/reader

And let’s be honest, we could blame the tardiness of this post on a lot of issues: the rise of fascist authoritarianism in America, busy home life, busy career, nights at the ball field… But we all know the real reason this post is months overdue: Balatro.

Internal-source work project launched

I devoted a lot of my Q1 life force to getting an internal work project out the door. It’s an internal design system that’s a sibling of the open source design system I work on but has more components, smaller API surface, a different look, more expressive and robust token system, and it’s less kilobytes.

Our team has a lot to be proud of and built something great but I’m learning that it’s not always a straightforward process in large companies. We’re addressing feedback and iterating to make it better while more requirements trickle in. It’ll jeremy-beremy around a bit until we get the five moons to align.

Cheer competitions

Spring is competitive cheer seasons. My daughter finished her second year of competitive cheer competitions. Not without drama. In late February her team competed at the NCA Cheerleading Competition and won the national championship for her D2 Mini Level 2 division. A minute after hearing the news there was an active shooter situation which was traumatizing even though it turned out to be two groups of parents fighting at a hotel. Wholly unnecessary. Everyone’s safe, but it’s having ripple effects through our family unit and friends’ families as well.

Since that event we’ve decided to go to competitions as a family. We went to one in Houston (technically, Rosenberg) which we parlayed into a trip to see my mom. The cheer season culminated in the Regional Finals competition in New Orleans, Louisiana (see below).

Installed grass and irrigation

Back-to-back heat death summers, our front lawn has been a barren disaster. In the summer the city limits days you can water, I’m inconsistent at watering, grass got too hot, curled up and died. And I don’t love spending my Wednesday and Saturday mornings and evenings moving sprinklers around, getting bit by mosquitos, and realizing I left hoses on in the middle of the night (see: ADHD). I even own a special flat shovel that I use to scrape mud back into our yard after it rains.

One of our lawn guys approached us with a plan to add irrigation and re-sod the front yard for an affordable price so we jumped on it. But did it work? It sure did. I’m happy to report we’re no longer the dirt bags in the neighborhood… for now. At least five neighbors have mentioned our yard (and former dirt patch) to me.

Spring break in Arizona

While most families head to the beach, we went to the desert. Arizona offers us one amenity not available in coastal regions: cousins! For five packed days our kids went wild playing with their cousins. To be honest, being off-duty as a parent with kids fully entertained and redundant parent figures (grandparents, aunts, and uncles) is the most relaxing and restorative break for me.

While we spent most of our time with family, we managed to sneak out and see a pre-season baseball game which was nice. The slow pace of life at the ballpark is a worthy aspiration to strive for.

The Sherwood Forest Renaissance Faire

Our friends the Kentopps invited us to join them at the Renaissance Faire. They have two boys and have gone for the past couple years and our weekends aligned where we could say “Aye,” to ye olde adventure.

There’s something magical about the Renaissance Faire, and I’m not talking strictly about all the cleavage and robed wizard cosplayers. It’s a fully immersive environment on acres of land. People in costume speaking with faux-Arthurian high fantasy accents as far as the eye can see. Shops of all different sizes and caliber selling different handmade and laser-cut wares. The illusion achieves a critical mass, and offers you a gift to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the group improvisation.

I did find it ironic that I’m the biggest nerd in my family, I play DnD, but I don’t have a RenFaire costume. After much discussion I think I realized that I’m not that kind of dork. I’m a different kind of dork.

New Orleans

At the beginning of April my daughter had her Regional Finals cheer competition in New Orleans. We stayed off-French Quarter near the convention center but we dipped in and out as needed. There were a three major highlights of this trip for me:

1. My daughter’s team finishing their season undefeated
2. The Honey Island Swamp Tour
3. Spending lots of time in City Park

We had a great guide on our swamp tour which made it that much more enjoyable. We saw lots of small swamp critters, tons of birds, and the big finale was two 12-foot female gators up close to our boat. Good memories for sure.

We ended up at City Park two or three times over our three day trip. The sculpture garden was phenomenal. There’s an amusement park there too. And can’t forget the Café Du Monde (of course) where you can coat your entire body in powdered sugar for your beignets. I’m sure there’s more to the story of City Park, but I love when cities invest in enormous public spaces. It’s a great contrast and relief to the more intense (and drunk) economic zones.

For Texans (and all Americans?), New Orleans is the closest city you can go that feels like another country. It has a different bustle, a different energy, different food, and that was fun to show the kids.

Bought another car

One Wednesday night my wife said “I think we need to buy a new car.” Part pressure due to family visiting us with no way to haul everyone around, part tariff-induced panic; buying a car became a top family priority. A quick search showed a nearby dealership had the right color (the most important feature of a car) and trim (the one with the black grill and wheels) that my wife wanted.

While this seems impulsive (and believe me, yes, correct) this is how our family operates. We talk about something for years, bucket money, never act, and then full send it on a whim.

At 5pm, she left me with the kids to go scope it out and about an hour later she called and told me to come to the dealership because we were ready to sign papers. Car financing is something that makes me want to pay cash for every car. 6pm turned into 7pm and so on… but by 10pm we were leaving with a brand new car.

Turning 45

I aged again this year. Did you know aging isn’t linear? This is something I learned this year. You age a lot around 44 and then again at 60. Interesting huh? I think I’ve been feeling that this past year. Aches are achier, all that.

I generally feel young, youth-spirited, but on the morning of my 45th I started to see 50 on the horizon and for the first time in my life I think I started to feel old. As I was thinking that my neighbor Cleo texted me to say happy birthday and congratulated me that I was now half her age. That was great timing. A reminder that there’s still a lot of life yet to live. That said, Cleo is super-fit and can still probably outrun me in a foot race, so who knows. You’re not guaranteed much on this earth.

One year at Microsoft

I also celebrated one full year at Microsoft. As I said above I’ve gotten to work on some cool projects; not one but two design systems, a robust design token system, a couple prototypes, and a lot of documentation. I’ve learned a lot and made some good work comrades.

A sour note to this celebration is that last week Microsoft had a 3% reduction in force (which is about 6,000) people. I know enough about enterprise to know this happens periodically but it never seems fair, only callous. I’m a post-processor so I’m sure I’ll be sitting with this for awhile.

Quick Stats

🧠 Learning

I love when I get to take a weekend for myself (read: I’m on parenting duty and the kids are on iPads) to learn something new.

• Godot - I took a weekend and Hello World’d Godot game engine. I have video game ideas kicking around but with Unity being the game engine I know, I felt like I was experiencing skill collapse because that company has made some horrific decisions. There’s a lot to like about Godot. GDScript feels like a cross between Python and JavaScript so it’s easy to pick up. It’s simplified in a way that you’re not forced to think about Quaternions right way, that’s there but more or less abstracted out. Feels like a good fit for a casual like myself.

📖 Reading

Not my best season of book consumption but that’s countered by the fact that 1) I chopped my RSS down from 3000 to 1200 unreads and 2) I read some great, high quality books.

• The Siren’s Call - Probably the best book I’ve consumed in awhile. Digs into the heart of the Attention Economy and how our attention is valuable, monetized, and exploited.
• The Twilight of the Elites - Another banger. A look at the 1% and how perverse and outsized the oligarchy’s role is in our politics. Meritocracy is not based on merit, but rather wealth.
• System Collapse - The last book in the Murderbot franchise.
• Careless People - Holy shit Facebook is a terrible and willfully ignorant company.
• Poverty, by America - A great look at the wealthiest country in the world’s biggest problem.
• Abundance - Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are mad about… [checks notes] … California housing and want to celebrate … [checks notes] … Operation Warp Speed … ? Ezra Klein wants to (and can be as far as I care) a pillar in the Democratic party and influence the platform… I found the book and ideas to be pretty impotent.
• Meditations for Mortals - Listening to this as an audiobook at 2x is not how the author intended but I still enjoyed it. I’ll probably buy a paper copy and do the daily reflections.
• Who is Government? - Anecdotes about ordinary people (and numbers) who avoid the limelight and toil behind the scenes to make government work.

📺 Media

Feeling blessed to have some good shows right now and making time for them.

Shows

• Win or Lose (Disney+) - Pixar’s “Pulp Fiction” style story characters in and around a youth softball team. Close to perfect as you can be for an animated series.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Gquuuuuux (Amazon Prime) - A new take on the Gundam franchise by the people who made Evangelion.
• Welcome to Wrexham S4 (Hulu) - Up the town. Excited for the new season.
• Murderbot - 50% how I pictured it, 50% not how I pictured it, and 50% even better than I pictured it
• White Lotus S1 - My wife and I had some kid-free nights where we could watch grownup shows, so we’re three episodes in.
• Love on the Spectrum - Autistic folks finding love. It’s a sweet show with so much emotional honesty. There’s a lot of making out, but it’s been great to watch the non-make-out parts with the kids and try to field their questions best I can on what makes autistic people unique. One young woman, Pari, on the show summed it up nicely, “It’s like having a different operating system.” I love that.

YouTubes

• Ari@Home (YouTube) - a guy in NYC who walks around with an entire mobile music production rig on his back.
• Ska Tune Network (YouTube) - a one man ska band that does incredible cover songs.

🤖 Gunpla

Picked Gunpla back up after a hiatus. No where near peak Gunpla, but it’s enjoyable when I get hop back in.

• Nobell Gundam - The “Sailor Moon Gundam” featuring class RX-78-2 design but with a tighter waist, longer legs, high heels, long blonde hair, and a school girl uniform.
• RX-78-2 Gundam Revival - A remake of the original 1979 Gundam plastic model kit. It has the same boxy proportions and limited mobility as the original, but modernized on the inside.
• Duel Blitz Gundam - A mobile suit that has another set armor it can wear

👾 Gaming

I rebuilt my gaming PC so I could hop on games with my friends more. Been fun.

• Balatro - Way too much. Still having fun tho. Best way to kill 10 minutes.
• Warzone - Back in Verdansk with the boys.
• Overwatch - New stadium mode is okay. Anything different is welcome.
• Lots of mini web games: 368 chickens, Dragonsweeper, etc.

Thus ends the retelling of the vibes.

Hearing rave reviews about Obsidian from friends (who are certainly not a cult, I’m told), I’ve tried to switch twice before. I spent entire weekends setting up a trial vault but never felt compelled enough to switch fully. But today –after a slow month-long process– I’m happy to report I’ve ditched Notion and am using Obsidian now. So… what changed?

My problems with Notion

In March, Notion notified me that my monthly cost is increasing from $8/mo to $12/mo (a +50% increase). On top of that, Notion has been pushing AI hard the last couple years culminating in sparkle emojis everywhere and an ever-present animated floating mascot in the corner¹. I poked around at the AI features, used my free credits, but came to the conclusion that AI inside Notion is almost the antithesis of what I want in Notion. I use Notion as a thinking tool, I don’t need it to be a think-for-me tool.

The emphasis on AI and the price hike forced me to scrutinize and re-think my commitment. Correct or not, I associated the two chafing points and felt like I was subsidizing other user’s AI usage rather than getting more value out of the app. That was the tipping point for me. I don’t harbor any hatred or disgust for Notion; it’s truly a “we’re growing in two different directions” sort of divorce.

Economically, Obsidian takes me in the opposite direction at $4/mo for Obsidian’s vault sync feature. It also takes me into a more bare bones, hands-on setup experience. That real farm-to-table organic content that forms the bedrock of my personal brand. 😂

My new Obsidian setup

I’ve watched hours of videos about the perfect Obsidian setup but what truly unlocked it for me was Tyler Sticka’s post Obsidian Miscellany. Seeing Tyler’s setup and the plugins he uses to craft Obsidian’s brutalist nature into something cozy gave me the courage to try a third time. Obsidian has a great plugin system and an active community of developers, where the WordPress-style “There’s a plugin for that” rings true (and probably has similar performance pitfalls). Getting a handful of plugins configured to your liking moves the user experience needle from “Something I use” to “This is mine”.

Copying most of Tyler’s list, here’s the list of plugins I’m using:

• Advanced Tables - Make markdown tables draggable
• Auto Card Link - Add unfurl-style link preview cards
• Dataview - A query language that allows you to build up list or table views using an SQL-like syntax
• File Explorer Note Count - Show file counts in the sidebar
• File Explorer++ - Allows you to pin and hide items or folders (e.g. I’m hiding templates)
• Hider - Hide parts of the UI you don’t need/like
• Highlightr - Allows you to add highlighter effects to notes.
• Iconize - Add icons to files and folders
• Importer - Import items from other note-taking apps
• Linter - Keep files tidy
• Longform - A Scrivener-like tool for managing long form content (e.g. my shitty sci-fi stories)
• Minimal Theme - A Notion-like theme, but more minimal. Highly customizable.
• Minimal Theme Settings - A UI to manage your Minimal Theme
• Numerals - A micro-spreadsheet that lets you do calculations
• Projects - A folder-o-files powered kanban board
• Style Settings - Override Obsidian styles
• Tag Wrangler - Normalize, dedupe, and merge tags
• Write Good - A linter to help correct weasel words and remove passive voice, a poor man’s Grammarly

These breakdown into three major categories of plugins: themes, editor, and process… which is a great segue to talk about the organization and processes I have for my new vault.

Inputs, Outputs, and Tasks

For years I’ve been attempting to do PARA in Notion, but I never found it a perfect match. “Projects have an end date” was revelatory and “Areas” helped me take inventory of my life, but pulling it all together and putting everything in the correct bucket felt like high ceremony. Moving to Obsidian gave me a chance to rethink how I wanted to organize my second brain.

By default, Obsidian nudges you towards no organization, which is to say it wants you to tag and link content to build wiki-like associations in a flat’ish file structure. This doesn’t work for my brain at all. I need a bit of structure to my content. I spent a long time researching different organization systems from the loose (Zettelkasten) to the strict (Johnny Decimal) and I settled on a modification of August Bradley’s Pipelines, Pillars and Vaults that I call “Inputs, Outputs, and Tasks.”

Inputs are scraps of content and ideas that influence your thinking that you want to keep to reference later. I collect these “Inputs” in small files organized in folders by content types like books, links, quotes, and unorganized notes.

Outputs are a big part of why I use a note-taking app; to get ideas out of my head. Whereas Inputs are inert and fine to live in cold storage indefinitely, Outputs want to live in the world and need a little process behind them to maintain momentum. I’ve recruited the help of some kanban and writing plugins to add a thin layer of process to my blog posts and projects.

Tasks are the final leg of the stool and a tool for jumping back into finishing projects or other work. The one key thing about Tasks is that they’re actionable and achievable. Tasks can’t be big abstract to-dos like “Do taxes” or “Make a video game”, they have to be actionable like “Get 1099-R from SEP IRA” or “Prototype fog-of-war system.” Descriptive enough to be actionable, atomic enough to be achievable.

Thankfully, I don’t need a separate Tasks plugin to manage this, I can use the [ ] Task Name syntax in my project note and then use Dataview to slurp up a list of Tasks that I’ve created across all my active projects.

```dataview
TASK
FROM "Outputs"
WHERE !completed 
AND file.frontmatter.status != "DEADPOOL" 
AND file.frontmatter.status != "Archived"
GROUP BY file.name
```

You’d need to customize your WHERE clause to how you have your Obsidian setup, but that query generates a view like this where I group all to-dos by project or note.

Adding process to Outputs

To manage my outputs I have three plug-ins that help add a layer of process to help get the work out the door.

Projects

One of my favorite and most used features of my Notion was my Blogging Kanban. This was the heart of my content generation flywheel; keeping track of all these scraps of ideas in different states. Blogging and side projects that have a somewhat linear flow and it’s great to visualize a post or project nearing a checkpoint or a published state.

Of all the kanban plugins I tried, Projects felt like the best fit. I know I’m violating open source protocol by heaping requests on free software, but I wish the querying and filtering was a bit more advanced. There’s a lot to be desired on achieving parity with Notion’s rich Kanban and Table system, but it looks like dynamic tables is on the Obsidian roadmap, so I’m fine using the nerfed versions for now.

Longform

I have six or so shitty sci-fi stories burrowing a hole in my brain as well as an entire failed book pitch on prototypes. To help add structure to this process, I’ve employed a plugin called Longform. It allows me to break stories up into scenes or chapters, rearrange them, and then stitch that all together into a manuscript for review.

Write Good

Write Good is a poor man’s Grammarly. Unfettered, I tend to default to passive voice or use weasel words as sentence filler. For example, In the previous sentence I tried to use the word “employ” instead of “use”, like I’m the damn King of England. Write Good nudges me towards simpler phrasing and an active voice. Passive voice is natural for me and I don’t hate that part about me, but there are people (grammar nazis) who do care, so why not remove that stumbling block? Over time I’ve come to prefer an enforced writing style and think the active voice tightens up most sentences.

Write Good also helps filter out technical writing no-nos like the word “Just”. That itself is worth the price of entry. I can break the rules any time, but requires me turning off the part of my brain that obeys linters.

I’ve actually been using Write Good for years but as part of a secondary pre-publish process as a VS Code plugin. With Obsidian I’ve been able to “shift left” that part of the process to the writing phase. Keeps me honest on how much work is actually left.

What I don’t like about Obsidian

After a month of solid use, I only have one major gripe: the finickiness of the editor.

The swapping between reading mode and editing mode feels erratic and jumpy in a way that Notion never did. I use a lot of CMD + E to manually swap between reading and editing, but it either remembers too well or not well enough on how I want to view different files. I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy here because I think the core problem is that rich text editing is weird.

One other aspect I think Obsidian could improve is creating a component library or style guide for plugins. Not all plugins generate side panel UI, but for those that do… it’s a zoo. I think a little effort here and design systems work for plugins could create a cohesive look and feel.

The mobile app is fast

One of Notion’s biggest well-known issues is poor app performance. I don’t spent my entire days worrying about this because I tend to be on desktop and once it’s opened, it’s opened. But after firing up Obsidian’s mobile app, you can’t unsee the difference.

Obsidian’s mobile app is fast. Downright instant. And it somehow dodges the finickiness of the macOS app I complained about above. I know it’s not the flagship product, but the mobile app feels like a first-party experience and not an afterthought. It’s useful and has the right performance profile for jotting little notes on the go.

It’s also impressive that all my JavaScript-based plugins are working inside the native mobile app. I assumed most plugins wouldn’t work inside the WebView environment². This made for a situation where I had low expectations but was pleasantly surprised.

Nothing beats a folder full of markdown files

Obsidian reinforces a lesson I’ve learned from my last decade and a half of blogging; nothing beats a folder full of markdown files. A note-taking app doesn’t have to be complex machinery. A little bit of YAML frontmatter can go a long way.

This migration identified one subtle problem I didn’t know I had; I “over-databased” in Notion. I created entire sections in Notion with a database to get the editable table UI. This creates a lot of click-thru flows, excess documents, and feels like building an entire CMS for a one-page website. Obsidian nudges me to think more simple.

Your productivity app and my productivity app will look different

It took a solid month to migrate my thousands of documents to Notion. I declared bankruptcy on my Web Clipper links, but settled on a better system with a link aggregator. I think what learned through this process and giant deep-dive into productivity tools is that productivity is personal. Your dream setup and my dream setup will look different.

We have different brains that understand the world differently. Some people are Type A controlling, some are Type B hot-messes, and some of us are chill Type O. We have different goals for our note-taking apps; some might be pure archivists, some might be on a hustle grind, and some might need to organize their DnD sessions.

I come back to an old quote I’ve mentioned a handful of times before from Kevin Kelley, founder of the Whole Earth Review…

A tool is an opportunity with a handle.

Grab hold of good tools that give you good opportunities.