Apple Pay went live Monday, in the US only, so I experienced it by proxy: a teammate on rotation at the client’s Ohio office paid for groceries with his thumb and messaged us the play-by-play. He and the cashier reportedly shared a moment of genuine wonder; the man behind them sighed, because the future is unevenly distributed and also in his way. Some pharmacy chains are actively blocking it to push their own janky QR thing (CurrentC), which is a masterclass in putting corporate strategy ahead of user experience. Prediction logged: the janky consortium app dies, the thing-that-just-works wins.
The F1 title fight is heading to the final rounds and it’s perfect: Hamilton against Rosberg, teammate vs teammate, raw pace vs telemetry. Rosberg’s driving is all efficiency, detail, and setup, optimization as a system design philosophy. I’m emotionally invested in a driver’s engine map. Sports!
Work update: I gave my first-ever conference talk. Local meetup, 40 people, “What Two Years of On-Call Taught Me.” My hands shook for the first three slides, then someone laughed at the log-rotation story on purpose and I could suddenly breathe. Public speaking: still terrifying, newly survivable.
TIL: speaker notes are a crutch that works. Also, every talk is just a blog post standing up. I have 44 blog posts. I have material.