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Weeknotes 3: November 30, 2025

11/30/2025

Well, it’s been about six months. I’ve given the site a bit of a facelift (more on that down below), but mostly I’m excited to have a place to blog that I’m truly proud of. As we wind down 2025, I’m hoping to get back to writing here with some regularity.

Rose 🌹 I think the highlight of this week for me was digging into some fun personal coding projects. Through the power of vibe coding¹ I was able to do complete re-writes and redesigns of both this very site as well as the portfolio for my dear friend Chris Zombik. I did both while recovering from a stomach bug and it was an extremely welcome distraction from feelings of nausea and malaise.

Thorn 🥀 Astute readers may notice that I mentioned having a stomach bug earlier in this post. Surprisingly, that is not my “thorn” of the week. Instead, my thorn was a series of extremely stressful days at work leading up to Thanksgiving. My boss and good friend left our team this week to pursue an exciting new opportunity, and while I’m thrilled for him as a friend I will miss him dearly as a colleague. Beyond that, we’re under some very tight deadlines for a current project we’re working on, which led to me working until past midnight the night before Thanksgiving. Not fun!

Bud 🌷 Increasingly, my “bud” is the end of the year! I have (almost) a full two weeks off at the end of December in which I will be deleting Slack from my phone and completely disengaging from work. The last ~10 months have been the hardest and most rewarding of my professional career thus far, and while I’m extremely thrilled to have the opportunities I do at Handshake AI, I need a break and will be taking one.

Things I did

• Worked a lot but shipped a ton of meaningful and cool features.
• Cooked an extremely good turkey (pictured above) and green bean casserole (from scratch, thank you Kenji)
• Celebrated Thanksgiving with Becca’s family for the first time
• Started finding a new therapist as my current one is going on an extended maternity leave
• Adventured into The Castro at 1:00am to pick up medication for the aforementioned stomach bug at a 24-hour pharmacy. The contrast between my extremely low energy levels and the lively club scenes I drove past in my Waymo was quite amusing and stark.
• Rebuilt both this very blog and chriszombik.com in NextJS, and built a robust backend for Chris’s site using PayloadCMS. I prefer editing my own content in just raw Markdown files because I’m a nerd and comfortable with software development, so it was a fun and rewarding challenge to wire something up for a non-developer friend to make it easy for him to edit his own content.

Media from the week

• Kind of a slow media week due to the work stress, the holiday, and the illness. That said, I did start reading a few fun new newsletters:
  • Lenny’s Newsletter - a classic for product thinking
  • Snaxshot - a window into the landscape of food culture
  • Big Undies - a fun newsletter about plus-size fashion
• I migrated my RSS + reading setup from the app Matter back to my good-old trusty Readwise Reader
• Robin Sloan’s annual gift guide came out and wow what a good one!

Purchases

I’m trying out this section as both a bit of personal accountability but also as a window into some of the cool stuff I’ve found over the past week. I hope people find it helpful!

• Some tea from Leaves & Flowers
• The YUN HAI X O.OO 2026 LUNISOLAR ALMANAC, an absolutely delightful looking recommendation from Robin Sloan that dovetails nicely with my newfound interests in astrology and tarot
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book recommended by my boss and also by a few tweets I happened across in the same week. I thought about buying it after my boss recommended it, and then the tweets felt like the universe telling me to do so. Excited to dig into this!

Website changelog

• Well, the whole website was re-written in NextJS and given a totally new design. I’ll be blogging more about my thinking behind this, but in short I’m very happy with the decision!