Ultranormal

A Very Comic Book Redesign

2026-03-08T00:00:00.000Z

I woke up early, and there must have been something a little extra in my coffee this morning because I decided that today was the day that Claude Code and I would redesign my blog. Here's what it looked like before... boring, just like everything else, right?

And well, I grew up loving comic books and I thought, OK, I could use some color and pop around here, so why not?

Here's what happened:

My original move from Wordpress to 11ty involved not really looking too closely at what the markup looked like, I just want to make the move and I'd clean up later.
So, I did a little clean up! No more inline javascript or CSS! I moved all of those (I'm still using Alpine, which I'm not sure how I feel about, but decided I didn't want to tackle that today) into a single javascript file that handles things like loading PageFind and some other stuff like changing the class on the bubbles in the background so you get random colors every page load.
I wanted something more dynamic and colorful (I'm sorry), so decided I wanted BAM, BOOM, POW SVGs in the background just kind of bouncing around, and well, that's what happened! I'm not sure how I feel about them being in the source - I might move them to get added to the body on document ready, but they're alright for now.
I also wanted to support reduced motion, so if you have that enabled, the bubbles won't move (I thought it was a bug initially, but I also had reduce motion enabled, so... no moving bubbles to start for me).
The colors are a work in progress, especially in dark mode. I'm going to do some more digging - I'm thinking of having different palettes you can choose from based on my favorite issues. Late 80's Marvel for light mode, and late 90's Vertigo for dark mode. Stay tuned. All of the colors are just CSS variables at the moment, so that should be fairly easy.

It was a lot of fun playing around with things, and realizing I didn't actually have to change much markup to get the design I wanted - the biggest change was to get the "masthead" at the top, which wasn't that big. It reminds me of showing off CSS-only redesigns at work in 2002 and blowing minds.

11ty really is a joy to work with. It's just enough special sauce to do the bloggy stuff, without so much that it gets in the way of building what you want. It doesn't feel in the way, which is nice.

For a Sunday morning redesign, I'll take it. Stay tuned, there are probably bugs to fix and colors to tweak and I'm not sure about the headers, but... I like it so far!

Thoughts on a new (old) web

2026-02-14T00:00:00.000Z

I rage quit LinkedIn about a week ago in a post about the whole Moltbook nonsense. To save you having to go to LinkedIn, here's what I said:

The whole Moltbook farce, the engagement trap, the outright lies, and that literally every suggested post on LinkedIn for the past three days has been from someone unironically boosting some nonsense part of it - I’m done.

You can find me on my blog, where I’ll keep the links to my other social networks up to date - and now is the time for us to build something less centralized, more human, and more supportive to talk about the work part of our lives.

Let’s go build something better.

If you've never heard of Moltbook, OpenClawd, or Moltbot, I'm jealous. The wikipedia page about it is alright, but my real issue with it is that it's mostly bullshit, riddled with security issues, and was used by engagement farming liars pretending to be agents posting on it claiming to be doing all kinds of things, and people ate it up, creating a frenzy around something that was easily proven to be a malware-infested, easily-gamed, kind of interesting, experiment that got out of hand (the original thing, moltbot, is an interesting experiment). That's dismissive and mean, and there's a lot more that could be said about the responsibility we have to own the things we put out in the world (like the fact that if you put something out there that allows people to create extensions, and people report that it's overrun with malware, it's your job to do something about it, even if that something is shut the site down), but that's not what this post is about.

Sorry, I got off track. I'm supposed to be talking about building something better.

I've been exchanging emails with my pal, and sometime-Savannah resident, Simon, about how bad LinkedIn is and thinking about trying to build something new. We've been emailing since (checks timestamps) last October and we're still not exactly sure what that looks like, but it's been one of my all-time favorite epic email threads, and it's all lead here. I told Simon I'd write something about Moltbook and how my thinking is starting to come together and instead of it only being in an email, I thought it was time to start working in public.

Legacy Corporate Social Media

The name comes from an excellent post this week from Lori Olsen describing the entrenched players: X, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. There's a whole lot of interesting work happening outside of them: the whole federated world of Mastodon, New_Public, Pixelfed, Bonfire, etc, and new things happening all the time.

I can't find it now (I'm really sorry - I've searched for everything I can think of!), but someone posted this week that for anyone thinking about building something to replace one of the "legacy corporate social media" players, you can't think of building the whole thing, you have to think in pieces, and that's the spark that triggered everything that follows.

None of the big corporate monsters started with all the features they have today. They all started by doing one thing, and then either acquired a company that did something, or "fast followed" their way to pushing all of the little interesting players out of the market.

So, what's our response?

Go open, small, weird and local - with the option to go global

We don't need to replace all of what Facebook or LinkedIn does at once. We need to do something they do, do it better, smaller, weirder, more open and for a smaller audience. We don't want to boil the ocean or become a billionaire (because, let's face it, there are no good billionaires - as they're all dead set on proving to us these days). We want to build interesting things and help people.

It's the unix philosophy all over again: small pieces loosely joined. We just need to figure out what the pieces are that we want to build, and go. Where should you start? Start with whatever you're most excited about and build just that one thing. Don't build anything more than that one thing. Don't get lost in adding on things you don't need. Build the one thing.

Anyone with an idea and a computer connected to the internet can build something that does something today. You can use ollama to download an open source model you can run on your computer that you can use to slowly build software. You can use any of the others that your ethics allow you to to turn an idea into working software (maybe not professional software, but you can build something - more on that later).

So, let's do that. Instead of creating bad slop art, let's build software for each other that solves real problems. Open source it. Build on it. Make it better. Make it for yourself, for your neighbors, and then... think about how to make it talk to other software, because once it's online, the step beyond local is:

Now, about that global option...

The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can run a server as small as you want - it could be just for you and you can be a part of the global conversation, or a part of just the conversations you want to be a part of. That's the great part of a federation, it's just the parties that agree to be a part of it!

I think that's the first ingredient to this, any new thing we build, even if it's intended to be local, should implement ActivityPub and have the capacity for federation even if it's not implemented at first and can be disabled.

Where to go from here

In my post last month about rewriting the blog I wrote about how I would use AI and the more I talk to people the more I think I'm OK with where I've drawn the line. I'm excited about building things, and helping other people build things - more excited than I've been in years. How excited? So excited that I signed TechSAV up to be an event sponsor at the local library, and signed us up to host something next month called The Explorers and Builders Guild that's part hacker space, part office hours, part tech support, where anyone can drop in and ask about whatever they want that's tech-related, from installing linux on an old laptop, to starting a blog, to building an app. I'll be there with my laptop, and a couple of distros on thumb drives, plugging away on projects waiting for people to show up.

I don't know where it will go, but I'm hoping it will turn into a community of people who build software for their community, a little like Open Savannah used to be, but without the overhead of Code for America. I'm hoping it will help people see that there's a world online outside of legacy corporate social media that they can help build and that they can make their own, that it can be more art than commerce and more community than extractive end-days capitalism.

That's a lot to ask from one event at the library, but I've got to start somewhere.

Nostalgia is an Anchor

2026-02-09T00:00:00.000Z

This made me cry in my coffee. If you don't want to read it, it's basically a letter to senior engineers just like me about AI coding tools, and how they're just a fact of life now. He's right. As much as I, or anyone else wants to fight, at work, he's right.

I do think there's still a place for craft and for hand-crafted code. The craft is all around you. You still need to know how to break down fuzzy big ideas into chunks of work. You still need to be able to build consensus. You still need to design systems. You still need to build people up, and convince them they can do the thing.

The place for hand-crafted code is probably not at work. It's in your spare time. It's for fun - again and finally. It's for the thing that no one's ever built before that you just want to see exist. Go do that by whatever means you want, you brilliant wizard.

I got a case of the nostalgias last week at work - it even prompted some posts to Mastodon about my various web standards adventures in the early part of this centry (yes, that made me feel even older than I already feel), and I even let a couple of stories fly at work.

The problem with nostalgia is that it's an anchor you're always dragging behind you, and it's a memory that's never actually accurate. The past sucked too, just in ways you've chosen to forget. The best parts were different than the best parts now, but that don't let anyone tell you they were necessarily better - they just happened when the rememberers were younger and weren't dragging these stupid memory anchors around.

Writing code was hard. We were doing things on the web no one had ever done before. Our lead times to do anything novel or at scale were long. I remember sitting in meetings where we had to talk about timelines to order huge machines, and then how long it would take to rack and wire them. We don't talk about those stories. We talk about the thrill of shipping the thing we built with our friends. Look around. You can still build and ship things with your friends. You're just doing it faster, cheaper, easier, and a little different. The thrill is only different because you're different, but you should still enjoy it.

A Shiny New Bloggy Home

2026-01-24T00:00:00.000Z

This blog is almost twenty six years old (here's the first post from July of 2000). Just like me, it's gone through a lot of changes. It started on Blogger, moved to Movable Type, where I think I had to move it between hosts a couple of times, and then to WordPress where I know I moved it at least four times. It changed text formats at least four times between HTML, Textile, Markdown, back to HTML, to WordPress's Gutenberg. It has over 2,400 published posts, and the archives were always an anchor around my neck when it came to thinking about migrating it again. I'd think about going through and cleaning up the weird formatting (a lot of weird line breaks and backslashes all over the place), and give up after going through a couple dozen posts.

I'd attempted migrating to several static site generators over the years: Jekyll, Middleman, etc, and always ran into at least one deal breaker either technical or personal - mostly personal. I just didn't want it enough to invest the time to fiddle with the code to convert my gigantic archive into something that would work, when what I had was just good enough.

My most recent attempt before last weekend was Ghost. Things were going pretty well until I realized that somewhere between 2000 and 2020, my permalinks went from underscores to dashes (along with the rest of the web) and that I'd have to figure out how to do redirects, and I just didn't have the fucks in the budget to do that.

And then I started a new job.

This is where I think this story is going to take a left turn and we have to talk about generative AI because it's all anyone is talking about these days, or all anyone is avoiding talking about. Depending on the day, I'm in one camp or the other.

In general, I think most people who aren't AI kool-aid drinkers, feel like generative AI is being inflicted on them. They are 100% not wrong. Like crypto (anyone remember NFTs?) and a bunch of other "revolutionary" technologies that came before it, it can feel like a solution in search of a problem, and that's both a marketing problem and a Silicon Valley sycophantic investor problem that I'm not going to get into because it's depressing as hell and I'm glad I've escaped it.

The other problem with a lot of discussions about generative AI is that it's not one thing, or one technology. It's a bunch of things built on top of one revolutionary technology: transformer.

I've got decades of work experience with search, machine learning and even neural networks, and I've been in tech for 30 years so the whole hype cycle of new technology to buzzword to investment boom to marketing hype to crash to people forgetting that there was actually something there at one point, so I've been on this ride before. It's not new, and it's never not disappointing. This time is different in scale and the impact it's having on the every day lives of people, from the loss of jobs, the scale of the money being thrown around and the corruption of the players involved.

My big objections to the marketing push is that the edict in a lot of businesses to "use AI or else" was that there were no guard rails in place to protect customers or employees, and it all felt like an excuse to lay off huge chunks of people; and an excuse to blow huge wads of cash by people who already had more money than they needed, without a plan to deliver any actual value.

That's also the problem with the discussion: we can't separate the marketing, people and the economics from the technology and the ethics behind it. The entire thing feels like The Good Place.

If you've made it this far, you are probably scratching your head wondering what this has to do with a blog. I'm getting there, I swear. Just a few more paragraphs.

Trying to find my line

I left Gusto in July of 2025 after working pretty much non-stop for 30 years. I'd never taken an intentional break between jobs longer than a week. This time, I had the resources to take a real break and I took it. It was incredible. I will write about it eventually, but not now. This is already too long, and it's about the blog, right? Anyway, Jen and I drove a 4,800 mile windy route across the eastern half of Canada. The best thing about driving other than seeing things is that you can't really do anything but think or talk, and I did a lot of thinking. A lot of it was about my own rules around how I would engage with generative AI, because again, it's not just one thing.

So, after five months off, and a month working at Bonusly where I've been using Cursor all day, and been really impressed with the results, here are my rules as of this writing for generative AI and why:

I will be careful who I trust: There are bad actors everywhere. Elon Musk and Sam Altman both give me the icks, and one of them has such a proven record of bad acts that I'll never be involved in anything he's touched, so I'll avoid them, and a whole lot of others. Anthropic, so far, seem to be pretty solid. I really like that they don't have image or video generators at all (their Slack gif creator is charmingly awful and only creates SVGs).

I will reevaluate constantly: things change all the time. Trying to stay on top of things is a losing battle, but I'll do my best to keep up, adjust accordingly, and the rules may change, because I could be wrong.

I will use generative AI for:

Coding: I trained myself on openly available code on the web, viewing source on web pages, and looking at open source code.
Research: Using tools like NotebookLM to compile sources I provide it isn't all that different from using something like ElasticSearch to index and search anything else I might give it.
Transcription and summarization: This can be done by less complex models already, and the tools are good, so I'm OK letting something like Granola summarize my meetings for me.

I will not use generative AI for:

Creative work: I won't have it create images, poetry, writing, music, or anything else creative.

I think that's the big objection. It's that we think so little of writers and artists that we're OK with large companies stealing all of the work they've put up on the web to advertize their services over the last thirty years - violating copyright to do it - and then regurgitating it back to us as putrid echos and calling it progress. Yes, it's technically unbelievable that it's possible. It's morally reprehensible. That those giant companies not only seem to be getting away with it, but making trillions of dollars and bankrupting artists along the way, only makes it worse. It's that Google's move from traditional search to AI summaries breaks the unspoken agreement between it and the people who publish on the web that we'll allow you to index our content and put ads around the search results in exchange for sending people back to us. Now that they've broken that agreement, what's our recourse? What's our recourse in any of this? Between Big Tech and Big Trump (which is a whole different topic for another day), a lot of us feel powerless and unheard, which is dangerous for them and us.

So, what's the difference between coding and creative work? I'll try to explain my thinking with an analogy from the world of code.

The web "won" and really took off because normal people without computer science degrees (like me!) could understand HTML, and with the tools they had on their computer: Notepad and a web browser, produce something that worked. HTML was also fairly forgiving. Even with a few typos, the browser would still display something, and might give you a clue where you went wrong. That wasn't true with programming languages, especially the ones available at the time.

Not long after, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools came along: NaviPress, Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Publisher, etc. They allowed people who were used to word processors to publish to the web! And boy, those of us who coded HTML by hand, much like the scribes to the printing press, were pissed.

That's what abstraction layers do. They take what's hard and make it not just easy but accessible to more people. I wrote about this back in 2016 in Racing Robots.

And that's where I think we are with generative AI and coding, except today, the S is "say". With a short conversation, What You Say is What You Get and a normal person can have a working piece of software that does something. That's powerful.

There's risk there, though. I think the thing people are running into is that we've accelerated the 0 - 90% part of development, but that last 10% is now a lot harder because you still need professional experience to understand security, performance, networking, etc. That's the next hurdle - how do we help people who've gone run into that 90% wall at the speed of sound and made a huge mess? That's a topic for a different post.

And back to the blog...

Finally! We get a professional development stipend at work, and I used some of it on a Claude Pro subscription, because I was a manager for ten months before I left Gusto and then off for five months so it'd been almost a year and a half since I coded full-time, and even then, not much of that with AI anyway, plus people raved about Claude Code, so I wanted to try it out.

So, I sat on the couch with my laptop, installed Claude Code, created a new empty directory, cd'd into it, fired up Claude Code, and between two three hour sessions with it, I'd:

Installed eleventy, configured it and created a theme from scratch.
Imported my WordPress archive
Created scripts to clean up all of the formatting issues in the archives
Implemented dark mode
Added tag archives
Deployed it

And this weekend, I added month and year archives, and some navigation stuff.

I could write more, but I read this post this week about working with coding tools and it sums up my feelings really well, so I'll spare you.

Back in 2020, Ethan Marcotte wrote a blog post called Let a website be a worry stone that has stuck with me since then and I think about it frequently, and wanted my site to be that, but I hated WordPress, but felt stuck with it. Claude Code has made screwing around with code in my spare time fun again, and that's really something.

So, expect more changes around here.

A 50 Year-Old Dad Confronts 2026

2026-01-16T00:00:00.000Z

https://youtu.be/2Se76S0XH-I?si=hFddcWQ7ksPItzCK

I'm stealing my theme for 2026 from The Mountain Goats: "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me."

I've been trying to get healthier for a while now, and just this week, as winter is at its metaphorical and actual darkest, I hit a goal I thought was unthinkable - I've lost 100 pounds. I'm now smaller (I have cheekbones?) than I've been in over twenty years, and I'm not done. I have more work to do, but that work doesn't include worrying about my beard.

In 2026, inspired by Joshua Idehen, I'm embracing my cringe. I've been thinking about this a lot since I turned 50 last year, and the song behind that link does a great job of summing it up. I'm now "out of the zeitgeist's eye" for the most part, and I think the world at large still feels like inducing cringe is somehow wrong but, as a dad, it's kind of my superpower? So, I'm declaring 2026 my year of cringe.

In 2026, I will wear what I want. I will listen to what I want. I will let my beard and my hair go feral. I embrace my hairy troll ear and my weird music. I will learn to knit if I want (and I do). I will share the things that I'm excited about, and if they excite you too, awesome! If they don't, that's fine. What are you excited about? Let's talk about them.

In 2026, I will let the love in my heart go wild and flow in whatever direction it wants.

In 2026, I will read books made out of paper, from bookshelves in my house.

In 2026, my blog is here for me and I'll post if I want, won't feel guilty if I don't, won't edit before I post, and it'll just have to do. Fuck it.

In 2026, I will be open about how difficult it is to be a "productive" member of society in all the bullshit ways we define this while the world burns around us (and people are actively setting fires).

In 2026, I'm moving to more eccentric services, embracing more open source, doubling down on the Fediverse and going to explore creating more of my own software. If that doesn't make any sense to you, that's OK!

And now, to you, whoever you are, in the already dreadful year 2026...

I love you, child, whoever you belong to, I do.

I wish you all the happiness in the world.

I hope you know you are loved, even if we've never met.

I don't understand a goddamn thing you're talking about half the time, but I celebrate the joy you take in it. Please keep enjoying it, especially if it makes you happy and isn't hurting anyone. I'll gleefully nod along any time you want to tell me about it.

I do not know what to do about the brutality in the world. I don't know how to make people love each other, or see that their self-serving cruelty is hurting them as much as it hurts the people they hate. I do not understand why they do the things they do, what drives them to punish the innocent, or what fuels them beyond the original sins of white supremacy and patriarchy (is it really that simple? How do we get people to give that up and choose something better?).

I know I'm a middle-aged dad and you're used to me having all the answers, and even though you are now also an adult, it's disappointing that I don't. I'm disappointed too. 2026 would be a lot less painful if I understood what the fuck was going on (in 2026, I also choose to swear more, because science says it gives us super powers).

To end this thing, I'm going to use a quote from another man, Rabbi Tarfon, who's much much older than me (I know it's hard to believe that there's anyone older than me) that's making its third appearance on my (also very old) blog, because it's the crutch I use when things are difficult and I'm wandering around in the dark looking for help:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

2026 Energy

2025-12-31T00:00:00.000Z

I have a draft post all about 2025, but you know what? Fuck 2025. It was a complicated year and I'm tired of thinking about it. I'd rather listen to music, hang out with friends and get ready to vote against every Republican I can for as long as I can until they take that away too.

This video is the energy I want to bring into 2026:

https://youtu.be/TUQDQraBn3Y?si=NyqvdObde0_7xc3D

The Layoff Collection

2025-10-29T00:00:00.000Z

The layoffs in tech continue unabated. I realized that there's no one place where I've got all of the things I've written about them collected in one place (and I don't like Wordpress' tags page). So, here they all are, plus one bonus one about all of the ways that working in tech can make you bitter and how not to let it take your humanity.

The Layoff Line - this one's practical, kind of what questions you can expect to get answers to, and the ones you never will - also naming the feelings you're probably feeling.
One Last Layoff Lament - yes, I thought there would be only two posts. Silly me. It's about how damaging layoffs are to trust and how the people who still work there feel - also naming feelings.
The Illusion of Control - what it says in the title.
Stay Soft - you could call this one a love letter to the people I've worked with.

There you go. Please be kind to yourself. If you're in a place to help folks who've lost their jobs, please do. Not just because it could be you next but because it's the right thing to do.

The Cost of Lies

2025-08-07T00:00:00.000Z

What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: ‘Who is to blame?’

Valery Lagazon in the first scene in HBO's **Chernobyl
**

I've got a cold, and a friend mentioned that their favorite "comfort watch" is HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, so I gave it a try (I think this is my third time watching it). I didn't find it comforting, but this quote from the first scene hit me.

This is where we are in America. We're no longer holding liars accountable for the lie. We can't even begin to keep up with them all because there's a new rancid delivery daily. All we get now is people trying to throw blame around, the powerful constantly punching down at marginalized groups trying to get their followers' constant outrage focused away from their obvious failings, and on "the enemy."

Who is the enemy seems to change, and you know things aren't going well when they cook up an all new one instead of pulling from the overfull file of "outrage reruns."

In a world of slop, lies and inauthenticity, humanity shines through. Be #human.

Stay Soft

2025-07-10T00:00:00.000Z

I wrote this as my farewell in Slack, and wanted to keep it, so it's turning into a blog post!

Tomorrow is my last working day at Gusto, which has meant a lot of good-bye conversations, some tears, and a good bit of advice. It's bittersweet leaving a company full of kind people, but the thing that's come up in pretty much every conversation is some advice that just keeps coming up… enough that I figured it'd just share it with everyone.

One of the reasons I'm leaving is that my 30th anniversary of working in tech happened in May and hit me a lot harder than I expected. It triggered a lot of feelings, and a lot of introspection. Thirty years is a long time. I've learned a lot of lessons the hard way, learned some the easy way (from watching other people learn them the hard way), and have developed my own rules for working that I think can all be summed up with two words (don't worry, I'll explain them):

Stay Soft

Working in tech can make you bitter, fragile and angry. For a long time, I was really angry at all of the various disappointments, bad choices by others that affected me, and the failures that left scars. It took a lot of work to process it and turn those traumas into memories. I wish I'd done the work earlier, but I'm glad I did it at all. That's where softness comes in.

My friend Cindy Li used to remind me: "work won't love you back." It's true. Work won't love you back; but, people will. And I think that's the secret to making it to thirty years without being the human equivalent of a charcoal briquette: focus on the people. Focus on the how I show up and who I show up for, not the what. The what changes. The what is frequently outside of our control. Early in my career, I was all about the what. I wanted to work on the biggest, the coolest, the hardest, and get all the glory for doing things that others didn't think could be done. It was so bad that at one point, my manager pulled me aside and said, "Kevin, people don't like working with you. Yes, you're great at your job, but you're not fun to be around. You're sarcastic, and it's not productive." That hurt, and made me rethink how I worked.

What we do is a team sport. It takes everyone to build something great. Sometimes, even if you're working with the best people and do almost everything right, the thing won't be successful. Maybe it was too early, or too late, or didn't resonate with the audience. Maybe it was just the wrong thing to build. Tying your self-worth to the result of a project is a recipe for misery. Being a developer isn't a golden ticket to success. We're not the most important part of the process; we are just a part in the process.

Back to softness. Instead of investing in what, I invested in who and how. I stopped competing with other people and focused on competing only with Past Me. Just that one change fixed all kinds of problems. The second part was to do my best to play the part that wasn't being played on the teams I was on, trying to make it easier on everyone else involved. That meant learning what mattered to them, their lexicon, and asking them what I could do to make their goals easier to achieve. Being soft means being pliable, willing to jump in and do the work that no one sees, but that needs to be done. It means being willing to absorb disappointments, changes and consequences without taking it personally (but learning from all of it). It means meeting people where they are, accepting their skills gratefully and helping them learn new ones. It means bending to try new ways of working and accommodating your team's quirks and personalities.

Story time!

My dad was in the Air Force, and a navigator in fighters, so we moved a lot when I was a kid. I moved twelve times before I turned 21. I was also raised Mormon (but, never lived in Utah other than one very painful year at BYU), which meant that in pretty much every school I was in, I was the only Mormon kid in my class. When we lived in the South, that was a big deal. I got picked on a lot, and excluded from things for something I didn't choose. That all left scars.

So, I know what it means to be alone, excluded and dismissed for something I couldn't control.

I started my career in tech totally by accident. I got a job at AOL in tech support because my girlfriend at the time worked there and said I should apply. I loved it. As a sheltered 20 year-old Mormon kid (I was so naive), the motley collection of freaks and weirdos was a gold mine of things to learn. I built a group of friends that would have stuck out like a sore thumb at church. I felt at home and accepted for the first time in my life, and it lit a fire. It made me realize that I could make sure that no one I met would ever feel like I did as a kid. I didn't have a name for it then, other than it feeling like the right thing to do - and I can guarantee I didn't succeed all the time (I had a lot of work to do - this was thirty years ago).

There's power in making people feel welcome and cared for. You go from being a bunch of people to a pirate gang. There's real power in believing in their potential and telling them. Then, you all become unstoppable and can go do ridiculous things; and, have fun doing them.

I've definitely gotten better at it over the years, and still get it wrong. But, that's softness too, and something I see all the time at Gusto - please don't lose it. It's the most welcoming place I've ever worked, and hopefully, I've helped reinforce that. If I haven't, I'm sorry and I hope you'll forgive me.

In closing… stay soft. Love the people you work with. Be there for each other. Help each other get better, and tell people you believe in them. Don't let the indignities and failures make you bitter. Learn from them and use them to do better next time.

I'll miss you all. It's been an amazing four years, but it's time for me to go figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Racing Robots

2025-05-29T00:00:00.000Z

This was originally published on the Creative Coast's (now Startup Savannah) blog way back in 2016. With AI, it's feels even more relevant now.

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” — Annie Dillard

I’ve been organizing Savannah’s RailsBridge chapter for a few years now. By all accounts, it’s been a success: we’ve run more workshops as a small Southern city than anywhere else in the world except San Francisco, NYC & Boulder/Denver (suck it, Atlanta), introduced over 300 people to programming, helped a baker’s dozen find new careers they didn’t realize were possible, and provided a place for the local tech community to meet and help their neighbors.

But, the longer we run these workshops, the more it feels like a rain drop in a forest fire. Introducing people to programming is a great way to get me back in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner, and the students’ excitement and questions about what they should learn next are a great reminder that there is no clear path to success in programming – or in the future of work, which is really what we’re here to talk about. This thought has been tumbling around in my head for years now and has surfaced in a few different venues, but I’ve never really sat down to put it all in text.

After World War II, a whole generation entered the middle class thanks to the need for skilled labor to build our industrial future. Factories were humming. Unions were organized and fought for their members. Public highway and other construction projects kept millions of people busy. It was possible for someone who was just willing to work hard and learn a skill to enter, and stay in, the middle class without a college degree. A lot of Americans think it’s somehow possible to go back to that glorious industrial paradise, that we can somehow put all those people back to work in factories that either no longer exist, or have been completely re-staffed with robots.

That’s not going to happen. Those days are gone. China didn’t steal all those jobs – robots did. And it’s not just the factories. Wal-Mart’s wholesale destruction of Main Street? Robots. Amazon’s annihilation of small bookstores? You guessed it, robots again.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” — Carl Sagan

Back to programming: it’s the blue collar skilled work for this century. In your spare time, using free resources on the web, you can learn enough to get yourself and your family to the middle class – without a college degree. I did it. A lot of my friends did it. There are at least two generations of great developers who don’t have computer science related degrees – because the web, especially the web at scale, moved faster than university curriculums could keep up.

While it’s harder now to go from zero to “job”, it’s still possible, and people still do it all the time. It’s why everyone is so interested in coding bootcamps and why STEM is on the tip of every politician’s tongue when they talk about education. But, turning everyone into a programmer isn’t going to keep the robots at bay, and it’s not going to keep everyone employed when 50-70% of the jobs that exist today just… disappear.

We are all racing robots for our jobs

We are all racing robots for our jobs. Most of us haven’t realized this yet and are about to get trampled and left behind. That sounds dystopian, but the more I think about it, the more apt that image is. The small bookstore owners can tell you about it, so can the store owners that used to have stores on Main Street USA, and our grandparents who used to assemble cars.

“If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.” – Seth Godin

We’ve failed generations of students in preparing them to race robots. We still rely on Industrial Age education methods, meant to churn out obedient little factory workers. Sorry, but we don’t need those anymore. That’s what the robots are for. We are failing our children right now by not teaching them the skills that will keep them ahead of the robots. Teaching everyone to be a programmer isn’t the solution – it’s just the one thing we can point to as being somewhat robot-proof (even though it’s not). We need to break it down further and realize that the economy of the future will have very few places for unskilled labor. Anything that’s done by rote will be automated.

And just because you sit in an office and work on a computer, don’t think you’re safe. Don’t think we’ll see robot lawyers, accountants and insurance agents? How much of preparing taxes is really just complex repetition? Quite a bit when you really break it down. Just think of how many jobs will just… not exist. My 50-70% number looks like an understatement now, doesn’t it? The days are already gone where you learn a skill in trade school or in college and then spend your entire career doing that one thing.

Even baby boomers held an average of 11 different jobs in their careers, and that number is probably only going to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if our children end up with an average of 11 different careers during their working lives. So, given all this dystopian information, what do we do about it? How can we prepare the next generation for a world where their jobs will continually disappear?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

We need to change how we educate our children and make it more closely match how they’ll be forced to adapt to an ever-increasing rate of change. That means that rote learning, fact regurgitation, testing as the only tool for measuring fluency… all of those things need to be burned to the ground. In their place, we need to teach:

Resiliency, flexibility and problem solving: They will constantly be presented with new problems and will have to come up with solutions based on very little information. We need to teach them how to do just enough research to solve a problem, and I don’t have a word for it, but I’ll call it Minimum Viable Fluency: what’s the minimum amount of knowledge you need to have about a subject in order to solve the problem at hand? I can’t tell you how often I have to go from zero to MVF in order to put out the latest and greatest fire at work.
Entrepreneurship: The future of work is most likely a series of freelance gigs that kind of turn into what we think of as a job. There’s not a lot of security in that, so we need to teach them how to find, quantify and exploit opportunities in the market. They need to have all those tools at the ready so they can move, adapt and survive.
Teamwork Across Diverse Skills and Experience: The more diverse the set of experiences and outlooks brought to a problem, the more likely it is that the team will find the best possible solution. That means we need to learn how to work with groups with different perspectives, experiences and talents than our own. We can’t build the future without including as many people as possible.

“But, it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope – because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, propose to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” — FDR

All of that brings me back to Savannah. Our lovely city is in a precarious position when it comes to the future I’ve laid out. We have a 26-28% generational poverty rate. That number has stuck like glue for thirty years and shows no sign of budging. All the social programs and services the city, county and state have put in place are barely keeping up have failed to put even a dent in the number. When all of those low-wage jobs get automated away? When the port is 99% automated? When hotels no longer need people to clean toilets or make beds? That 26% will look like a golden age. I wouldn’t be surprised if the poverty rate doubles in the next twenty years. No tax base, no new hotel, parking garage or marathon, will be able to cope. I’m not going to go into the systemic reasons that some people in our city want to have a quarter of our neighbors living in poverty. I don’t care what their reasons are because the outcome of those reasons is unacceptable.

It should be unacceptable to the vast majority of us who live here that a full quarter of us are below the poverty line. We are wasting billions of dollars in human potential because we refuse to admit our complicity in the situation and resolve to fix it. The more research I do, and the more I learn about this, the more convinced I am that addressing and fixing Savannah’s poverty is the key to building a Savannah that will thrive through the future of work. If we don’t, the robots will win and our social infrastructure won’t be able to cope with the shock to the system. You would think that I’d be in my backyard digging my bunker to sit out the end of the world, but I’m not. I’m convinced that we can solve these problems if we work together, get creative, and work like hell.

“By all means, break the rules. Break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.” — Robert Bringhurst

Where do we start? It starts with what I said above about education. Those same skills need to be shared across the community. Here are just a few of the things I think we need to focus on:

We need to support and grow our small businesses to better take advantage of social media, modern web-based tools, and better capture the 2.6 billion dollars tourists spend in our city every year. Growing those small businesses means they can hire more employees, and we get to keep more of those 2.6 billion dollars in the community.
We need to embrace the successes of The STEM Academy at Bartlett and put them into practice at schools all over the system. There’s no excuse to have this internationally-recognized jewel of a school in our city and not use what works there to improve our neighborhood schools.
We need brave and daring local leaders to stand up and speak out. Governments act when constituencies are well-organized and loud. Too many of us have been too quiet for too long. That’s going to mean reaching out across Savannah’s well-fortified silos and working with Savannah’s amazing and dedicated non-profits and activists, having uncomfortable conversations, and working together on the things we can agree on, while accepting that there will always be things we don’t.
Along with those leaders, more of us need to pay closer attention to the decisions made at every level of government and keep our elected leaders accountable to us, their constituents. If we don’t speak up, they’ll listen to those who do. If we don’t pay attention, they’ll never have to answer for their actions.
We need to be better about sharing and celebrating our successes, coming together to learn from our failures, accepting our place in history and coming to peace with it, and then working to make the future brighter for all or our neighbors.

None of these things are impossible. We have a community of creative, committed and energetic people. We have all the human capital we need. We know the tools exist, and we have some local examples of things that work. All we need to do is put them together. I remain, as always, optimistic about the future. Not because I think things will be perfect, because that’s silly. I remain optimistic because I believe in our capacity as human beings, neighbors and friends, to improve and increase our capacities. The greatness of the American Dream is that we accept that our union isn’t perfect and that every day all of us are responsible for making it closer to the more perfect ideal.

“Optimism isn’t principally an analysis of present reality. It’s an ethic. It is not based on denial or rosy thinking. It is a moral posture toward the world we find ourselves in. If everything seems great, there’s no need for optimism. The river of good news just carries you along.” — Josh Marshall

The Nonsense Continues Unabated

2025-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

My nonsensical House rep, Buddy Carter, filed a bill to rename Greenland to "Red, White and Blueland." This isn't the first time Buddy's been ridiculous in public, embarrassing his constituents.

Here's a letter I sent to him this morning.

Dear Mr. Carter,

What are you doing? Greenland doesn't belong to us. It's not ours to rename. Yet, you filed a ridiculous bill to rename it that is being loudly and roundly mocked around the world, bringing yet more embarrassment to the First District.

This is the latest, and the most egregious, in a long line of public embarrassments while you've been our Representative.

I am sorely disappointed in your priorities, where you choose to spend your time while being paid by US, and the constant nonsense that comes out of your office. I know you're excited to see the Executive Branch burn itself down at the hands of an unelected, unvetted, drug-abusing, fascist billionaire, but please, direct that energy where it can do some good.

Sincerely,
Kevin Lawver

A Quick 2024 Retrospective of Good Things

2025-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

2024 was a lot of things, a lot of them not so great. But, there was good stuff too! Here's a quick recap of some good things and favorites from 2024:

Jodi Chromey's multiple posts about how men don't appreciate art created by women (start here) bounced around in my head all year. My intention for 2024 was to read more fiction by women, and it was extremely successful! How successful? Read on!
This year, I discovered the work of Annalee Newitz. My favorite novel that I read this year was The Terraformers. It's an incredible feat of world building that had me so bought in so quickly that by the time the flying moose shows up early on in the book, it made total sense.
I didn't stop there! Other great books by women I read this year:
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
- The Waymakers by Tara Jaye Frank
My favorite album of the year? Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee. I don't often get lyrics stuck in my head, but this album lives in my head.
My favorite song of the year is definitely Learn to Swim by Joshua Idehen. It's gorgeous and gets me in the feels every time.
I played a decent amount of video games this year. My two favorite games this year were Dredge and Astro Bot.
I lost more weight! I lost about 35 pounds this year and for the first time in over fifteen years, I'm under 300 pounds. I feel better than I have in years, and I'm now less than a hundred pounds from my goal weight.
After over five years as a non-manager, I'm a manager again. This happened towards the end of the year, and caps off a year full of stretching and operating at a scope larger than I could have had at a small startup. Gusto continues to be a lot of fun to work at (we're hiring!).
I successfully broke my Instagram and Facebook addiction. This is a list of good things, so I won't share my thoughts on Meta and mainstream social media, but the apps no longer live on my phone and I don't miss them.

I think that's all for now. I'm still trying to figure out what my intentions (aka resolutions) are for 2025, but I think they'll largely be what they were this year: appreciate more art made by women, continue getting healthier, and do more fun stuff.

The Thief in the Public Square

2024-02-27T00:00:00.000Z

Automattic, the owner of both Tumblr and Wordpress, admitted that they're working with AI companies to sell their users' creations to help train AI models. This site has been on WordPress for a long time, and moved WordPress installations between hosts at least twice.

This is so hard to take. So much of the web trusts WordPress with their work, and Tumblr users trusted it with their communities and art.

I've been thinking about how AI using content available on the web, regardless of its license, to train their generative models is different from search engines indexing our content in order to power their search products (and make money by selling ads around those results).

The difference is that search engines are directories, or maps, that take public data and use it to route people back to the source of that data. It's a symbiotic relationship, where the publisher of that content eventually gets a potential reader/viewer/patron/customer pointed their direction based on a query that person put in the search engine. The original source of that content is still the destination.

Generative AI doesn't do that. It gives no credit to their "inspirations" and no creator ever gets a new potential patron. Why? Because the original source is now just a signal that creates a mediocre knock-off based on it, and millions of other works, all created by people.

These companies are thieves in the public square, taking the property that others have created, giving them no credit, no way to make a new fan of their work, and producing knockoffs, polluting the world with... uninspired bullshit.

Can the entire world file a class action copyright lawsuit against these companies? How else do we tell them to make their models opt-in instead of opt-out, and make it possible to remove our content from their bottomless pits of copy pasta.

In other news, I need to migrate my blog off of WordPress, and I really don't want to.

My Favorite Albums of 2023

2023-12-26T00:00:00.000Z

I am apparently not in the musical consumption mainstream. I still love sitting down to a meal of an entire album instead of singles. I keep my playlist of favorites from the year still, but I love albums.

This year, I'm trying to avoid albums by artists I've called out in previous years, so even though they were great, no New Pornographers (but go listen anyway).

This post might grow as I listen to things from the year this week, but here's my list of favorite albums of the year!

In no particular order:

Archimède: Fréres: They're French, sing in French, and write super poppy songs you'll sing along with even if you don't understand a word they're saying.
Nakhane: Bastard Jargon: Nakhane has a voice you can't ignore, gorgeous and magnetic. It'll pull you in, hold you close and then break your heart.
SUSS: SUSS: Like William Tyler, SUSS are writing soundtracks for movies that don't exist, for sweeping desert vistas and alien cowboys. They make perfect music for deep work.
Killer Mike: Michael: This album is deeply personal and has the first hip hop song to ever make me cry.
Film School: Field: This band speaks to my early 2000's indie soul. Fuzzy guitars, catchy tunes, and... just got get lost in it.
The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field: The Beths are new to me this year, and I'm sad it took me this long to discover them. They're cute without being cloying, with amazing harmonies and very clever lyrics. Strong Dean & Britta or The Submarines vibes.
The Rural Alberta Advantage: The Rise & The Fall: I think this band invented Stadium Folk. It's acoustic AND epic and you'll probably love it.

And an honorable mention to Rubblebucket, who I discovered this year, but the album I fell in love with was last year's Earth Worship, especially Geometry.

And another for Skinshape, who released one of the dreamiest songs I've heard in a long time, The Ocean. The whole album is great, but that song is just so old school dreamy soul, I think I listened to it on repeat for at least two days.

I wish you happy listening on this final week of 2023 and a thousand great musical discoveries for 2024!

We are all made of star stuff

2023-12-20T00:00:00.000Z

I don't know if you watched Carl Sagan as a kid, but a friend shared this poem, and I was instantly transported back to watching him tell me I was made of star stuff when I was 6.

We have calcium in our bones,
iron in our veins,
carbon in our souls,
and nitrogen in our brains.

93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames,
we are all just stars
that have people names.

93 Percent Stardust by Nikita Gill

Wrapping up National Blog Post Month

2023-11-30T00:00:00.000Z

Between writing a blog post almost every day and going back to the beginning of this blog and re-reading stuff I wrote over twenty years ago, it's been a bloggy month over here!

I only missed two days. I can live with that. I've blogged more this month than I have in years, and that was the whole goal.

My big learning from this experience is that social media really killed my blogging. If you look at the first few years of posts, I sometimes posted multiple short posts in a day and maybe one longer thing a week.

Now, I never write short posts. They're all longer than a paragraph, and that's what blogging means to me now, which I think is misguided and too inspired by more "professional" blogs. This is my personal space, and I should use it to post whatever inane nonsense is on my mind. It's not a diary, but it is kind of a public journal of what I'm thinking about - a perennial first draft of things that might become something more professional in the future.

I need to give myself permission to post the first draft (sorry in advance), and be OK with it living forever(ish). Because that's what blogging should be - the great empathy engine of the web. It's our thoughts, our selves, out there for anyone to stumble across and get a glimpse of our lived experience. Whether you're me, a cishet white male with serious dad energy, a writer in Minnesota, or a famous sci-fi author in Ohio, your life is worth talking about. Your thoughts are worth sharing.

I probably won't post once a day, but I'm hoping I make blogging a habit again. Fingers crossed!

The expert is calling from inside the house

2023-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

I've played product manager more often this year than I have in years. It's been a fun role to get back into.

It's also been a long time since I played product manager at a larger company. The last two times were tiny startups, and well, it's a very different experience.

With tiny startup product management, I didn't have a lot of internal expertise to rely on, so most of the research was external - I had to find people to talk to, find research, do a lot of research, and figure out how to validate assumptions.

A lot of that is similar in a larger company, but, the expertise is inside the walls at a larger company. I've had great results in all of my recent projects by just asking for folks who have expertise in big public Slack channels and they just appeared!

I think we frequently discount our own, and our peers', expertise when doing discovery and research, especially our peers in customer support roles. I think that's a huge mistake. Who talks to your customer more than the folks in customer support? Nobody. Who knows your product better than the people who have to support it? Pretty much nobody.

I was able to jump start onboarding to new subject areas a whole lot faster by asking our support teams about their processes and doing user interviews, just like I would with a potential customer, and that lead to some really interesting discoveries and avenues to explore.

So, don't take your internal experts for granted! Ask them things! Praise them! Share your results back with them!

Avoiding cynicism

2023-11-28T00:00:00.000Z

I mentioned this last week, but while I've been fixing formatting issues on my old blog posts, I've made the mistake of reading some of them. Getting a glimpse of me 20 years ago has been interesting - he was so angry, usually about work, and talked about it a lot.

That guy was on the verge of burnout every other week, and I think he was actually burned out quite a lot.

I'm not angry about work anymore. I was last really burned out over five years ago.

I think if I'd kept going the way I was headed back then, I'd be a cynical burned out husk. I haven't read beyond the beginning of 2003 yet, but I can't wait to see when the switch flipped (having a "coming attractions" for my own past is pretty weird).

If you asked me right now how I avoid being a cynical husk, I think it comes down to my rules for working:

Never miss a chance to celebrate. We're confronted with failure so often at work, that we should celebrate every little win.
Focus on the who and the how. We don't control what we work on most of the time, and pinning our self-worth to the success or failure of the things we work on is a recipe for sadness. So, I no longer really care what I work on. I care about enjoying the people I work with, and focus on how I work. I can control how I work more than I can any other part of it.
Compete only with yourself. I try not to compare myself to other people. I've got my challenges and other commitments, and I know nothing of theirs. So, I only compete against Past Me™️ - which also helps make sure I'm constantly improving, even if it's just a little bit.

That's not a lot of rules... but they work for me. I might change them...

First day back

2023-11-27T00:00:00.000Z

I was off all last week for Thanksgiving, and I had a very hard time getting back into work mode... which I guess is the sign of a good vacation (even though we didn't go anywhere).

On top of that, I'm prepping for a big allergy test, which means I've been off of all antihistamines for 5 days (and have 16 left to go... sign) and I am really starting to feel it. I've only got a couple days left of National Blog Post Month and I'm not going to stop so close to the end! The posts just might get dumber from here on out.

Football, no, the other one

2023-11-25T00:00:00.000Z

I just searched my old posts for "soccer" and there are a bunch, but none about the Premier League and proper football.

I've been going through the 2,500+ posts on my blog, fixing things broken by moving platforms, and there are so many posts about American football. Jen and I used to Tivo all the games, watch for hours on Sundays and then the recordings throughout the week. We had Sunday Ticket and everything... for probably the first 15 years of our marriage.

And then we just stopped. We realized we were spending way too much time and money following a sport where we couldn't balance out the long term health effects for players with watching it. So, we just stopped cold turkey. That was probably 10 years ago. And then we just kind of stopped paying attention to sports at all.

Until COVID. The Premier League was the first major league to come back, and Peacock not only streamed the games, but all the replays were there. So, I started watching and the spectacle of football played in completely empty stadiums where it was so quiet you could hear the players talking to each other. And I fell in love. The action is nonstop, no five minute commercial breaks every five minutes and the anticipation of misses and build ups - it's just great.

Now I'm back into sports and back into football, it's just the other football. I love that the games are on in the morning on the weekends. I love that I can pick up a replay whenever. I've been trying not to be so attached to it that I have to watch the matches live, but... I did get up and turn on Man City vs. Liverpool at 7 this morning.

It's fun. I even love the video game version. And, I've gotten into the women's game and the WSL thanks to the World Cup and Big Kick Energy (the best sports podcast in the world).

I think I can keep it under control this time. I probably only really watch 2-3 matches a week.