My wife told me to write this exact blog post over a year ago, and here we are, approaching Valentines once again. So, if you’re looking for something fun to do with your special someone on V-Day, check out one of these options. And hey, they can’t be any worse than watching the movie Holmes and Watson.

Once upon a time at work, I was tasked with writing automated tests for a web application built on top of Salesforce. The devs used a special plugin to implement a custom UI, but the underlying UI and Backend were still Salesforce. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You shouldn’t be testing Salesforce. That’s Salesforce (the company)’s job. And you’d be right, but it’s not just SF, it’s our team’s implementation of hundreds of little customizeable widgets, features, formulas, plugins and extras that all work in part to create a CMS.

Late in 2024, I downloaded an RSS feed reader and began using it as my primary scrolling news feed. What a difference that has made in my personal relationship with the internet! It’s like using a GOOD version of Reddit with zero ads and only interesting content I subscribed to!

A while back, I wrote up a post about doom-scrolling and phone addiction. Since then, my habits have changed and I wanted to make an update because I’ve made even more progress.

If you haven’t read the old post, check it out. Or just read the following summary to see what I had tried earlier:

Where I’ve Been #

First off, let me update you on my current projects:

My scifi mech novel, SoftWar - Predator, Prey is my current focus. I’ve completely finished the first 13 chapter draft, but my wife has given me some incredibly valueable feedback (aka the main character sucks) and she’s 100% right. So I’m four chapters into the rewrite and it’s getting better. I’m excited to see this new version of Yuri survive Rocco-II and fight off the Zard hacker.

No sooner had the chamber pressurized than the door to the port cracked open, just slightly enough to allow the hiss of rushing air to echo through the space. Yuri glanced at the door and watched as it opened slowly. He felt a gentle pull as the low pressure tunnel equalized with the inside of the port.

Over the course of the last seven months in the academy, Yuri’s planet-side mech training had covered several skills to effectively navigate around a battlefield. He knew how to use grids and maps to chart friends and target locations, and he found the z axis easy enough to pick up on the fly.

Chapter 2 #

Yuri caught up quickly, not wanting to be left behind. The two of them walked across the long steel platform toward the far left side of the massive industrial space. Yuri could see the engineers ahead carrying Hawthorne’s stretcher down the scaffold staircase. They were so high up, the boy felt a bit of vertigo and kept his hand on the railing.

So there I was… #

So there I was applying to another startup on Y-Combinator a few Mondays ago, and in my cover letter I made a joke about how difficult it is to get deterministic responses out of LLMs. Almost immediately after I sent the email, I instantly came up with a better joke I should have used instead:

Chapter 1 #

A few hours later, on a dark and sandy beach, a few kilometers from the outskirts of New Miami, the young man reclined on his red and yellow beach chair. Waves rolled in slowly and quietly all around. On this lonely beach, he was isolated and free.