Entry 146. Six years, 146 fortnights, zero gaps. The streak enters its seventh production year with 99.999% author uptime (one entry written on a phone in an Oregon eclipse field; the SLA held).
2018’s thesis: everything got invoiced. 2017 ran up the bills; 2018 collected. Facebook paid for the feed (Cambridge Analytica, $119B in a day, the token heist). Musk paid per word ($4.4M/token). TSB paid for the skipped rehearsal. Fallout 76 paid for shipping the wrong vision competently. Marriott paid for buying a breach sight-unseen. And the whole industry paid its GDPR retrofit costs for a decade of data hoarding, the only invoice that came with a receipt I’m actually proud of (the deletion pipeline; the lawyers’ forcing function produced my year’s best work, therapy pending).
The quiet item I’m filing for the future, per tradition (last year logged a “probably a big deal” paper): Google released BERT this fall, a language model built on that same Transformer architecture, now smashing every NLP benchmark via pretraining-then-finetuning. The pattern: 2017’s curiosity is 2018’s benchmark-eater. Extrapolation is left as an exercise for future entries. (Hi, future entries. You knew. We all half-knew.)
My year: loop lead (the debugging-audition data), GDPR shipped, game-day discipline institutionalized, Proverbs file: 168. Fantasy PL: champion, again, goalkeeper-diversified. The banner multiplies. Next sprint (2019): I’ve been asked to scope what a “platform team” would mean here. The org is 120 people now and the paved roads need a road crew. Feels like a fork in the career: deeper into systems, or wider into people. The honest answer is the fork is fake and the road does both. See you in year seven.