David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #26 (April 2025)

Posted 2025-03-31 under #dispatch

Nico received a major software upgrade this month. One day he could barely roll over, the next he’s crawling, getting into stuff, maybe even talking? (It’s a little hard to tell but I’m going with “dada” as his first word.) We finally got Nev out of the Pack ’n Play she’s been sleeping in since she moved out of our room and into a proper bed. She loves it, and it’s great that she can just get out of bed and come downstairs by herself when she’s ready to start her day.

Annual trip to Vegas was a blast – watched games at Venetian and Paris, real international stuff. Let’s see if my Duke boys can bring one home this weekend. Looking good so far!

I skipped Viget’s annual hackathon this year – too busy on an enjoyable client project – but one of the teams was building an app against data from Harvest, something with which I’m intimately familiar. I found a tool called Hasura that can generate a GraphQL API from a Postgres database and pointed it at a mirror of an internal reporting database, letting them bypass the Harvest API entirely. It’s slick, and written at least partially in Haskell, something you don’t see every day.

Made a couple big music studio upgrades this month: picked up a mixer and a MIDI router (and so many cables – like every kind and length of cable you can imagine). Now I can plug all my stuff in at the same time, use any device to control any other, run sound out to speakers and into my computer. I’ve been having a lot of fun using my full-size digital piano to control my Reface CP:

I ordered reprints of the book version of this site – I wasn’t happy with the margins, emojis had been replaced with •, and Lulu offers a nicer linen cover for a few bucks more, which is more what I’d envisioned (like Derek Sivers’ stuff). They arrived, and they are awesome. But! They misspelled my name on the spine. Womp. New copies are on the way.

Finally, I’m noodling on ways to better stick to habits and goals, and considering some kind of post series on this site. Some kind of public accountability could be helpful, and tapping into this monthly posting habit that I actually have been able to stick with might provide the motivation I need. More to come!

This Month

• Adventure: impromptu trip to Busch Gardens to meet some characters from Dino Ranch, Nev’s absolute favorite show; Lake Norman Easter weekend, hoping to repeat the kayak trip we did a couple years ago
• Project: crochet fox, for real this time
• Skill: subtractive synthesis – I have been slowly learning the ins-and-outs of my mono synth, LFOs, ADSR, etc. but I think with a few hours of dedicated study I could unlock a world of cool sounds

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Sunbringer, Hannah Kaner
• Non-fiction: Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick (recommended here)
• Music: Saudade, Thievery Corporation

Links

• Posting – The API client that lives in your terminal

  The API client that lives in your terminal. Posting is a beautiful open-source terminal app for developing and testing APIs.

• Our interfaces have lost their senses

  We’ve been successfully removing all friction from our apps — think about how effortless it is to scroll through a social feed. But is that what we want? Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching… these take effort, but they’re also deeply satisfying. When you strip away too much friction, meaning and satisfaction go with it.

  I found this delightful; Robin Sloan wasn’t as impressed.

• If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

  The most durable solution would be carving things in stone - it would last for millennia. But that’s hardly practical, and it wouldn’t make things easily searchable or shareable. The second best option is plaintext files with UTF-8 encoding and Markdown formatting3. As long as computers exist, we’ll be able to read plaintext files with ease.

• The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here

  But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

• The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny

  I very intentionally capitalized and bootstrapped Norbauer & Co. in such a way as to never need outside investors, and at no point (now or in the past) have we ever been in want of cash. Indeed, I have spent my entire entrepreneurial life resisting investor-oriented management. So, as I now find myself more tranquil and satisfied than I have ever been in all my working life, I’m reluctant to admit what made it all possible. I sold nearly half of my company to a publicly-traded investment fund run by a Canadian billionaire.

• The average college student today

  All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.