I have been giving Commafeed a try as my self-hosted RSS service. It’s got a very simple presentation, decent keyboard shortcuts, presents the Fever API to RSS clients like Reeder, and has filtering capabilities (though I am having some challenges understanding their ins and outs).

The main issue I have with it is its somewhat limited set of sharing options, but that actually helped me decide to decommission Wallabag (which is not one of them). I’ve found that pretty slow and not as easy to deal with as Pocket across platforms. I wanted to like it, but it’s hard to justify for a kind of tool I’m glad to have but don’t feel a deep attachment to. So I’m switching back to Pocket, and Commafeed works just fine with that.

Stories for Tiddlywiki

The Stories plugin for Tiddlywiki lets you create a second column and divert tiddlers to it so you can have things side-by-side. I don’t use it much for my personal wiki, but for my work wiki it’s a great way to have my interstitial journal sitting open and ready in one column, and my active tiddler open in another.

This appears to be the closest to a link I can find.

Fujifilm X100VI

I am not made of stone. I preordered one. I took my X100V to San Francisco a few months ago for a work trip and renewed my affection for the series. As with Portland, I much prefer the X100s to a larger ILC for street carry. I did keep thinking, as we walked around Chinatown at night, “man, I wish this thing had IBIS.” I still liked the shots I got, but you’re managing harder tradeoffs. With any luck I didn’t preorder too late to get one before next September, but we’ll see.

I’ve long held that the X100 series could stop iterating once it had weather resistance (solved with the V) and IBIS (solved now with the VI). I suspect a faster lens would make the bulk unacceptable, so I will not hold my breath on that one. I’d like the series to match up batteries with the X-T series, too, but that might be another bulk issue, and I have accrued a collection of the WP-126S batteries between the X100F and X100V, so I’m set. I have a very thin Wasabi charger that’s great for travel. During my SF trip I had all-day walking around juice on the battery in the body and a pair of spares at the bottom of my sling.

I wonder if the X-Pro series ended with the X-Pro3. I liked mine a lot but also felt like the “anti-chimping” display was a little gimmicky, and it didn’t have IBIS. Returning to a normal rear panel of some kind and IBIS would be great, but I’m good with the X-T5 and not so hung up on the rangefinder-esque design that I’d run out and buy an X-Pro4. And if I did, I’d slap my nice 23mm on it and have … an X100 but a little bigger and more conspicuous and a few stops faster. Nope. I think the X100VI has the makings of a desert island camera.

Work

Today was IT steering committee day. I was asked if I thought my crew does more or less than traditional IT. Interesting question. My current place sells SaaS, my last place had a lot of on-prem estate (and a hyper-overbuilt network given the size and nature of the business).

At my last place I presided over the last of a desultory teasing apart of corporate IT and something we called “SRE” for a period before settling on “developer services.” For reasons I will avoid enumerating, we had some struggles with that teasing apart that persisted over four years – I left engineering, did IT, went back to engineering, then went back to IT one more time. Each time I’d chip at the problem from my new perch. It all came down to loosening some death grips in IT, reassuring corporate security that the engineers wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree, and eventually just being a little bit of a prick with the one remaining IT person who felt it right and proper to require security engineering to petition for log dumps so they could audit their own services.

“If you make him give them self-serve access to Splunk, he’ll quit,” warned the manager I had over that team.

“Well, good. He needs to be this tall to ride. If he can’t handle letting people see logs for their own services, this is probably for the best.”

I wrote a memo (the only “Mike uses his directorial ex-cathedra voice” memo I’ve ever written) explaining that everyone needed to be this tall to ride. He couldn’t handle it and quit. Wasn’t tall enough to ride.

Anyhow, I have a lot less complexity to deal with at the current place. There are still some weird “why does this route through IT” issues that pop up, but they’re pretty easily resolved by visiting my security colleagues and asking “did we do this for a reason” (seldom) and then asking engineering “would you like to remove me as an external dependency?” (usually, but sometimes I wonder if they think I’m trying to trick them).

What it amounts to is an interesting inversion of value. When I presented today about the year’s big initiatives it was mostly about portfolio governance, access management, and providing administrative uplift to the vendor management process. We still have to deal with traditional IT admin stuff, but it’s pretty contained. Not nearly as sprawling and perilous as it was at the last place.

Anyhow, “traditional for where” is the real answer. I’m glad to be doing my job in a context and era where the parts that are simple and the parts that are complex have sort of shifted around.

… I really did. I don’t think it’s gonna take.

There’s a lot to like about it, and if your whole thing is “I’m gonna go try this new model of thinking about things,” it’s a fine representative of the smart/connected/non-hierarchical etc. notes market. It is very outline-centric, so org-mode and Workflowy people will feel more at home.

The approach I took to my trial was to just go with its preference for daily journal pages as the starting point. I did do an overlay on that using PARA, more or less.

• Daily pages included a section for meeting notes, a task inbox, and a section I called “facts” that was just meant to be “random snippets of this and that flowing in throughout the day.”
• My project pages included project notes and project-specific tasks.
• My area pages included notes and tasks that I knew were related to a given area when I created them.

Logseq includes a built-in TODO page that gathers all your open tasks, which you really need if you’re dumping todos into daily pages. On a desktop monitor it feels manageable. On a laptop panel, especially one with a 16:9 ratio, it feels overwhelming if you have many open tasks.

I came across a number of strategies for dealing with the problem of “loose tasks flying around in your note volume” including review of the TODO page, custom queries, and the use of a plugin that offers a way to quickly scroll through available tasks and inject the ones you want to tackle today into your journal.

Another plugin provided a way to automatically roll daily journal tasks over with the creation of a new daily page, but it threw me a few curveballs after a day of trying to use it without having to think about it.

Two obvious comparisons to make are org-mode in Emacs and Obsidian.

If you like the thought of a very outline-oriented notes and tasks manager, but wish there was a more robust and purpose-built sync capability than org-mode offers, Logseq offers org-mode syntax and has a paid sync capability that seems to work pretty well. If you don’t care about a mobile use case I don’t know why you’d pay for sync when there are things like Dropbox and Syncthing. But if getting at your stuff on your phone matters and you’re sort of over trying to make Beorg or Plainorg work, Logseq might be interesting.

Obsidian is the real competitor, though, and as I read through forums and subreddits I saw some hair-splitting over which solution was “better” based on features that come out-of-the-box. Logseq does have better built-in task management stuff, but a single, very mature plugin in Obsidian closes that gap and then exceeds Logseq’s out-of-the-box experience, and you’re back to finding plugins to get parity.

I’d be remiss to leave out org-roam (Emacs) and Denote (also Emacs). If your use case is just notes with no tasks, either of these will work pretty well, too. You’re just left with the sync challenge, and neither is suitable for mobile (IMHO … livable, but not great). I said “just notes with no tasks” because org-mode’s agenda, which is generally how you’re going to aggregate todos across a bunch of connected notes, has known scale issues over time as you add more and more files as potential sources of tasks. If you don’t mind adding more custom lisp and a package or two you can overcome that. You’re still left with the mobile problem.

What about one big page?

I thought about that, too, after a little Ed trolling. I’ve done the whole “one big org file” thing in the past, but that was a simpler time.

I did model PARA into a single org file, tweaked a few org-capture templates, and made some conventions to take advantage of the :CATEGORY: property and tags inheritance. That made the agenda a lot more digestible and useful.

The single-file approach also lets Beorg and Plainorg work pretty well.

That isn’t exactly a “connected notes” thing anymore. It’s more like Workflowy, and that’s if you’re doing it in org. I can’t imagine doing it without org-mode’s assistance. Too much going on.

Migration day

I’m sitting on a call with a migration specialist from Jamf, having promised the team that I’d be available to yell or threaten if they requested it. This is our third go at effecting a migration off of self-hosted infra and into their cloud. Fingers crossed Went fine. We’ll be able to decom a load balancer along with several compute and db nodes. We’ve also observed that a few backoffice integrations work much better in their cloud instance, meaning better reporting about the state of our end user compute fleet.

We’re sort of in a change season right now: In the coming half we’ve got a new password manager, a VPN refresh and some bits and bobs to improve our SSO situation. Getting Jamf in the rear-view mirror means a significant amount of headspace opens up for the team and will vastly improve our chances of success on one major initiative I pulled forward by two quarters and have sitting on the dock, awaiting a more reliable endpoint management setup to take advantage of it. Better reporting also means we’ll be able to make good on a major change we made to laptop fleet management that has improved our hardware budgeting situation a lot, but has needed better insight to really sing.

I took this job knowing there’d be a lot of simplification work to get through, and it hasn’t disappointed. There are days I want to pull my hair out – like the first and second times we had to scrub our Jamf migration – but there are also plenty of days when things come together and I clock out knowing we took a step forward.

Most days I also ask myself what’s compelling about all this to me. IT’s generally thankless work. But “run services orgs” is pretty much what I do, even when I’ve led engineering teams who probably didn’t want to think of themselves that way. I think the simplest answer is “you can help a lot of people and make a lot of things better,” including for the people who are also asking themselves why on earth they’re in IT every couple of days.

I also happen to like unknotting Christmas tree lights.

Kill It With Fire

Through this change season, I’ve been noticing and appreciating my Readwise notes from Kill It With Fire, Marianne Bellotti’s excellent book on dealing with legacy systems. I read it thinking it would be more “technical,” but it’s as much about the leadership and cultural challenges of dealing with legacy systems. Right up there with Camille Fourier’s The Manager’s Path.