Q3 2026 notes
I started these quarterly logs at the start of the year so this is the fourth one, meaning I have now covered a whole year.
π Blog:
Four posts and the big thing being I hosted the IndieWeb Carnival and it got some very good submissions. Havenβt got around to the roundup post yet, but I will. Surprisingly my stream of conciseness writing on reading books on my phone got shared and read widely. On the science fiction blog I have covered a handful of really good highly recommended stories, with an early Greg Egan story being one of the best stories I have read in a long time.
ποΈ Movies:
My viewing has shifted a bit away from contemporary arthouse to more genre excess lately. I had a good run with some classic Hollywood melodramas from the 40s and 50s, with fantastic films like Written on the Wind, Niagara and Some Came Running - all in lovely Technicolor, full of excess and melodramatic acting. I refound my love for Nicolas Cage with Wild at Heart, Face/Off, Con Air and Red Rock West. He is really a fantastic versatile actor to watch. Italian genre films from the 70s are still going strong with disturbing titles such as L'ultimo treno della notte and La mala ordina, and I have been having even more fun with some slasher classics like The Slumber Party Massacre, The Burning and the first Friday the 13th. The biggest highlight of the year is by a big margin Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Almost tailormade for my sensibilities and I plan writing a (too) long blogpost about it.
π Books
The summer has given me a bit more time for reading, some of it on my phone, and in addition to the various science fiction short stories I finally finished Bill Gatesβ autobiography Source Code. It was an enjoyable read, but also written by the man himself and not really as critical or deep as something like Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs. Compared to Linus Torvalds' autobiography, it was also clear that he grew up in the US with a more commercial mindset. He started in labs with the hacker mindset of wanting to understand the systems, break the rules, find clever solutions, but ultimately he ended up forming a business. Selling licenses. And even wrote a stern column in a computer magazine criticising the software pirates. The book I actually read on my phone was a Danish book on philosophy and art, where David Favrholdt makes a solid case for his opinion on a definition of art. He is clearly against the very loose interpretation that everything can be art, and values skill and depth, over shock and provocation.
πΌ Work:
After the summer we could focus on finishing a big migration project that has been long in the making, having paused it and started it several times of the last couple of years. This means we can retire a massive amount of legacy code with a freshly written codebase that has better tests, higher quality and in general just a better foundation for future development. It really is an uphill battle to get such things prioritised over βnew features for customersβ, but after years and years of almost no progress on that part of our product as it was impossible to maintain, everyone seemed to realise it was about time to do something. Now we only have three or four massive critical legacy systems left that need the same treatment.
π¨βπ©βπ§βπ§ Life:
We did the same road trip to Italy again this year, without car problems, and it was a good decision basically doing the same trip twice. We were better prepared, knew what we should prioritise, and what not to, on our vacation. However, I donβt think we want to repeat the exact same vacation again for a third time next year. At least a new destination. Otherwise it is just back to school for the kids and for me to make lunchboxes every morning, and everything else that is part of the daily routine.