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Weeknotes 1: June 8, 2025

6/8/2025

Weeknotes are a fun idea I’ve seen a few other websites do and I figured I might as well jump on the bandwagon. The idea is that I’ll publish a weekly post of what I’ve been up to, interesting media I watched/read/listened to, things I ate, and other observations, and thoughts.

I’ll start off my weeknotes with “Rose, Thorn, Bud,” a weekly review exercise I picked up in college where you list your rose (highlight of the week), thorn (low point of the week), and bud (something you’re looking forward to in the coming week).

Rose 🌹 I finally came out publicly!! As I shared in my blog post earlier this week, I’m finally ready to share with everyone that I’m transgender and will be going by Gabby (she/her) moving forward. This was a HUGE step that took literally years to work up the courage to do, and I feel a huge weight off my shoulders now that I’ve done it.

Thorn 🥀 I’ve been really tired from work recently and on Friday night I had to skip an event I was excited for in order to rest and recharge. I need to get better about carving out deliberate rest time during the week and making sure that my work schedule doesn’t totally overtake my other commitments.

Bud 🌷 My birthday is this coming week (on June 12) and I’m very excited to go out for a bougie dinner with Becca to celebrate. I took Thursday and Friday off from work and am excited to go on some walks around the city and just take it easy.

Things I did

• Visited good hot with Becca and one of our close friends. It’s a completely delightful place with a little group of freestanding saunas beside the Bay up in Richmond, CA. You rent out a sauna for an hour and a half and can alternate between spending time in the heat, spending time outside in the sun, and dipping your toes in the Bay. It’s one of our favorite local spots to relax.
• Had our local trash service do one of our two annual “bulky item pickups” and got a LOT of old junk out of our garage. I guess it’s a little late in the year for this to count as “spring cleaning,” but better late than never!
• I got one of my semi-regular laser hair removal sessions this week. I can’t exactly say that I look forward to these, but on some level it does feel nice to invest in something that’s just for me and helps me feel better about the way I look. Plus it’s always nice to chat with the technicians.
• Had a WONDERFUL dinner out with Becca at Four Kings, which is quickly becoming one of our favorite restaurants in the city (it was our second trip there). Four Kings is a Hong Kong/Cantonese style restaurant in Chinatown that has impeccably good vibes and insanely good food. The highlight of the meal was definitely the fried squab, but everything was amazing. I mean…they do “mapo spaghetti”,¹ need I say more!?
• Attended the monthly “Trans Nerd Meetup” in SF. I’ve been working on going to more social events and making more local friends, and this is always a blast to go to.

Stuff I read this week

• My former colleague Chris Krycho’s posts are always extremely thoughtful and worth reading, and this one about the use of AI-assisted coding tools is no exception. Most of my usage of LLMs to assist with coding has been around building new features, not making large architectural changes in an existing codebase. LLMs excel at being shown an example of how one thing in a codebase is executed and then being asked to make a new feature based on that pattern. I’m simply not sure how effective they’d be at the kind of work Chris is so good at, namely re-architecting things in a complex system and getting people on board with those changes. Perhaps this is worth experimenting with, especially given the recent rise of AI tools meant to run completely in the background, like OpenAI’s codex or Claude Code.
• Robb Knight wrote about journaling and naturally it has me reconsidering my current journaling setup and wanting to get back into it as a hobby and practice. A little while back I started using Simone Giertz’s Every Day Goals Calendar to track my journaling habit and the results are not great². I think my biggest takeaway from Robb’s post is: The biggest thing I've realised is there's no wrong way to use a notebook. Some weeks, I might only use a single page for the whole week. Other times a week can span over multiple pages with brainstorms for new ideas, flowcharts to understand a concept, notes on a video I've watch, or just a sketch of something I thought of. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in trying to plan a system out that I don’t actually do it, and I think this is something I want to work on changing about myself. These weeknotes will almost certainly shift in format and content over time and that’s fine! I will probably miss weeks here and there (or for months at a time) and that’s also fine! The important thing is that I’m doing any of it at all.
• I’ve picked up a lot of books recently but haven’t settled on one to actually read next. I think for nonfiction I’m going to try and get into The Body Keeps The Score (which truly so many people have recommended to me at this point) and for fiction I’m going to pick up Margaret Killjoy’s novel The Sapling Cage.

Website changelog

• Well, I basically launched the website this week so in a sense everything here is “new” to those reading it, but I’ve been working on building the site for the past few months so much of it isn’t new to me.
• The biggest actually new feature I created this week is my /weeks visualization that shows key dates in my life. It was inspired by a few other blogs that have done the same and I think it’s a really neat idea and was fun to build.