A recent tasks-n-notes tool spinout felt like the liminal moment between deep sleep and awakening to some disturbance. That sense before you’re fully conscious that there is something going on, but your consciousness hasn’t engaged with it yet. It’s just a weird externality in whatever dream you’re having. It was gnawing at me by the time all was said and done.

There are times when I feel okay with all the screwing around and futzing, but things have been hectic recently and I was spending my discretionary time fucking around with tools. I’m not gonna go into the why of it, but once the week had wrapped I had some clarity.

However, one thing I was doing, or at least outcome that was happening was that as I was slowly waking up to the fact that I was deferring a serious conversation with myself, I was reminded that I used to do really well when I journaled. I’ve taken several approaches to that over the years:

• Essay-length writeups about what’s going on in my head
• Quick little notes during the day about whatever passed through my field of view
• Letters to myself at the beginning and end of the day
• A “what’s going well/what’s not going well/what’s the big task for today?” morning exercise

All are fine. All work better or worse depending on what’s going on with me.

But the idea I came across was what everyone seems to be calling “interstitial logging,” which is really just … logging?

(8:00a) Looking at the calendar. It’s going to be busy.
(9:00a) ITENG standup. Someone needs to look at the Meraki/Envoy thing
(9:33a) Caught a ping about the Zoom renewal. Need to find the MSA from last time.

Some people like to toss todos in. Other people seem to just have a little diary.

I picked it up partially because I remembered that diaries help me focus and clarify what matters, and partially because I was so busy trying to figure out where to put all the stuff that I had to do that I was afraid I’d miss something if I didn’t write down everything in the simplest form possible.

Brief digression about how I’d like to behave for a bit

I’m consciously not going into how or where I decided to keep my log. Just the process of figuring that out was slightly agonized and wasteful. It’s enough to say it was sort of a grand tour of everything I’ve played around with in the last … 10 or 13 years? To write down little time-stamped notes? The meta got pretty vertiginous by the time I was done.

I did end up making myself pick something though, and it is sufficient to this narrative to say “it is just fine for writing down little time-stamped notes.” More than fine, because you could do that with any number of things, some backed by extensive cloud resources, some operating in a container on a Synology, some running on a way over-provisioned desktop machine, some, like … 3x5 cards or a giveaway vendor swag notebook or a legal pad. I picked something in between “an expensive subscription SaaS” and “the blank side of a piece of cardboard I tore off a soda can case.”

I want this to be the last time for at least a while that I comment on the tools I am using for keeping myself in order. For a few reasons:

1. After watching enough videos from people who desperately want to be tools influencers I am saturated and tired of the entire frivolous scene. Nobody should take tools advice from people whose job it is to write about tools. I say this as a former tech journalist who wrote an ungodly number of articles about tools whose efficacy I could attest to because look at how prolific I was writing about tools.
2. As with a few other creative endeavors I share, I could begin to feel the distorting effects of getting attention for the stuff I was writing about and resenting the effect it was having on me. Like, it was super cool to get a few links from an Emacs eminence, and it blew up website traffic, and I was reminded that I don’t do well with that kind of feedback.
3. There are other things that are more important to me than documenting how I tortured an AI into writing some lisp for me.

I write all this down as a sort of accountability exercise with the ever-shifting procession of faces coming in and out of focus that I think of as “whoever’s going to read this.” I am not sure who that will be because I ripped all the analytics out of my site. For at least a while, I don’t want to know.

So back to what I was saying:

I started keeping my “interstitial log.”

At first there was a little ocean boiling: How do I account for tasks? Do I use this tool or that tool? Which markup format?

I made myself knock all that off and landed on “just make a date heading, then make timestamped entries and write something when it occurs.”

Even then, for a bit the entries were about writing entries. Throat clearing. Like a dog circling its bed 20 times before it finally lies down.

But things began to improve. The entries were what they were meant to be. I got rid of an overoptimization I allowed to creep in (elaborate todo stuff) in favor of making a little annotation either for a thing I wanted to come back to and rethink later, or manually transfer to my task inbox.

The equilibrium I’ve come to is more or less “keep an outline of the day, annotate for followup/recapture, allow the outline to take shape, make sure to sweep it all up to end the day, because you’re starting a new log tomorrow and don’t want to forget anything.”

Looking at a stretch of logs, I feel a lot of affection for them. They’re easy to scan. I can see all the stuff that happened. At the end of the day, because I have made it easy on myself, I can collect everything up that needs to be sorted and take a moment to do that with care, teeing up the next day.

I would like to stick with it for a while for the same reason I buy my underwear, socks, and t-shirts from three single sources, and have in the last few years bought multiples of other things that work for me but are subject to the vagaries of global supply chains and profit-squeezing sourcing fuckery: If it works, just go with that and remove another thing from the list of things you think about.

The tool isn’t why you work.

The process isn’t why you work.

The outcome is why you work.

I made “my journaling practice” the focus of some attention this week. I started out with org-journal, but ran into an issue with it I couldn’t untangle regarding line wrapping. I couldn’t understand what was even going on until I read that it uses its own org-derived major mode, which at least explained why it suddenly started working when I invoked org-mode by hand on a journal buffer, at the expense of god knows what functionality.

In the end, I decided “whatever.”

I was happy with my daily journal pages in Obsidian, which fully existed in my Zettelkasten. So I decided to set org-journal aside – I wasn’t planning on using many of its features anyhow – and focus instead on making org-roam dailies capture templates to suit my needs. At this point it just means I have a couple of quick keystroke paths to capture my morning and evening prompts in the current day’s daily page, which also gets used mostly just as a running log.

Being able to say “whatever” and set aside a bottomless round of troubleshooting is how I’ve committed to using Emacs this time around. Doom continues to mostly “just work” and has proven stable and manageable. At the same time, I’m being less adventurous. If something doesn’t seem right and doesn’t yield to a few common-sense experiments, I prefer to bounce off the issue and figure out what will “just work.”

I will say that the sqlite dependency at the bottom of org-roam makes me uneasy. It is odd for me to err in favor of something like that vs. trying a little harder to make another solution with fewer outside dependencies work. It’s just a taste thing that’s been developing more and more over the past few years.

And the whole thing isn’t peculiar to Emacs. It’s any extensible tool. Like, Yoda said the only thing in the Evil Force Tree is what you take with you, so don’t take a teetering edifice of other peoples’ poorly understood code in there.

Job hunting and writing

I realized in the process of preparing answers to 18(!) interview questions that I was doing more intense thinking and writing about why I show up at work and how I like to be at work than I have in a long while. I have done a few “what’s your personal operator manual” exercises, but not in a way that felt as high stakes as “I want really want this particular job.”

I’ve also been doing more writing about work lately, as part of the job-hunting strategy. I haven’t been comfortable with the mode I’ve been using to do that writing. It is a little too ponderous, a little too just-so. And informal analysis tells me LinkedIn does something with those reading time statistics it collects that also cause that form to work against me.

If you are mystified and gob-smacked by the flatly bizarre content that flows across your feed there, wondering “who on earth reads this?” the answer is what it always is with algorithms The Tech People cook up to solve engagement problems: They don’t have a meaningful way, yet, to assess the content, but they are committed to a project of “surfacing” the “best” content. So they assess the formal characteristics of the content that succeeds so they can seed the feedback loop. I’ve done this. I’d be galled with myself for forgetting it if I hadn’t remembered quickly enough.

So I’m going to experiment with a shift in writing approach, and use it as a practical application of Zettelkasten:

The practical writing I’ve been doing to prepare for interviews has engaged me on a different level. Stories play into it because even when the interview style is very conceptual I still steer my answers into the behavioral, giving interviewers something they didn’t even realize they wanted sometimes. So I have to think about what I’ve done, not just how I think things should be.

But an insight from my coach after a disappointing round of interviews has been ringing in my ears, too:

“Mike, they don’t want to hear your stories until they trust you enough to let you in a little more.”

So the change is just: I have a bunch of very concise writing I’ve done to prepare. It has touched on a bunch of stuff I care about and have done: change management, communications, people management, operational excellence, conflict management, and goal-setting. It starts small – a concrete question – grows into something bigger, because I’m inclined to story-telling – then settles back into something I can get across in a few minutes. It’s all so atomic that it wants to be turned into nodes, ready for slight rehydration as part of a different kind of writing I want to get better at, even once I’m done looking for work.

I’m interested to try it, because my writing comes from a certain tradition: Get it all out, pare it back, let something back in, take something else back out, back and forth until you’re asking for just the right amount of attention – nothing less than the lede promised, nothing more than the lede can bear. It’s like sculpting a big hunk of rock. This approach will be more like … Jenga? Starting from a compact, economical place and making sure no more is added than it can bear to accomplish something a little more ambitious than “capture the thought,” but still modest, and still balanced.

Anyhow, today is a little busy, so I’m wrapping early. I’m really looking forward to next week: It’ll be hectic on Monday and Tuesday, then Al and I are taking the Outfitter to Nehalem Bay for its spring shakedown: A few days of beach-walking, hanging out in Manzanita, and movies on the iPad.

I’m fairly sure the omg.lol community is mostly people who are comfortable seeing what this button does. Those folks probably also know what Markdown is, have come across the Markdown-with-front-matter pattern, and have probably dropped a few commas or left a few brackets unclosed in a config file in their day.

But there are also people who may have sat blogging out during its heyday, or blogged but stuck to platforms like WordPress or Blogger, or who just want some documentation to work with before jumping in.

This guide is written more for the latter audience.

I like the approach Adam has taken with weblog.lol.

If you wanted to stick to the core offering you could do that and have a simple, functional blog. Authoring is simple, and it’s cool that it does some stuff implicitly (e.g. setting a post title using the first Markdown h1).

At the same time, he’s written an API that’s amenable to making tools for it and there’s a git-based workflow if you prefer to work that way. I’ve seen some very nice blogs from people who know their way around CSS.

Personally, I enjoyed the writing exercise. My favorite writing during my time on LinuxToday, LinuxPlanet, and Practically Networked all involved writing howtos and little tutorials, and my biggest contribution to the Puppet docs was a getting started guide on Hiera. It took months to learn enough Puppet to learn enough Hiera to explain it credibly, and it was all fun.

I enjoy learning how something works then writing that down with an eye to helping other people along, and it turns out that’s a useful skill to have for everything from telling people what that button does when you click it to explaining and directing an organizational design change for a 200-person R&D organization.

Today I’m starting a contract gig writing some technical documentation for omg.lol’s weblog service. It seemed like a fun idea when I came up with it, so I sent the site’s founder, Adam, a quick note with a simple proposal. He liked the idea, too, so here we are.

At the moment I’m busy looking for work doing what I’m best suited to do, which is operations or chief of staff work somewhere in the software industry. Looking for work always triggers some reflection. This most recent period of time off and now spinning the job search back up has been no different.

I’m coming off ten years at a company that defined an entire technology paradigm. It was a period of amazing growth and opportunity: I walked in the door as a technical writer, and left as its senior director of technology operations. The experience broadened my horizons and changed how I see myself. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

One thing I lost track of a little, though, was my sense of technology as something that is fun, interesting, and empowering for every day people. Yes, at Puppet we were making software for everyday people who just so needed to manage infrastructure at scale.

As a director of IT and engineering services, though, I was thinking about the needs of a 500-person business full of everyday people trying to get their work done. My thoughts about technology took a turn for the very practical, very enterprise-y. I still took my responsibility to make technology accessible and useful seriously, but fun didn’t really enter into it the way it once had.

I was feeling that turn when I came across omg.lol a while back: I’d made a very practical personal site that I didn’t much like dealing with and hadn’t updated much. I had a personal blog that I liked a little better but didn’t like to play with because the feedback loops with that service were slow. Then all hell broke loose on Twitter, a lot of people I knew started making the move to Mastodon, and an online friend mentioned he had a new Mastodon account via omg.lol, which stood up its own instance for its users.

If you haven’t seen it yet, omg.lol is an interesting little collection of services you’ve seen other places:

There’s that Mastodon instance, a pastebin service, a URL shortener, a personal landing/links page, a DNS tool, and a weblog service that Adam put together over the course of December in the form of a series of blog posts dressed up as an Advent calendar. All the services come with a usable web UI, but Adam’s also built an accessible API for all of it that you can access from automation as simple as an Apple Shortcut or a Drafts action.

The whole thing reminds me in spirit of ’90s-era dialup shell accounts you could get on the early Internet if you were interested in things like Usenet, Gopher, MUDs, or Telnet BBSs you read about in a book like The Whole Internet.

You could use services like these in other places, but there is a certain fun positivity in the way Adam goes about running his service. There’s an IRC server (with a Discord bridge) if you’re interested in hanging out with him and other tinkerers, and there’s a spirit of spontaneous, exuberant creativity to the way Adam works. A number of people using the social.lol Mastodon instance have commented it’s one of the more positive Local feeds going.

I know once I had my account set up and was following along with the initial weblog.lol documentation dripping out over the month of December, I started feeling like playing more than I have in a while. I hacked together an Apple Shortcut to use the URL shortener, then made a little Sinatra-based development tool to make it easier to do page design for the blogging service.

When January rolled around and I started digging in harder on my job search, it was fun to turn back to playing around with omg.lol stuff once I was done submitting applications or checking the network for leads.

So when I saw Adam mentioning that he felt behind on his documentation, I thought “I could help with that, and probably learn more about something I’m having a lot of fun playing with.” I wrote him, offered to pick up a contract to document the weblog service, and we had a great conversation about what that could look like.

This morning I watched his getting-started video and started building an outline. It felt good to think about a kind of writing I haven’t done in a while, and the ways technical writing can interact with and inform design.

At this point we’ve got plans for a set of documentation that’s reasonably scoped and meaningful, starting with a quick start guide to go with his video then moving on to an “operator’s manual” for templating and configuration, then “API docs” for people who just want a reference and all the legal values.

So this project is sitting alongside teaching myself Swift and assorted photography-related things while the job search goes on. It felt good to grind through the job hunt stuff today knowing I had this to look forward to, and I’m really looking forward to sharing good docs with the rest of the omg.lol community in the coming weeks.