Newsletter anniversaries are for living fully

Well, that’s a round number. It’s hard to grok doing something four hundred weeks in a row (though of course there’s much we do automatically for far longer than that—eating, cleaning, sleeping, and so on). I hope you get somewhere close to as much out of reading this as I do out of writing it.

This was another weekend, like that of issue #300, spent nicely “living the principles” set out in issue #100: yesterday included reading, workshop time,¹ catching up with friends and family alike, and installing a piece “on-site” (aka finally finishing and installing doors for one of the garden bed covers I built… a year ago); today had more friendship time, plus Moo Shu and getting my hands dirty by fixing a flat on my bike.

(Also, if I read issue #300 correctly, yesterday marks 100 weeks of woodworking for me—neat! I will properly reflect on that another time. But having done woodworking yesterday and very light bike mechanic-ing today, I can say I much prefer the woodworking 😂)

It’s a treat to find and share interesting things with you each week—thank you for reading, whether for one issue or… four hundred!?

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• I really enjoyed this post from Martha exploring humility from a number of different angles, from how it shows up in leaders (and should affect organizational decisions more!) to how it shapes us personally. Plus a through line about Martha’s dad that has it all hang together nicely.
• Simon Willison quoted a piece on DuckDB’s importance to making geospatial analysis accessible, and referenced some other discussion about it. The thesis of the article fits me to a T. DuckDB made GIS so much easier for me—e.g., adding some information to a point when it falls within a particular geometry, it’s a natural SQL operation that DuckDB’s spatial extension makes so accessible. (And, hard to emphasize just how incredible it is to have zero dependency fiddling while doing geo work. Amazing!)
• A good reminder from Annie Mueller on how much people can change in ten years.
• Speaking of doing mechanical things this weekend, I enjoyed Simon Collison’s brief post about fixing an espresso machine—the merits of being methodical. (I caught myself in a moment of impatience while putting my tire back on today, cooled my head, thought it through, and worked the problem out. If only I could always catch myself in those moments!)
• Simon’s also been journalling about his time at CAMP, an arts residency in the French Pyrenees. Been very neat to follow along.
• There was an election this week! (Or, really, 343 elections. But we’ll round to one.) So much appreciation to all the poll workers and other staff who work tirelessly to enable people across this vast, varied country to vote. This story of voting in Canada’s North welled up a lot of good feelings in me.

I know it’s in the footer, and up in today’s intro—but, again, thank you for following along here. It means a lot. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas