I had already written last week’s newsletter but had not sent it when we set out for our first (and only) ride of the week, where we had to rescue a turtle who was making their way across a street in the park. We saw several cars and bikes almost hit it, so we stopped to pick up and place on the other side of the road.
The turtle rescue would represent our last ride of the week. By Tuesday, it was too hot for the doggo (and me) to be be out rolling around. We've end up spending most of the week indoors. The first couple days Poppy is always super depressed and demanding "bike", but eventually she gets used to the new routine. Our evening walks were often short, but we discovered a new path home that involves cooling off.
Like many of the people I work with in the API space, I am in between jobs, while also trying to make sense of what is happening with artificial intelligence. I've begun a new project with my friend and former co-worker Sue Smith to talk regularly, while also trying to write our way though this moment, as we both struggle to understand and succeed in the technology, business, and politics of our desperately online world.
One of the topics Sue and talk about was the importance of being able to reverse engineer websites and applications, and specifically what we have historically learned with the "view source" option when you right click in a browser. This is something we are losing with the continued obfuscation and black boxing of everything with artificial intelligence. I wrote about my thoughts on view source being dead, and then Sue shared her thoughts about what comes after view source.
Continuing to work through some of the topics we covered I also dove into how people can orient themselves in a system you didn't build. Something that is commonplace for anyone working in technology, and something that is the perpetual state of my work as I work to understand the APIs around us. Internet technology is well established, but building something new is rarely the job in front of us, and making sense of the systems that we depend on each day to survive in our work is becoming the critical skill you will need to not drown in the AI slop consuming all of us.
I've been extremely grateful to be able to get back to my own projects, and spent most of the week working on open source tools for my API Commons domain. It is a domain I begin work on back in 2014 to produce open source schema to license APIs, but have begun organizing a bunch of open-source tools I've been envisioning for years when it comes to API governance. I am not sure where all of this work will go, but the concept of operating a common area where artifacts and tools can live has long been part of my dream for my work, and it feels good to finally have some bandwidth to focus on work within this domain.
Tall ships paraded up the Hudson River on the Fourth of July. We briefly considered going out to line the banks and watch, but then Audrey discovered we could just look at them out our side windows of our apartment and stay inside with the cool AC. I love sailboats. I really would love to have one, but I think it is just a dream. It is rewarding enough to just watch other people's hard work, and save my money and time for other endeavors, enjoying parades like we saw this week, and roaming the harbors and docks of the cities around the world I visit.
As I write this I am packing for a trip to Munich Germany. I will be speaking at APIDays in Munich about consumer API governance, while also MC'ing a track, and participating in a panel discussion. I've been enjoying evolving my talk from APIDays NYC to APIDays Amsterdam, and now for Munich. I've been giving the same talk, but iterating each round with what I learn from talking to folks and actually applying what I am talking about. It really feels like I am getting back to my roots where I am doing a lot of research and storytelling online, but then reinforcing it with in-person talks and conversation--repeating until I make sense of what is happenining in this moment.
I finally finished the 3rd book in the Poppy War series by R.F. Kuang -- The Burning God. I slow rolled this book because I really, really, really didn't want it to end. Now itt has. What a great trilogy. So thankful for being able to lose myself in that world for most of this year. I absolutely love Rin the main character. Reading the series has been such a grounding force as I work in the Claude mines this year, and I am thankful for fiction to be able to keep my from spending all my time online. This series will stick with me for a long long time. What a beautiful, yet very painful world of storytelling magic.
Our weekly journey each Sunday to the Farmer's Market on the Upper West Side has become the highlight of our week. The walk up there. The sitting on the bench alongside the Natural History Museum, waiting for the market to open. The market. And the walk home along the West Side Parkway. It is all magic. It makes you so thankful to live in NYC. Even with the heat and humidity, it is therapy to be lost in the moment. Here I am scoring the week's pig ears and chicken feet for my gurl.
I cleaned the house yesterday. One of my deep cleans where I get on my hands and knees and wash the floors with a hand towel. Clean the kitchen and bathrooms. It is always very therapeutical for me to do it. It is a lot of work, but it helps me clean out the cobwebs in my brain. I always feel like there is a relationship between the clutter in my mind and the clutter in the space around me. Having a clean space to sleep, eat, and live in, helps me face the world with all the anxiety, depression, and insecurities that come with existence. Thankful to have a home. To have a space to live this life with my little family.
"Clutter is not just the stuff on your floor – it's anything that stands between you and the life you want to be living." — Peter Walsh
