I have listened to podcasts since the name made sense (iPod broadcasts!) and you had to use ugly apps to mush RSS content into your MP3 player and, wow, it is weird to be nostalgic for that kludge. Get off YouTube! Get out of Spotify! Do not make me look at you! There should not be a credited hair or makeup artist for what is canonically a goblin job.

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I’m deeply fascinated by the premise of Famous Last Words, the new Netflix show that got surprise-launched by the death of Jane Goodall:

a series of late-life interviews with famous people, whose contents — including their subjects’ identities — are kept closely guarded until after the subject dies. Goodall’s interview, which was completed in March, was one of a handful that have been sitting in a Netflix vault for months. She was simply the first among those interviewed to die.

Saw a post from the Chicago Transit Authority announcing that a new ‘L’ station was getting an elevator and realized that I hadn’t updated the station data backing my little toy CTA tracker Slow Zone in two years.

The process I came up with for this way back when was deeply tortured:

1. Download a CSV of stop data from the city’s Data Portal. This dataset includes stop locations, which lines they serve, whether they’re accessible, etc.
2. Convert that to JSON.
3. Transform that JSON using a bunch of homegrown functions to massage the goofy data types and create an object of stations containing their associated stops.
4. Update that file in the repo and deploy the app.

Obviously, I never remembered to do this, so I put together a GitHub Action to fetch the data and update it for me once a week. Runs in ~20 seconds, opens a pull request if anything changes. Shockingly straightforward.

Behold: two years of infrastructure progress: four new elevators, one new station, and deleting a stray space.