David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #34 (December 2025)

Posted 2025-12-10 under #dispatch

We took a quick trip down to Lake Norman to visit Claire’s grandmother, but the big travel in November was up to New York for Thanksgiving. We did a long weekend in NYC then spent a week at my sister’s house. The kids loved the big city (especially the Statue of Liberty cruise, Bluey’s House, and this giant indoor playground). I just loved soaking up the city – we were there a few months ago, but that was mostly in Brooklyn, which is a pretty distinct thing from being in Lower Manhattan. We’ll be back.

I did the Troy Turkey Trot 10K Thanksgiving morning. Felt pretty good! Happy with my result, though I came out a little hot and faded down the stretch. My family joined me for the mile walk afterward.

At work, I built a simple tool in Go to extract content from our HR platform, consolidate it, and upload it to Google Drive. I showed it to a couple other managers who seemed interested in using it, but then I had the problem of how to distribute it and get non-devs set up (installing dependencies, managing config files, etc.). Codex (my AI coding agent of choice) was super helpful here: it suggested and implemented a few subcommands to help with initial configuration, then set up GoReleaser to build the program and distribute it via Homebrew. Super cool, and simple enough that I had it create Homebrew formulas for some of my personal apps.

I’ve never been great about adding alt text to the photos I put on this site, and decided to see if I could farm it out to AI. I tried a few local models with limited success, then figured I’d see how Codex could do. Pretty well, turns out – inspect the photos above to see the results. I already have a shell script to encrypt images, and I added a few lines to have Codex generate a description before encrypting. I promise this will be the only AI-generated content ever featured in these posts.

Finally, my sister’s been working on a secret project for the last few months, and it’s finally been released to the public. It’s a short Kill Bill / Fortnite film of a scene that didn’t make the original movies. It rips. Here’s a post from Kottke with more information.

This Month

• Adventure: my girl turns FOUR; Christmas in Greensboro
• Project: couple music things – an animated music video for a work event + a chill collaboration
• Skill: Santa’s got me down for a 3D printer, pretty psyched for that

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, Matt Dinniman
• Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman
• Music: Please Don’t Judge Me, Gas-Lab

Links

• Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels (via)

  Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be engineers first and computer guys second. That means knowing what to build, and why. That means being able to understand the second- and third-order effects of their decisions. That means recognizing bad ideas early, and giving business recommendations backed by solid evidence.

• Naz Hamid • Million-Mile Tech

  A deeper appreciation and intimacy grows as you hold onto something longer and longer. There’s a point at which it evolves from the shiny new thing into a tool you love. You’ve cultivated a lopsided fondness for a material possession that’s now a well-worn friend. May all of the things we care for outlive us.

• Software is supply-constrained (for now) | justin․searls․co

  It’s long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions.

• Five Months of Journalling • Robb Knight (via)

  I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I’m keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking like in my journal, I’m happy.

• xkcd: Fifteen Years (via)

  “Want to feel old?” “Yes.”