Decorated the front yard for the holidays. In matters like this, my contribution is logistics: how to attach things to walls without making holes and figuring out where all the extension cords go.

In an effort to keep holiday gifting from going exponential, our generation of kids and their spouses does a secret santa exchange. I’m nominally responsible for pairings, which means an opportunity to overengineer the whole thing. For the last few years, the assignments have been sent out via SMS, but that’s gotten much more complicated apparently! In my frustration with Twilio, I rewrote the code to send emails with SendGrid instead – which I forgot is also owned by Twilio, and also required new compliance checks since I used it last. I wish more services had an account flag for “I am going to use this to send six messages once a year; I promise I will be good.”

Speaking of overengineering, Advent of Code is back! I haven’t finished the last few years, but it’s always fun to use as an excuse to try new things out. Played with Bun for Day 1 and really enjoyed not having to spin up all the scaffolding the modern JS ecosystem seems to require to start fiddling around.

Small improvements corner: The <link> tag for this site’s RSS feed no longer 404s. The feed itself is no longer full of escaped HTML tags.