I’ve been learning about web development using svelte. It’s cool wrapping my head around this stuff finally. It’s been nice having the experience of learning new debugger tools and whatnot; it’s always a combination of frustration and sudden moments of enlightenment.

I spent the last week on vacation from work. I’ve been growing a decent sized piece of infrastructure at my day job for years now, and a small piece at home that I use to learn lessons and tease myself that I can go independent some day. I spent the week cleaning up old ansible and making it all uniform, really investing in justfile tasks to drive entire workflows from one tool, building out my vibe-coded small business idea, that sort of stuff.

Seeing how much better it feels to have nothing in between the workflows I want to activate and my mind, that I understand every codebase really well right now, it’s such a freeing lack of friction. I improved all my build times down from 2 1/2 minutes-ish to under 30 seconds, and it feels amazing knowing I get all my feedback that rapidly.

I dunno, it feels like lessons to bring over to dayjob. I always miss the feeling of my personal projects when I’m at work; I move so much more fluidly in this environment, with better tools. The degree of friction getting decisions made at work is aggravating at times: I have to work with teams that are backlogged enough that it can be weeks before a job is unblocked.

I should maybe try and design our workflows to insulate us a bit more, but it feels like the wrong solution. The right solution is always going to be to tackle friction head-on, but god damn is it tiring.