§ 01  ·  NOW · MAY 12, 2026

A field note,
not a feed.

A few paragraphs on where my head is this season — the whybehind the work. For the live, daily version — commits, listening, what's shipping — see the dashboard.

The note.

§ 02

The month splits down the middle: code in the daylight, the garage after supper.

At work the big one is replacing a thirty-year-old QC station — the kind of project where the hardest part isn't the WPF or the gauge integrations, it's convincing everyone the new thing won't also be in production for thirty years. Alongside it, I've been building a tool-use layer for Hermes-Agent: letting the agent call out to a small, well-defined set of tools — file search, calendar, shop sensors — without losing the plot.

After dark it moves to the bench. The BLV AM8 got a fine-tune pass — input shaping dialed, running a 0.16mm benchy against the K1, mostly an excuse to stand in the garage at 10pm. And there's an ESP32 with mmWave radar going in so the shop lights know when I'm actually out there. Half the fun is the false-positive log.

Reading & learning.

§ 03
READING

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Re-read, twice a year, every year.

WATCHING

Talks from LocalLLaMA meetups

Mostly to figure out what I'm doing wrong with my router.

LEARNING

Rust, again, for real this time

For a small daemon I don't want to babysit.

Not working on.

§ 04

Anything that pulls me away from supper. Twenty years in, I've learned to protect the evenings and trust morning Ben to figure out the hard parts.

UPDATED MAY 12, 2026 · AMERICA/CHICAGO