SIGAVDI #47 – Pear Pizza Edition

Hello friends,

It’s been a couple of weeks. Since last Tuesday I’ve been in St. Louis. Jessica and I paired on some Docker & Kubernetes stuff. It was highly educational.

And we went to the symphony.

And the art museum.

But mostly we ate really good food.

Some of it highbrow.

Some of it less so.

That is an authentic St. Louis “slinger“, a $6.50 pile of sloppy late-night goodness.


A mistake I have made over and over again: thinking of life in terms of forks in the road. Big choices on which everything hinges.

The truth is, there are few choices in life that can’t be a “yes, and…” with some creativity. And most choices can be amended.

Just move. Direction is always adjustable.


I’m thinking of starting a Patreon (just do it, Avdi! Direction is always adjustable!). I’m trying to figure out what rewards to offer subscribers. Thoughts? It can’t be anything that adds a significant amount of work to my weeks.

I should print stickers. Everybody likes stickers, right?


I find myself badly wanting to sit down and code lately. It’s been so long since that was a central part of my day. This urge was one of the motivations for soliciting new consulting clients. Ironically, one of my first gigs may be more about video production than coding (more on that soon, hopefully).

A lot of it is just that I miss the relative simplicity of making shit work instead of deciding what shit needs to be done.

I’m also thinking of doing a talk on communicating technical ideas. I spend a lot of my time these days coaching other people on how to do that.


I’m really struggling with my goals this week. There are a lot of possibilities. Let’s talk about the last two weeks first.

  • ✔ Stream/record some kind of collab with Janelle Klein. Done. It’s probably not going to see the light of day, but it set us up for future recordings.

  • ✔ Finalize my new working arrangement with Cohere. Done. Not in the way that I had anticipated, but I made a decision for the time being and it’s time to move forward with other plans for now.

  • ✔ Get to a tentative agreement on a consulting gig. Done! This was a stretch goal but it happened 🙂

  • ✔ Nail down April travel plans. Done. I’m spending more time traveling than home this month. This is fine.

  • ❌Clean up the weight room and do some lifting. Nope. But! I ran and lifted here in St. Louis!

  • ✔ Sundry RubyTapas and Rubber Duck meetings and related work.

  • ✔ Attend a new meetup Done! Well, sort of. My original plans fell through (who schedules a meetup for 6PM?!) but I made it back to the Knoxville Devops meetup.

  • ✔ Attend some part of Big Ears Festival. YES! Janelle and I caught Max Jaffe doing interesting drum things, and later attended the poetry slam finals which were fantastic.


What am I doing this week?

  • Play Super Smash Brothers with the children who are presently interrupting the writing of this email.

  • Create a landing page for Flawless Ruby

  • Edit video on building chatbots in Ruby

  • Launch my Patreon because why the hell not

  • Migrate off of Drip for mailing list hosting because they are a total garbage fire since their acquisition.

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