I emailed 18 links posts this year, down from 30 last year.

Games

I've been playing on my custom game table, on Board Game Arena, and on Tabletop Simulator.

Some of my favorite board games this year have been:

  • Scythe - My favorite, scoring takes a few plays to get used to. I played a friend's copy a number of times this year, and finally got my own for Christmas.
  • White Castle - I've played a lot of 1v1. It's strong, but some starting positions are much easier than others.
  • Hanza Teutonica - It's particularly good at 3p. I've not yet played with 5.
  • Secret Hitler - We rotate between social deduction games. Avalon is my favorite, and the Coup: Reformation expansion is a surprising improvement on the base game.

And the video games I played the most:

  • Jackbox - Easy, chill, and always fun. It's never a mistake to play Jackbox during a game night.
  • It Takes Two - Incredible breadth of game mechanics, presented approachably. I'm impressed.
  • Blue Prince - I love the tactical layout puzzles, but I suck at remembering the clues for large puzzles. For us, that makes it a great co-op game.

Services

  • Claude - Opus and Sonnet have more often than not been my favorite coding models this year.
  • Cloudflare - I use Cloudflare for dns and managing bandwidth, and use tunnels to expose some services.
  • Github - Gotta store my code somewhere.
  • Spotify - Audiobooks on Spotify are awesome.
  • Amazon Prime - Amazon is still almost always cheaper for most tech purchases. I've been trusting Amazon reviews less and less, instead using Gemini, Wirecutter, and Reddit.
  • Board Game Arena - $42/year is so worth it to play any of the best games when friends don't live next door.

Projects

Work

I continue to work at Apptronik on the DevOps team. It's been an about even split of work on developer experience, software deployments, configuration management, and infrastructure. My favorite work is on developer experience - it's a fun area with all the new tools we've been seeing this year. In DevOps, I can build for a customer that I am deeply familiar with: Developers.

Location

I moved from Austin to the Bay over the holidays. Still adjusting and getting settled. It's been about... 2 days. Hit me up if you're around!