Public diary — entry 1

This was a pretty crazy week! It was my second week on The Watch (our version of an on-call rotation) and we had some really big launches to help coordinate. Luckily we have an amazing team and everything went smoother than expected. An uneventful launch is a good launch. I’m really excited to get back into my normal product work as The Watch can be pretty draining for me.

Work stuff

My favorite thing that happened this week happened yesterday (Friday) when we released version 2.14 of the app. We had fixed a bug that would drop words from your post at the time of publish. I wrote up a detailed explanation of why this was happening, and people really seemed to like it!

Best of all the user who originally reported the bug responded and wrote an adorable open letter to me which completely made my day ☺️

This is what gets me into the office everyday and is why I push for what our users want so much. At the end of the day, if our users aren’t happy, we aren’t doing our job. There’s no point in building new features for unhappy or nonexistent users!

Personal stuff

On the more personal side, this week was pretty typical. Monday was chorus rehearsal which was better than usual because the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony joined us. They’ll be playing with us at our concert next week, and they sound so good. I was really blown away with the quality of their players, and it made me really want to be a part of their group. I was also infinitely jealous of the clarinet player for getting a beautiful solo in I am Harvey Milk.

Wednesday I always go to the local karaoke place, The Mint, with my boyfriend Greg and a few of our friends.

All those people in the photo were just random people there. They were pretty enamored with Greg and his singing voice, which is something I can relate to 😉. It was really cute to see everyone crowded around listening to him and cheering him on.

The group of people who come every Wednesday night has started to grow, and singing with them is always a highlight of my week. This week we did an impromptu Adele night where everyone had to sing something by Adele. I sang Hometown Glory, one of my absolute favorites, and a song I haven’t done in a little while.

Thursday Greg left for Philly, so I spent the night by myself playing video games (obviously). Recently I’ve become fascinated with retro games that I never played as a kid. In particular the amazing RPGs that were released for the SNES that I just skipped over because I was too young to play them at the time — and by the time I was old enough, we had the newer consoles like the N64 and Playstation 1. I’m about 10 hours into Chrono Trigger and I now know why it is considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time. It’s a stand out RPG that has withstood the test of time. If you haven’t played it before, and you’re a fan of RPGs, you should drop everything you’re playing now and play that instead. It really is that good.

To play these games, I use Provenance, an incredibly well done open-source project that lets you emulate retro game consoles on the new Apple TV. This combined with the Nimbus SteelSeries controller provides the best emulator experience I’ve found thus far. Being able to select a game like you would an app on the TV reduces any friction that comes with emulating on a computer. I never have to think about hooking up cables or controllers since everything is already set up for me. I like this project so much that I’ve submitted a few pull requests to improve things I’ve noticed could be better. It’s been fun working in an open source code base, and on an app designed for the new Apple TV. I’m just hoping the owner of the repo responds to those PRs soon.

My favorite reads

Here’s what I read this week that truly stood out.

This piece by Hillary Clinton was so good at explaining how horrible Trump and the other Republication candidates stance on abortion is, as well as providing her take on the issue. My favorite quote:

Donald Trump keeps showing us who he is. We should believe him.

A really well done story about spending money as a new startup. I loved that they used illustrations from the classic Frog and Toad children’s books.

I had no idea what the Revolv was until reading this story, but now I’m glad I didn’t buy one. The author brings up some really interesting points about where technology is going, and how the longevity of a products has completely changed. Makes you think twice about what you’ve bought recently and if a company could just turn off its service entirely.

This reminds me of those “I tried to buy products only made in the USA and completely failed” kind of stories. I had no idea how many entities were under the Sony umbrella.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day :)