Add weeknote for May 2-8, 2026

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

content/now.md

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ title: Eric in the Present
 [locallygrown]: /posts/locallygrown-origin-story/
 [randomrecipe]: https://www.youtube.com/@RandomRecipeProject
 
-This page is all about what I am doing *now*. It was last updated on April 21, 2026, and will be edited as things change.
+This page is all about what I am doing *now*. It was last updated on May 2, 2026, and will be edited as things change.
 
 ## Where I am now
 
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ We [lost Charlie](/posts/2023-07-24-goodbye,-charlie/) but our two remaining cat
 
 ## What I am doing now
 
-I'm a Staff Software Engineer at [Natera](https://www.natera.com), working on lab management software for their histology labs. We just completed a successful production deployment in San Carlos — real scientists, real equipment, real samples. Now I'm building out observability tooling, monitoring dashboards, and support runbooks for when the inevitable fires come. The travel schedule over the next couple months is intense: trips to San Carlos and Austin as we roll out across labs.
+I'm a Staff Software Engineer at [Natera](https://www.natera.com), working on lab management software for their histology labs. We just launched our new platform in the San Carlos lab — a real, live, twenty-four-hour-coverage cutover that landed boring, which is the best possible outcome a software launch can have. Now I'm deep in Datadog, expanding observability based on what real production users actually do, and gearing up for the Austin lab rollout next. The longer game: pushing into the broader oncology workflow as we replace the legacy system one lab and one workflow at a time.
 
 [LocallyGrown.net][locallygrown] has settled into a rhythm of steady improvements after the massive six-month migration from Rails 3 to SvelteKit. The infrastructure work is behind us; now it's about new features, better tools for market managers, and growing the platform that serves 70+ farmers markets.
 
@@ -55,13 +55,14 @@ After months of silence, I'm writing regularly again. The words are flowing.
 
 ### Upcoming Events
 
-- **Natera Austin trip** — First visit to Austin happening this week, with more San Carlos and Austin trips to follow.
+- **Man or Astro-man? at the 40 Watt** — Headlining the first day of a local-label music festival next weekend. My all-time favorite live band, and a rare treat these days.
 - **Vivian's graduation** — Georgia State University, closing in fast.
-- **Georgia Renaissance Festival** — Spring season starts soon.
+- **More Natera travel** — Austin lab rollout next, with more trips to San Carlos and Austin ahead.
+- **Georgia Renaissance Festival** — Spring season in full swing.
 
 ## Where my head is
 
-The San Carlos deployment went flawlessly. I met my team in person for the first time, watched real scientists use the software we built together, and ate better than I have in years. The travel ahead is intense but I'm looking forward to it — Austin is shaping up as my home away from home. Life is good.
+We launched. After two months of high stakes and adversarial gatekeepers, our team threw a switch and the new platform went live. It was beautifully boring — quality-of-life issues to patch, not fires to fight. I shared a 3 a.m. overnight shift with our Director and got to slip away on a quiet Monday to make my own pilgrimage to Apple Park. The launch validated everything still to come, and I can see clearly how to grow into the role I want from here. Life is good.
 
 ---
 

content/posts/2026-04-25-weeknotes.md

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: "Weeknotes: April 18–24, 2026"
+date: 2026-04-25T10:00:00-04:00
+draft: false
+description: The calm before the storm — a week of writing documentation for adversarial gatekeepers ahead of a high-stakes launch, sixty deviled eggs from Juniper, and Korean fried fusion experiments in the kitchen.
+tags:
+  - weeknotes
+  - work
+  - cooking
+  - family
+---
+
+*Taking a breather and trying to relax — next week will be either triumphant or a world of hurt, and exhausting either way.*
+
+This was the calm before the storm. Except before we could even get to the storm, we had to make it through a gauntlet of gatekeepers.
+
+We've built a whole new software platform to replace a production system that is firmly entrenched, FDA-certified, and critically important to a billion-dollar company. No shortage of people needed to personally sign off on our launch, some of them quite adversarial and not without reason. Those approvals kept coming in right up to the hours before our target date. Our team's managers fought those battles, but they needed documentation tailored to each gatekeeper, and producing that documentation is what I spent most of my week doing. As of right now, we are still go for launch.
+
+---
+
+### Read
+
+About a third of the way through *Starter Villain*. The setup is nearly complete and it just keeps getting more charmingly ridiculous as it goes. I'm looking forward to seeing what Scalzi does with it.
+
+### Played
+
+Not much. I opened Starfield for the first time in ages to poke at all the features and content Bethesda has shipped since I last played, but I didn't have time to really dig in.
+
+### Cooked
+
+Juniper's swim team had their year-end banquet, and she made sixty deviled eggs entirely by herself. After some quality assurance "sampling," she still had nearly four dozen to bring.
+
+I made a batch of Korean fried chicken and had extra batter, which led to some experiments. Korean fried deviled eggs? Fantastic. Korean fried neeps and tatties? Fusion fritters made in heaven. I now have to resist the urge to dunk everything in my refrigerator into that tempura-and-potato-starch batter and drop it into hot oil.
+
+### Thinking About
+
+Next week. Overnight support shifts, takeout eaten alone instead of big team meals, high-visibility successes or failures with equally high stakes. I've been in this position before, but never quite at this scale.
+
+### What's Next
+
+For the flight to San Francisco and back I got a window seat. I'll be curled up against the bulkhead, which means I won't be constantly jostled and grabbed at by aisle walkers — and I'll get to see the sights.
+
+If the launch goes well, I'll be writing next week's weeknotes from a place of relief. If it doesn't, I'll be writing them from a place of triage. Either way, I'll be writing them.

content/posts/2026-05-02-weeknotes.md

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
+---
+title: "Weeknotes: April 25–May 1, 2026"
+date: 2026-05-02T10:00:00-04:00
+draft: false
+description: A boring launch is the best kind of launch — the San Carlos platform went live with quality-of-life issues instead of fires, a 3 a.m. shift with the Director, and a pilgrimage to Apple Park to honor the kid with the cassette tapes.
+tags:
+  - weeknotes
+  - work
+  - travel
+---
+
+*Relief. Quiet pride. A team that pulled off something genuinely hard, and a launch boring enough to celebrate.*
+
+We launched. And it was, mercifully, kind of boring.
+
+Trust me when I say boring is the best possible outcome a software launch can have. We got the final go-ahead about half an hour before our planned cutoff. When the time came we threw a switch, and that was that. The new platform is live in the San Carlos lab.
+
+There were issues, of course, but they were all quality-of-life things. This thing could be logged better. This metric could give us more insight. This print feature could be worded more clearly. That action is going to happen more often here at the beginning, so we should streamline it. Every one of them was a chance to practice our hot-fix process and get a patch out quickly, not a fire we had to fight. Work never stopped. Nobody panicked.
+
+We provided twenty-four-hour in-person coverage in the lab, working in eight-hour shifts and taking turns on the overnight slot. My shift was as uneventful as the rest, and I got to share it with our Director, my boss's boss, the person between us and the company executives. Being in the trenches at three in the morning with the person who most directly controls this next stage of my career (besides me, of course) was a gift. You can't buy that kind of context.
+
+It was a long week and a tiring one, but also a cause for celebration. We were in just one lab, in just one workflow, but the team pioneered a whole new way of writing and deploying software inside a massive company. The vast majority of this work happened before I ever arrived. I've been here two months. The launch validated a whole pipeline of work still to come and put real pressure on a status quo that protects billions of dollars of business. I'm riding on my team's coattails, no question. I also know I applied every bit of my skills and experience to the work that needed doing in these last couple of months to help get us across the finish line. It's exciting and a little scary, and it cements that I made the right decision coming here.
+
+---
+
+### Read
+
+So much Datadog documentation. I had basic metrics hooked up already, but seeing with my own eyes what real production users were doing gave me all sorts of ideas for improving observability. A month ago Datadog was brand new to me. I'm still not a Double-D expert, but I'm getting there as quickly as I can.
+
+I read more of *Starter Villain* on the plane, but honestly it was hard to focus on fiction this week. I'm about halfway through and still loving it.
+
+### Played
+
+We got in a great Gloomhaven session before I flew out. There's a lot of upcoming travel for folks in my group, so it may be a month or more before we get back to it.
+
+### Cooked
+
+No time for cooking, but we did have one great group meal the night before launch. Dry ramen, which I'd never had before. The noodles and toppings are served separately from the broth, and you dunk each individual bite into the broth as you eat it. Making it through the meal was a laborious process and absolutely worth every minute.
+
+### Noticed
+
+Monday was a slow workday. Most of my team was still traveling during the day ahead of the evening's launch. They didn't have as far to come as I did, so I'd flown up on Sunday. On top of that, the building holding our lab had a planned power outage for most of the day, so we weren't allowed to work there even if we'd wanted to.
+
+I decided to go see the place responsible for my love of computers: Apple, Inc. headquarters. I was in San Carlos and Apple is in Cupertino, about twenty miles south down the peninsula. Despite a sore and swollen knee from being curled up against the bulkhead for five hours the day before, I made my way from the hotel to the commuter rail to a bus to the Apple Park Visitor Center.
+
+I was eager to see The Ring, the beautiful circular building that was Steve Jobs's final project, with my own eyes. And in that I was disappointed, but in a very interesting way. The visitor center is directly across the street and there's a rooftop observation deck, but even from up there you can barely catch a few little glimpses of glass and steel through the treetops. The campus is essentially surrounded by forest and clever landscape grading, so that even as I later walked a couple of miles around the building — at times less than a hundred feet from it — I could never actually see it. I'd never seen that aspect of the campus described before, and it turns out to be my favorite form of architecture: modern efficiency, sleek design, and wild nature all intertwined.
+
+Back at the visitor center they had a scale model of the campus showing all the buildings, above ground and below, paired with an impressive AR app running on iPads you could borrow from the information desk. You could expand the engineering layer by layer and see all the thoughtful work that went into it. I got lunch at the cafe and pulled out my laptop at a table while an enthusiastic man gave a class at the next table over on how to make art on an iPad. I picked up a t-shirt featuring the old six-color logo, only available there at the visitor center.
+
+Around 1982, the school where my dad worked had a single Apple ][+ computer, and he was allowed to bring it home when school was out for the summer. I was in sixth grade in a poor rural area, and that computer was my gateway to the world. There was no internet, of course, but my mom found disk swaps, I bought magazines, I recorded software onto cassettes in the middle of the night off AM radio. Over time the ][+ became a ][e and then the portable ][c. When my family went on road trips to visit relatives, I'd bring the little computer and a small CRT monitor along and spend the long hours typing in code from the pages of magazines. It's no exaggeration to say those years with those early computers put me on the path I've turned into a career. I've never had a computer class in my life, but I know how to figure out what I need to do to make a computer do what I want, and it all goes back to those days.
+
+Standing on that observation deck looking out at trees, knowing the building was hiding right behind them, felt like exactly the right way to honor where I started. The kid with the cassette tapes and the magazine listings didn't grow up to work for Apple, but he did grow up to be the kind of person who appreciates a building that knows how to get out of the forest's way.
+
+### Thinking About
+
+The launch was an unqualified success, but it's no time to rest on our laurels. Our team has to keep pushing, first to the other lab in Austin, and then into the next parts of the overall workflow. For me personally, I need to press on and assert myself into the even bigger picture. I want to be the principal software engineer overseeing the growing oncology side of the business, and I can clearly see how to get there from here.
+
+### What's Next
+
+Man or Astro-man? is playing at the 40 Watt next weekend, headlining the first day of a music festival celebrating one of our long-time local record labels. They're my all-time favorite band to see live and I cannot wait. It's a rare treat to catch them these days.
+
+After a week of three a.m. shifts and laboratory fluorescents, an Athens club show feels like the perfect way to come back down to earth.

content/posts/2026-05-09-weeknotes/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+title: "Weeknotes: May 2–8, 2026"
+date: 2026-05-09T10:00:00-04:00
+draft: false
+description: Coming down from launch week, automating the release process, and a near-midnight Man or Astro-man? show that may have rewired my kid's brain.
+tags:
+  - weeknotes
+  - work
+  - music
+  - family
+---
+
+*A quiet week of recovery and vigilance after launch, with two bright spots: medieval cosplay at a craft fair and a midnight show that I think genuinely rewired my kid's brain.*
+
+Launch week is over, and this week was mostly about coming down from it. The round-the-clock in-person shifts ended once we got back off-site, but we're still rotating through 24-hour support, answering user questions, investigating anything that looks odd, and generally staying close to the system while it settles in. We've got PagerDuty wired up to notify us of problems and wake us up overnight if it comes to that. So far it hasn't come to that. The issues keep being minor and keep originating outside our own code, in things like single sign-on and the machinery of talking to printers.
+
+The work I've actually been sinking my teeth into is the release process. I want to automate it end to end. Releasing software should be boring, whether it's a scheduled version bump or an emergency hotfix, and the way you get there is by building a rigid process with gates at every step so each one happens correctly and in the right order. In a regulated environment like ours, with scientific and governmental requirements layered on top of each other, a documented and auditable release process isn't a nice-to-have. Automation is how you make that documentation real instead of aspirational.
+
+The rest of the week happened at home. My youngest had a rough year in high school, and we spent most of our waking hours trying to claw back a backlog of assignments and tests before the year runs out. We worked through the weekend and then every evening after that, and we made a real dent. It may turn out to be too little too late, but we're doing everything we can to get her to the finish line and salvage what's salvageable. That's where most of the energy went.
+
+We did step away twice.
+
+Saturday was the Indie South Spring Spectacular, the big annual outdoor art and craft market that pulls makers in from all over the region. Juniper and I dressed up in vaguely medieval garb for no reason other than the weather was beautiful and it sounded like fun, and we spent the afternoon wandering the stalls and looking at everything.
+
+---
+
+Thursday was the one that mattered. It was opening night of a three-day festival celebrating the 30th anniversary of Kindercore Records, one of Athens' own homegrown labels. The whole weekend was stacked with great bands, but the first night was headlined by Man or Astro-man?, who are far and away my favorite band to see live, and who I almost never get to see anymore. I took Juniper so she could see them for the first time, even though it was a school night and the band wasn't going on until nearly midnight.
+
+![Coco in his orange flight suit playing bass in profile while bandmate Avona Nova leans back mid-performance, both lit by stage haze and colored light.](IMG_3910.jpeg "Coco and Avona Nova, somewhere in the haze.")
+
+It was, I'm fairly sure, a life-changing show for her. Their stage presence is incredible on its own, but what gets me is the creative whimsy they bring to everything, their personas, their props, the instruments, the music itself. There's an energy and a drive to it that I've always found genuinely inspiring, and I had a feeling she'd feel the same way. We were front and center, so she got the full experience.
+
+![Coco of Man or Astro-man? in an orange flight suit with a COCO name patch and goggles, mouth wide open as he plays a theremin with his face beside a coil of yellow cable on stage at the 40 Watt.](IMG_3938.jpeg "Coco playing the theremin with his face. This is a thing that happened and I have proof.")
+
+At one point Coco, the band's frontman insofar as they have one, ran through the venue in his trademark 70s TV-set helmet, came back up on stage, and put it on Juniper's head. She wore it for the rest of the show.
+
+![A face seen through the screen of a vintage Emerson television set worn as a helmet, lit pink and blue by the stage lights.](IMG_3912.jpeg "Juniper, broadcasting live from inside an Emerson.")
+
+Then a surprise guest came out for three songs, wearing his own TV helmet: R.E.M.'s Peter Buck. I could not possibly have predicted that.
+
+![A guitarist wearing a vintage television set over his head plays a Rickenbacker on a rug-covered stage, drummer behind him and the 40 Watt light-bulb logo on the wall.](IMG_3918.jpeg "Peter Buck, sitting in. TV helmet and all.")
+
+It was an amazing night, and one I know Juniper and I will both carry with us for a long time.
+
+Other than that, it was a quiet week, recovering from the hustle and bustle of the one before and building back up the energy for the next push.

content/posts/2026-05-24-tones-in-the-dark/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+title: Tones in the Dark
+date: 2026-05-24T10:00:00-04:00
+draft: false
+description: A poor kid who learned to program off software broadcast over AM radio spends a workday on the grounds of Apple Park, the company that made the machine that made him.
+tags:
+  - personal
+  - computing history
+  - apple
+lastmod: 2026-05-24T19:37:30.208Z
+---
+
+In the late 1970s my parents had friends we'd visit for dinner now and then. I've lost their names and how the families knew each other, all of it, but I remember their house was full of books, and while the adults talked I'd sit and read, as happy as a kid could be. We moved from Indiana to Missouri in 1979 and saw them only once or twice after that.
+
+The last time we were ever at their place, the man took us out to his barn to show us a computer he had built. It was enormous, a wall of lights and tape reels and panels that looked like the bridge computer from the original Star Trek. He had one program loaded that he'd been playing with, a maze generator. He'd set some parameters, and I'm fairly sure I remember actual flip switches for it, and the machine would print a maze to a built-in continuous-feed dot matrix printer, running across as many pages as he'd configured. I was fascinated. I went home with a thick stack of generated mazes to solve.
+
+That was the first computer I ever saw. It set the scene for everything that followed.
+
+---
+
+A few years later, the first computer I ever *used* belonged to a school.
+
+Around 1982, the school where my dad worked owned a single Apple ][+, and whenever it wasn't needed in the classroom he was allowed to bring it home. Summers, long weekends, holiday breaks, any stretch when school was out. I was in sixth grade, living in a poor rural area on the kind of 1970s homestead where you grew much of what you ate and fixed what broke. I was already amazed by how small it was. The only computer I'd ever seen before was that wall of lights and tape out in the barn, and here was one that sat on a desk and came home in the car.
+
+A computer was a rare thing to have out in the country, but it didn't land in unprepared soil. My mom loved science fiction and fantasy, and she raised me on it. I grew up on Tolkien, on Star Trek, on Doctor Who. The future was already a place I spent a lot of time imagining, so a machine that felt like a piece of it arriving in our little house was thrilling rather than strange, and it was thrilling for both of us. She was as taken with it as I was.
+
+There was no internet to connect it to, of course. What there was instead was a whole improvised economy of getting software onto the thing. My mom found people to swap floppy disks with. I bought computer magazines and typed their programs in line by line. Some nights I sat up recording software broadcast over AM radio onto cassette tapes, the data encoded as screeching tones, hoping the signal held long enough to capture the whole program. When my family drove to see relatives, I brought the computer and a small CRT monitor along so I could keep typing in code from magazine listings once we got there.
+
+That ][+ eventually became a ][e, and then the portable ][c. I've never taken a computer class. Not one, in all the years since. What I learned instead was how to figure out what I needed to know to make the computer do what I wanted, which turns out to be the only durable skill in this line of work. Everything I've built in the forty-some years since traces back to those tones coming out of the radio in the dark.
+
+---
+
+We never owned a computer of our own through all those years. My dad just kept borrowing them, and I kept making the most of every stretch one was in the house. The first computer that was actually mine was a hot-rodded Apple ][e I bought as a college freshman in 1989, a thousand dollars handed to a fellow student for a machine someone had already lovingly upgraded.
+
+A couple of years later I was working as a user consultant at the campus computer center, which is a dignified name for the help desk. I spent my days on Unix, on Sun workstations and dumb terminals, answering questions from people who were as new to all of it as the rest of us. That was the start of getting paid to use computers, and I've been doing some version of it ever since.
+
+---
+
+A few weeks ago I was in San Carlos for a production launch, and I had a slow day before it started. So I did the obvious thing. I took a commuter train and then a bus down to Cupertino to stand on the grounds of what that borrowed machine eventually became.
+
+I went to see Apple Park, and specifically The Ring, the enormous circular building that was Steve Jobs's last project. I never actually saw it. As I mentioned in my weeknotes, the campus is buried so deeply in trees and clever landscaping that you can stand a hundred feet away and see nothing but oak and grass and a low fence half-swallowed by shrubs.
+
+![A sunlit woodland clearing. A large oak with deeply furrowed bark stands at right, its limbs arching overhead. Tall trees and dense shrubs ring the clearing, with a patch of blue sky and clouds showing through the canopy. The ground runs from leaf litter at left to lush grass dotted with small purple wildflowers in front. A low dark metal fence sits in the middle distance, mostly swallowed by greenery.](IMG_3796.jpeg "I'm standing about a hundred feet from the Ring. This is all you can see of it.")
+
+But the reason I made the trip in the first place wasn't architectural. It was that the company hidden behind those trees made the machine that made me. I wanted to put my feet on the ground there, the week I was helping ship software into the industry that machine helped bring into being.
+
+The visitor center had a scale model of the whole campus, above ground and below, and an augmented-reality app running on borrowed iPads that let you peel the model apart layer by layer and look at the engineering underneath.
+
+![A hand holds a tablet at arm's length. Its screen shows a detailed 3D aerial render of a vast circular glass building ringed by trees, labeled "Ring Building," with onscreen controls and a prompt to swipe up. Behind the tablet, blurred and out of focus, is a large white physical scale model of the same campus.](IMG_4040.jpeg "The augmented-reality app at the visitor center, doing what the trees wouldn't let me.")
+
+I got a coffee and sat at a table with my laptop while a man at the next table taught an enthusiastic class on how to make art on an iPad.
+
+![Looking straight down at a paper cup of latte on a wooden table. The foam and crema form two rounded lobes with a notch between them and a small stem at the top.](IMG_3780.jpeg "An apple, at Apple. I'll take it.")
+
+I bought a t-shirt with the old six-color logo, the one I remember from the side of that ][+, sold only at the visitor center and nowhere else.
+
+---
+
+Walking the grounds, I came across a barn. An actual barn, dark gray board-and-batten, tucked behind a fence and some tall grass near the edge of the campus. A plaque told the story. The Glendenning Barn was built around 1916 by the descendants of a Scottish family who'd been farming this land since 1851, back when the valley grew apricots and plums instead of software. The farm was sold off in the 1960s, the barn passed through Hewlett-Packard's campus and then Apple's, and when the Ring went up the barn was cataloged, taken apart, and rebuilt a little ways away. The most forward-looking company on earth kept a hundred-year-old hay barn and moved it out of the way rather than tear it down.
+
+![A dark gray board-and-batten barn with a steeply pitched roof, seen from below across a slope. A fence of tall, irregularly spaced gray slats stands in front of it, with shrubs and ornamental grasses around the base and a bright blue, partly cloudy sky above.](IMG_3800.jpeg "The Glendenning Barn, near the edge of the campus, a century older than anything else in sight.")
+
+![A black metal pedestal sign with a gold border and gold lettering, set in tall grass before a wall of green shrubs. The upper half is a dense block of readable text headed "Glendenning Barn"; below it is the City of Cupertino seal. The lower half of the pedestal is blank.](IMG_3798.jpeg "Built around 1916 on a farm that predates the valley's chips and code, dismantled and rebuilt when the Ring went up.")
+
+---
+
+A poor kid from a homestead, who learned to program off the radio and the pages of hobbyist magazines because that was the only way to get the software, grew up to spend a workday on the grounds of the company that started it all, on his way to launch something that mattered. The kid would have found that completely unbelievable. Though maybe not the barn. The first computer he ever saw lived in one of those, out in an Indiana field, a wall of lights printing mazes into the dark. He'd have understood a barn just fine.

content/upcoming.md

@@ -2,13 +2,13 @@
 title: Eric Yet To Come
 ---
 
-This page is all about what I am planning on doing in the not too distant future. As I get to them, they'll leave here and appear on my [now page](/now). It was last updated on April 21, 2026.
+This page is all about what I am planning on doing in the not too distant future. As I get to them, they'll leave here and appear on my [now page](/now). It was last updated on May 2, 2026.
 
 ## Where I will be
 
-- **Austin, TX** — First Natera trip to Austin happening this week, with more trips to follow as my role expands into the larger engineering organization.
-- **San Carlos, CA** — At least one more trip back for the next phase of lab deployments.
-- **Georgia Renaissance Festival** — Spring season starting soon.
+- **Athens, GA** — Man or Astro-man? at the 40 Watt next weekend, headlining the first day of a music festival celebrating a long-time local record label.
+- **Austin, TX** — More trips ahead as the Austin lab rollout begins.
+- **San Carlos, CA** — Return trips as the next workflows go live.
 
 ## What I will be building