Updated 2025-03-17
Vancouver is lighting up. Winter is gone and spring is creeping in with its colors and general uplift in spirits. We arrived just in time for the cherry blossoms and even though it looks like we could still catch a late day in the mountain to try snowboarding one last time, we're feeling like the times are ripe for moving on. Carnival is gone, the year is now starting for real.
We saw our parents, grandparents, siblings and nephews in Brazil. It's always so great and so painful - such is the current music of our lives. It's a moving tune but we're now longing for a rythm slowdown before the crescendo of making the most of Vancouver's summer. I ended up not having time nor energy to seek out old friendships to pay a vist, in part because I was working most days of the trip, in part because I was working on a weird timezone offset, the biggest part straighforwardly was a lack of preparation. Maybe next time, I like to think.
Updated 2025-06-06
Recently read The Burnout Society (4/10) and Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (9/10). Currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Crowd Source and Dom Casmurro. Next I'll have Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Recently watched Schitt's Creek and Schitt's Creek (8/10). Now watching Schitt's Creek and The Handmaid's Tale Season 6. Up next we have Novelette is Trying.
For music, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish remain dominating the rotation after their awesome concerts, but entering the mix is The Weekend.
Updated 2025-03-17
This is more of a wishlist of things I'd like to be doing right now than a real reflection of what I'm actually doing, but it all starts with an aspiration. Writing these down also helps me to reflect: if these are the important things to me, what's stopping me from working on them?
The grander a life's purpose is imagined, the wider a chasm is created between its idealism and the everyday experience - the endless flurry of maintenance tasks that embodies a life of responsibilities. How to reconcile the mundaneness of the present with the ambition of the future?
A solution for this conundrum is to embrace it as a contradiction, to overcommit to that ideal as to make it, by definition, impossible. In vowing to summit the insurmoutable, there's nothing else to do but to throw one feet in front of the the other, attentive to the rocks in the way while keeping sight of the top of the world.
To help me on this jorney, I'm working on composing a song and building a metronome.
I'm still working at AWS, with manageable levels of stress and off-hours work. The biggest challenge has been the same in the past years: aligning work that is interesting and fun with work that brings impact and recognition. This got a bit harder since I've started viying for a promotion to a Senior position, but at the end of the day I still prioritize doing cool stuff and doing it well even if a lot of it will end up invisible and delaying my career advancement. It's an uncomfortable situation at times, but it's the best compromise I've found in which I can taste the privilege of enjoying my craft while still accepting the condition of having to do whatever the organization decides. At the end of the day, it's an acceptable middle ground of having some cake and eating it too. The one unresolved aspect is working for Amazon, and this seems to be getting worse considering 2025's USA politics developments, but I trick myself into not thinking about it too much - at least it's not Meta or Xitter, and I'm not working on anything ethically dubious, it's mostly deep in the weeds fault tolerance and availability improvements. Still, the corrosion of character is real and I know I'm rationalizing my dealings with a devil of the golden handcuffs.
I'm increasingly letting go of centralized social media, but I still want to be in touch with loved ones and like-minded people, so I migrated my online presence to the respective federated alternatives: (Xitter to Mastodon, Instagram to Pixelfed, Goodreads to NeoDB). Being realistic though, I know that the vast majority of the people in my life will not follow me there, so I'm also looking into broadcasting my activity in more ways than federation.
I've owned my domain and this website since 2019, but it never really took off because social media has been a much easier path to interact with people. This transition cost has decreased recently, so I'm ready to renew these efforts. This website is going to be the basis for the RSS feed and possibly a newsletter, so I'm back to shaping it up. This page is a big part of that.
In January 2025 I was able to get my Mastodon, Pixelfed and NeoDB activity merged into a single RSS feed (used to generate the updates on my home page). This was much easier than I thought and renewed my belief in the power of these open platforms.
Next steps: 1) Consolidate my writing on this project's notes about the fediverse and RSS 2) Investigate how to deliver newsletters with a curated selection of my updates; 3) Automate a new type of activity: additions or changes to my written material - like this page;
To read more: my journey towards an independent web.