Hello! I have so much to catch up with you about. The time has flown.

Reading (and watching)

As you might have surmised from the radio silence, less to share than usual on this, but I am finishing up what is almost certainly going to be my favorite book of the year, Ducks, Newburyport. It's an experimental novel in the same vein as Infinite Jest or Ulysses, but don't let that descriptor scare you off if you are the kind of person who is scared by the emotional baggage of either of those books. This is a harder read in some respects and a much more thrilling read in others, and it is one of the books where you instantly understand exactly what a writer is trying to do.

Beyond that, I really loved: Diner, Working, They Came Together (more for nostalgic reasons than anything), North by Northwest, Pantheon (Season 1), The Studio, and the second season of The Rehearsal. (Still need to watch Andor S2 once Haley and I can carve out a few evenings together, and I've heard great things about Black Doves.)

Writing

Traditionally, when I do this I share all the stuff I've written in the past month. Well, it's been four months, so in lieu of that I'll share my two favorites: What Gives and Fatherhood.

Buttondown

You know, whenever I sit down to write one of these monthly roundup posts, the first thing I do is open a tab with every single blog post that I've published since the last monthly roundup, and it's funny to see HQ1 be one of the first tabs. Moving into this office feels like a lifetime ago, and in fairness, it has been three months—which, as we will get to later, is the new unit of lifetime. It's been a really busy quarter—mostly good busy, some bad busy. I think this is the thinnest I've ever felt between interesting product decisions, tough existential questions about strategy and growth, scaling up the team, and building out new processes because we've outgrown the old ones—or lack thereof—trying to keep more and more of a rapidly expanding organism in my head. It can be stressful on stressful days, but my median state is that of gratitude that I get to spend eight hours every day working really hard on interesting problems for people who I care about, and then I get to go home.

Some stuff in particular that I'm proud of shipping: the Playground, the CLI, the Firewall. but I don't need to ask for your forgiveness for the solipsism since I think you're used to it by now I'm proud of being able to work on the organization and the process more than the product itself. One of the things that was always tricky for me being In Management was the disconnect that I felt between my empathy and concern for my employees and my general anhedonia to the supersystem in which we all resided. Agency feels good; it is much easier and exciting to care about meta-work when I know we're the ones reaping the rewards.

Lucy

Lucy just turned eight months old. She's not quite crawling but doing everything short of it; she's not quite talking but has no difficulty in making her feelings known on any matter in which we beseech her opinion. We're in a pretty good schedule right now, though "pretty good schedule" is always relative when it comes to a kid. We roughly know how much she wants to sleep during the day, when she's going to go to bed, and when she's going to wake up. We also know who her favorite dog is (Telly), which is her favorite toy (Hobbes), and what her favorite brand of Greek yogurt is (Ellenos). The rest is a glorious act of continuous discovery — she is in many ways a Morrowind character, going to bed every night and then waking up the next morning with increased stats and two new skills.

The overwhelming joy of getting to spend time with her is so visceral that it makes writing about it feel anodyne and therefore impossible. Here is what I mean: my favorite part of every day is bringing her with me to the garden to water the crops and herbs. Each morning is a bit of a gacha: she will either find delight in the arc of the water from the watering can, or the novelty of a particularly long sprig of parsley, or the shadow-dappling of the soil next to the tomato plants in the Richmond sun. I am writing this paragraph, and trust me that it is not a bit when I say the mere act of writing this paragraph is forcing me to immediately leave the office early to go find her and have her honk/laugh at me.

Telly

Meanwhile, Telly's role as older brother continues to evolve. He is not exactly thrilled with the situation. He understands, and he is fiercely protective of his sister. But he's also still a little bit of a shit when he feels like it. My current negotiating tactic with him is what Haley has deemed "Boy's Club time": every evening at 7 p.m. when she takes Lucy up to get ready for bed, he and I live like kings and bachelors: which is to say, we go for a walk, play fetch for 10 minutes, and then he immediately passes out while I drink half of a Pabst and fall asleep watching the playoffs.

Haley

The first year of parenthood is filled with many surprises and revelations; one of the best of these is discovering hitherto unearthed virtues — ways in which your partner is even greater, kinder, warmer, and stronger than you had imagined. There have been a lot of these.

The first meal we ever had together in our house — that house, a lovely and terrible ramshackle craftsman in Green Lake — was an 18-inch pizza, freezer Manhattans and a bag Caesar salad, The Caine Mutiny and a sense of utmost arrival and contentment. Some of that has changed: movie nights are rarer for us now (evenings are a bit of a math problem); she's graduated from Manhattans to Gimlets 1 ^[1]. But we still get the same pizza we got five years ago (Belmont in lieu of Zeek's), and new rituals lattice themselves onto old ones rather than replace them outright. (To give a concrete example: Lucy really loves pizza crust.)

Here's what living with Haley is like, though: a few weeks ago, I was biking back from the office, carrying with me the baggage of a long day filled with too many calls and not enough coffee. I pulled into the backyard (laden with turf rather than what we generously referred to as "sod" in the Seattle house) and discovered Haley and the kids out there waiting for me, playing fetch (Telly) and spatula (Lucy). And in that brief instant, I could not quite remember where I was except home, nor how old I was except married — and the near-painful desire to live in that feeling of arrival forever was matched only by the joy in knowing that I can.

Miscellany

• My friend Myles has joined the team at Third South! Myles is great; you should reach out to him (he'll be delighted.)
• If you're reading this and I owe you an email: I'm getting to it, I promise.
• Almost done with my first side project in what feels like many years.
• Purchased a TrimUI Brick. This genre of device has gotten really good over the past half-decade, even if this is really an aspirational purchase at this point.

I hope you are well. If you don't hear from me for a while, it is because I am taking my family on a lovely walk because it is a nice day out.