This whole article resonates with my experience, but especially this:

When you’re responsible for everything, you see a bigger picture. You hear directly from users about design decisions you thought were smart. You hear from yourself when a dependency upgrade is difficult because of a web of intertwined dependencies. It’s humbling. But you learn.

I think this is the aspect I enjoy most about full stack development. Providing a whole solution, rather than just a piece of it, is tremendously powerful. It becomes possible to bring all parts of a system into harmony, every component working toward the same goal.

As a technologist and a humanist, I frequently think about many forms of the word able. My aim is to use technology as a tool to enable people to do great things. It makes me sad when I see technology employed to limit someone’s capabilities. (mbnov)

Must… stay… awake… long enough to hit submit… (mbnov)

Somehow it seems fitting that the English word touch, in both verb and noun forms, comes to us from Old French. (mbnov)

This is not Myspace, but it is my space. Thanks for reading. (mbnov)

Summer held on well into autumn for us, to the point that we had bugs venturing into the house as recently as last week. Yesterday, a sharp cold turn brought a dusting of snow and dispensed with the insects. (mbnov)

I do not hold strongly to any particular religion. At the same time, I find it very helpful to be reminded periodically of my connection to the universe. To the best of our knowledge, we are made out of star dust, after all. (mbnov)

I have soured on using cloud services for most things. Photos belong nearby — they should be at home, not some nebulous online place. Same goes for e-mail. I have begun the frightening process of configuring a private mail server. (mbnov)

Catalina No Longer Caches Shared Photos Locally (mjtsai.com)

… it also deleted the ones that had been downloaded by macOS 10.14.

Photos is largely why I won’t “upgrade” to Catalina. My archive is a wreck already from previous migrations and I will lose important memories.

For Halloween the kids and I made gumdrops. The recipe involves chemistry and molten sugar. When the hot liquid cools the treats must be extracted from their mold. Getting them out is hard because they stick so well to the silicone. The trick? Freeze them first. (mbnov)