visitor or do they frequent your site?

If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.

And yet, going back to the point of how quickly our industry changes, spending a year on CSS would require another year to master the new stuff that came out requiring another year to master the new stuff that came out and so on. Not very practical when, at the end of the day, we need to build things that people use and we need to get paid. Bills don’t just pay themselves.

Personal Craft

Perhaps, as Hamid says, “iterating, tending, evolving, and continuously improving—results in a collection of work that embodies their creators’ intentions and aspirations for care.”

Running a personal site can be a way to practice mastery. It allows me to focus on individual facets, improving my knowledge and skill to achieve mastery. With an ever-changing technology landscape, there is plenty of opportunity to continue that journey and build on top of the skills that we have, creating new techniques.

I think of the web that we had in the when our curiosity and explorations seemed to create an explosion of new techniques and approaches shared to the world at large.

I would enjoy seeing a return to more people curating their own garden, mastering their craft, and sharing it outside of the capitalist hellscape that is modern social media.

I originally wrote most of this post back in 2020, including the Jiro reference. I was reminded of this draft while reading Hamid’s thoughts on craft.

I am also reminded of John Allsopp’s Dao of Web Design that is a week away from a quarter century old.

I also read Greg Storey’s post on nostalgia and careers and my takeaway was perhaps a return to new creative explorations can lead us into new possibilities.

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