The main thing
Rewriting the guts of an app I built eight years ago and still open every day. Most of it works; the parts that don't are the parts I've been quietly working around for years, which is its own kind of answer. I'm keeping the outside the same on purpose and replacing what's underneath a piece at a time — that's roughly the argument I keep making over in Technology.
The detour I didn't plan on
Most of last week went to a fight with Claude Desktop on Windows: it kept closing itself overnight and refusing to reopen, with an error message that turned out to be lying about the cause. Tracing it properly took me from "a file is locked" down to leaked kernel handles in the AppX container layer, and the fix in the end was to stop using the MSIX build entirely. I wrote the whole thing up — here's how that went.
It's a good example of what I mean by not rebooting your way out of a problem. The machine stays on; the terminals and sessions stay where I left them. Restarting to make one app work isn't a fix, it's a cost I keep paying.
Reading
Ursula Franklin, for the third time. She's the reason I distrust tools that make a task easier while quietly making the person doing it easier to replace. It's slow reading and I'm in no hurry.
How the days are arranged
I'm trying to keep afternoons entirely free of meetings — mornings for other people, afternoons for the work that needs an uninterrupted run at it. It holds up about four days out of five, which is better than it used to be.
Writing
Roughly an essay every other week, whenever one has been sitting long enough that I'm sure I mean it. Everything lands in Technology, Business or Life, and there's a letter if you'd rather have it arrive than remember to come back. More about me and this site is on the about page.
— Koen