We’ve all seen the scene. Two skilled combatants square off in a duel, waiting for the other to blink so they can strike. Such as it was with me. I stared at an upcoming month and blinked. It did not. My attempted habit is to record in a few different places what happens. I have a Finish calendar behind my monitor. I have a 5x8-inch Field Book where I also write what happens. Most days are filled in with something that happened. On 18 March, one of our cats got out and into a fight with a local cat. As with me and time, our cat blinked and the other cat won. As work heated, my focus on writing and coding at home slowed. No writing. I took my youngest camping with a bunch of other boys his age. I went to the RailsConf 2024 and chased that with a work-related conference. More thoughtful people have shared their RailsConf experience. I went less for the talks and more for the inspiration, and came away rewarded. One keynote explained how she went from a non-technical person to selling application in a year, then struggled for profitability as she scaled until she hit pay dirt. Another keynote described different start-ups who struggled to get to production until they pivoted to Ruby on Rails from React and the other contemporary JavaScript frameworks. One CTO privately admitted his team’s incredulity when he said they could deliver features in weeks instead of months. Technical talks were no less inspiring. What looked like a simple talk on testing led me to commit to employing automated testing for my application. With a bit of developed code and...

As weekly updates go, this one might be lean. Not lean like last week, but lean as in fewer words. For a change. Maybe. New Series Progress. Progress continues, though perhaps not the pace I would like. I have a 4+ page Treatment for the first novel, 1-page synopses of the other three. I’m putting the main character with a group of friends, so I have their characters all roughed out for the series, as well as the characters for the first book. However, I would like to spend more time developing their relationships. I would be pleased if I could start on the first scene this week. I also mocked up covers for all five. Maybe I will keep them, or hire a cover artist. I’m rather fond of the artist I have. We shall see. Bridging tech and fiction, I moved my tools off of my website to a GitHub site. The Move from Apple. In March, I said I was going to go Apple-free for a month. Six weeks later, where am I on the journey? Well, last week I had a Frameworkcomputer delivered. Not particularly cheaper than the XPS was, but it boasts promise of modularity and upgradeability that I’ve not seen in a laptop yet. The question is whether a laptop would survive me long enough to need its guts swapped out. I upgraded to a 32” 4k monitor since I’m getting older. I still drive an iPad, but I see a Galaxy in my future. Running Windows with WSL for Linux gave me everything I used Apple for. All the applications I relied on were not in Apple’s walled garden. I gave my wife...