💚 On milestones and friends looking for love & money

Incredibly grateful for my husband & job, and not just because of the current market.

Last week was a big week. I attended my son’s first Halloween parade at a big kid school. I paid off my student loans — there’s been a lot of bureaucratic hold-ups due to database restructuring (and, given my job, how can I not sympathize). But as a result, my husband and I were able to finalize our shopping list for swapping out our tub for a shower so it’s a bit more accessible for me and my unstable hip ligaments.

I also finally watched Office Space, which I appreciate all the more now that I’ve celebrated my two-year anniversary with Readwise. I couldn't have made the transition from teaching to a (wonderful, remote, high-autonomy, low-bureaucracy) job in tech without this newsletter, so thank you all for the encouragement over the years.

As you can see, all this has made me extraordinarily reflective on my great fortune, and not only with the above. I found my husband during the golden age of OKCupid, not the current hellscape of swipe apps. I can’t describe the rise of AI girlfriends as anything but depressing. The job market sounds rough, too. Especially in tech and tech-adjacent fields.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have their dream job fall into their lap. In the age of large language models, it’s a lot harder to for companies to find good people and for people to find good companies. AI slop is everywhere, taking over search results but also cover letters and resumes. For years, we’ve been lamenting credential creep and the difficulties non-technical human resources departments have evaluating for technical roles. Job applications demanding 8+ years of experience in languages that have only existed for 3. Openings aimed at developers with the title listed as “analyst.” That sort of thing.

So I thought this might be a good opportunity to help people bypass the AI handshake and the HR arms race and hear about some real humans who are great.

• My buddy Mike is an expert on military hardware and organization — he’s your guy for defense analytics, business intelligence, and data operations. On a personal note, he taught me everything I know about pivot tables and he’s damn good at optimizing EVE online… everything. He’s got managerial experience, knows product development, and loves fixing inefficiencies.

• Josh likes to work on boring-sounding business software that people use to get their jobs done. He’s one of that rare breed, the project manager+developer, and likes interacting directly with customers and translating business requirements into deliverables. Prefers small teams that ship solid software, with competent people who care. Among his many open-source javascript projects, he wrote a neat tool to help with memorizing passages of text instead of facts.

• Nick is a devops engineer / sysadmin who’s been super helpful in the Obsidian community for years. He’s very talented at asking probing questions and helping people figure out what they need to do in order to serve their goals. He’s also one of the blessed people who understands highly technical topics like APIs and unit tests and version control… and writes about them well. It helps that he enjoys video games I’m familiar with, like EVE and Path of Exile, so his highly technical treatments of things like the PoE market APIs are in a context I actually understand.

I’m sure there are other folks who read this newsletter who are interested in hearing about neat jobs, or who are looking to connect with interesting people. If that’s you, please leave a comment and consider trying to connect with other readers of a niche blog about obscure history and slightly countercultural productivity habits.

And hell, let’s go old-school with the classifieds, Pina Colada style. If you’re looking for a date, romantic or otherwise, maybe consider dropping a paragraph about where you’re at and what you’re into, too.