A Lament for Stack Overflow
The author of this LinkedIn post thinks he’s describing something great in Stack Overflow’s licensing of its Q&A data to AI companies and making much more revenue that way than it did as an open Q&A site. But what he’s actually describing is just one more instance of the growing trend of AI to destroy the real value of whatever it consumes.
Stack Overflow’s “death by AI” is personal because I was one of its public beta testers before it launched. I wrote some of the original questions and answers that seeded the site before it went live. The mistake is in seeing Stack Overflow as “just” Q&A pairs, and edge cases, and war stories. It was a community of people—far from perfect—but one that helped me get better at the work of software engineering.
It was a community that spawned a pretty good tech conference, Stack Overflow Dev Days, that I attended and learned a lot from. Stack Overflow also launched a job board that ultimately helped me find a job in healthcare IT. Thanks to that job, I visited South by Southwest and reunited with friends and former colleagues I hadn’t seen in a decade.
Good for Stack Overflow for making millions of dollars off our donated time I guess. But what they’re selling can only decrease in value over time because they destroyed the diverse communities of people who originated, grew and sustained that value. Whatever knowledge these companies grow inside their walls is necessarily limited by who’s inside their walls. No company has a monopoly on the best people or the best solutions to problems.
Wikipedia banning the vast majority of AI-generated content is just the latest instance of the growing pushback we’re seeing to what GenAI does. Open source project maintainers are banning AI-generated PRs because the vast majority of them are crap that doesn’t add value. This doesn’t mean that GenAI isn’t capable of impressive and genuinely useful things. But its utility still depends heavily on the skill of who is using it. And anyone who thinks this—or any other tool—can replace community and not destroy something truly necessary and valuable is sadly mistaken.
Software Development Roles: Lead versus Manager, Revisited
I first wrote about the lead vs manager distinction in software development in 2016. A decade later the line is blurrier than ever--and GenAI is part of why.
The original distinction was simple: if you spend half or more of your time writing code, you're a lead, regardless of what's on your business card. If significantly less, you're a manager. Organizations that keep those roles separate consistently ship better software and grow better engineers.
That's still true today. But GenAI has given companies a new reason to collapse these roles--and a new set of risks when they do.
Here's what's changed for each role:
For the Tech Lead:
GenAI raises the productivity floor for individual contributors dramatically. A skilled lead with strong AI tooling can produce what used to require a small team. Companies have noticed--and some are using this to justify asking leads to absorb management responsibilities. Don't be fooled by the productivity argument. Reviewing AI-generated code at scale, governing how your team uses these tools, and maintaining architectural integrity are already expanding the lead's cognitive load. Adding people leadership on top of that isn't a productivity gain. It's a recipe for the same burnout the hybrid role produced before GenAI existed.
For the Engineering Manager:
GenAI doesn't eliminate the core of the management role--it shifts it. The administrative overhead (status updates, reporting, some forms of performance documentation) should get easier. What doesn't go away: removing blockers, developing people, judgment calls about team direction, and now--understanding AI-assisted output well enough to hold your team accountable for it. AI-assisted--not generated--because people need to remain accountable for any and all software that ships. No blaming the AI for outcomes. Managers who stay deliberately close to how their teams are using AI will have a real edge over those who don't.
The job-search advice from a decade ago still holds: scrutinize the description, ask how the role is scoped, and look at the manager's span of control. What you find will tell you whether the company has thought clearly about these roles — or is using a familiar title to describe an unfamiliar burden.
Navigating the Great Delayering, Revisited
It’s been less than a year since I wrote this piece about engineering leadership inside a delayered organization. Here’s what I’ve learned since then.
When your rollup goes from 7 to 14 to 21 (or more) direct reports in short order, something has to give. What gives first is actually developing the people who report to you.
Delayering isn’t just a management inconvenience. It breaks the leadership pipeline.
In a healthy organization, people leadership starts small—a handful of reports, room to make mistakes—and learn from them, space to coach and be coached. Delayering eliminates that entirely. In my last organization, people leadership now starts with responsibility for two engineering teams. There is no shallow end of the pool anymore.
The way my last organization implemented delayering, team leads were turned into individual contributors with little warning beyond rumors on Blind. Imagine the whiplash of being promoted to lead a team in January only to be converted to a lead IC just a few months later. Nearly a year after implementation, there are still no clear growth paths or guidance to the next level for dozens of people in my line of business alone who went from being team leads with responsibilities for helping their direct reports shape their careers to individual contributors.
The ripple effects of delayering are real:
* 1:1 time shrinks. Feedback gets less tactically useful because the manager is too far from the work.
* aspiring leaders never get to test whether leadership is for them before being thrown into the deep end.
* senior ICs have to absorb mentoring responsibilities that aren’t formally recognized or rewarded.
* existing leaders get stretched until they break—and the institutional knowledge walks out with them.
The companies that leaned first and hardest into delayering (Meta in 2023, Amazon from 2024 to the present) have not obviously improved their products. In Amazon’s case, the combination of delayering, layoffs, and ramped-up GenAI usage has led directly to more frequent and severe production incidents. The already-fleeting margin improvements of delayering may yet turn into losses as a result.
When I evaluate my next role, among my first questions will be whether the professional growth of direct reports is a genuine leadership priority—not a talking point.
How I Created My First LinkedIn Carousel Post with Claude and Canva
A friend recommended I post more original content on LinkedIn as I enter the job market this year. Here’s how I used Claude, Canva, and other tools to create my first LinkedIn carousel post. First, I prompted Claude to look at my blog archive and curate the best 20 posts with career advice. Next, I asked Claude to convert one of the recommended posts into a LinkedIn carousel. After manually editing the HTML to update the content for the present, I opened up Canva and added screenshots of the HTML slides to a LinkedIn carousel template. After downloading the carousel in PDF format, I attached it as a document to a post and shared it with my network.
I’ve been blogging off-and-on for over 20 years, not always about my career, but enough that I expected there would be enough posts I could use as a starting point to share original content on a consistent basis. Here’s an outline of my initial Claude prompt that could be adapted and applied to any LLM:
<blog archive URL>
Review the provided URL and generate a table with the top <number of posts> links best suited to repurposed as LinkedIn posts. Each row should have the following columns: link to the blog post, <number of> items of key career advice the post contains, recommendation on whether significant rewriting is needed to make it relevant to the present day.
While I didn’t provide a persona in my prompt, I did provide details on how the response should be structured. Here is some of Claude’s “thinking” as it built a response to my prompt:
Now let me fetch the key career and leadership posts to understand their content before building the table.
I now have enough content from the key posts to build a comprehensive table. Let me compile this into a document.
Now I have enough content to build the full table. Let me create a nicely formatted HTML file with the table.
Here's your LinkedIn repurposing table with all 20 posts ranked and analyzed. A few highlights worth calling out:
Ready to post with minimal editing (5 posts): "Navigating the Great Delayering," "Tell Me About Yourself — Engineering Leader Edition," "Software Development Roles: Lead vs. Manager," "Idolatry of Innovators," and "The Problem with Exit Interviews" are all essentially evergreen and could go up this week with only length trimming.
...
Format tip: Several of these (especially #2, #11, and #13) would convert naturally into LinkedIn carousels — the structured advice translates well to a slide-per-point format.
Claude’s response was a nicely-formatted HTML table. The column with blog post links included the date of the blog post. The “rewriting needed?” column provided unexpected depth regarding the degree of rewriting needed, recommendations of specific updates to be made, even advice on the best time of year to share a particular post. The format tip which came just before the HTML table is what sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole to try and create a LinkedIn carousel instead of a traditional post.
Building on the output of the first prompt, and advice I read elsewhere regarding LinkedIn carousels, my next prompt was this:
As a LinkedIn content specialist, turn the contents of post #2 into a LinkedIn carousel of 5-15 slides in length.
Unlike my initial prompt, I did provide a persona. The range of slides gave Claude enought flexibility to size the content to a sensible number rather than stretching or cramming it into too many or too few slides.
The HTML version of the carousel looks great—I’ll definitely make future carousels I publish available in that format as well as in LinkedIn. The main goal was posting on LinkedIn though, so I pressed forward. On my Mac mini, I used Cmd-Shift-4 to screenshot each HTML slide as a image. Then I dragged and dropped it into the template pages and resized the images to fit. After downloading as a PDF (a few times as my final walkthrough of the output revealed some things I wanted to tweak), I uploaded and published the post to my LinkedIn network. In the future, I’ll make the posts open beyond my LinkedIn network for broader reach.
This story of the use of “less lethal” munitions brought to mind a weird idea: the goon squad has become the dogs they used to use on black folks protesting for civil rights. Only the federal government has unleashed them on everyone.
2 cases of tuberculosis detected at El Paso ICE facility - The Texas Tribune
Concentration camps of earlier eras in both American history and world history killed their occupants with diseases, inadequate sanitation, and overcrowding.
Jackie Kennedy’s 1964 Letter Comes Back to Haunt Trump - The Daily Beast
Jackie Kennedy had a clearer and deeper understanding of the dangers of political patronage and corruption than anyone who works in and for the White House today. If our country survives this moment, merely taking Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center might not be enough.
From the Equal Justice Initiative 2026 calendar:
February 1, 1965 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more than 200 others are arrested and jailed after a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama
This is the centennial Black History Month www.instagram.com/reel/DUM0…
A sinister (and unfortunately appropriate in this moment) transposition of the National Anthem.
An early Black History Month note: Dr. Gladys West, a sharecroppers’ daughter, laid the groundwork for the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Silicon Valley's Latest Crisis of Conscience Doesn't Impress Me
Anil Dash recently shared this N.Y. Times piece about the negative reaction within Silicon Valley to a number of CEOs attending the screening of an Amazon-produced documentary about Melania Trump. Dash has been consistent for many years in encouraging people in tech to vocally oppose things that are wrong and uses this story for the same purpose. The piece links to an open letter calling for ICE to leave our cities. But I’m unimpressed by this latest crisis of conscience in tech because of their lack of introspection regarding how their treatment of women and underrepresented minorities over many years contributed to our current environment.
I fully understand the shock and anger over our government’s murder of Alex Pretti. But I can’t help but contrast that to the lack of reaction to Andreesen Horowitz hiring Daniel Penny as a deal partner, soon after his acquittal for strangling Jordan Neely to death on the NYC subway. Venture capital as an industry has funded startups with black founders at a rate of just 0.4%. The same Jeff Dean quoted in the N.Y. Times piece saying “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this,” also fired Timnit Gebru under questionable circumstances in 2020. Google would go on to fire Margaret Mitchell, co-founder of their AI ethics unit early in 2021. Both Meta and Amazon embarked very quickly on a full-scale retreat from their DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s re-election in 2024. In this respect, they followed the lead of Elon Musk, the founders of Basecamp, and the CEO of Coinbase in becoming “anti-woke”.
The tech industry consistently fails to see the connection between how the way they devalue their employees enables the ways Trump’s regime devalues everyone. We are living through every warning about AI that the women researchers followed and interviewed in the documentary Coded Bias gave us 6 years ago. This morning’s news brings word that Amazon is cutting another 16,000 jobs, supposedly because of AI improvements. Meanwhile, some of the most prominent usages of GenAI include generating CSAM and the Trump administration altering photos in support of their mass deportation agenda. The data center that powers Grok has been poisoning the air in a predominantly black community in Memphis for some time now. GenAI as an industry is built on industrial-scale theft of copyrighted works—unfortunately aided and abetted by at least one federal court ruling so far. Without exception, the CEO of Anthropic argues against regulation of GenAI even as he warns of it stealing jobs, all while raising billions of dollars.
Criticism of an out-of-control and unaccountable federal government is good and necessary as far as it goes. But absent the industry doing some serious introspection and taking action to undo the broader harms to people they are enabling and actively engaged in, it looks like virtue signaling on the way back to business as usual.
Majoring in Minors
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s response to a journalist asking what questions she would pose to the administration regarding Venezuela’s future frustrated me.
Warren’s framing of Trump’s kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro as a violation of his campaign promise to lower prices serves as an egregious example of “majoring in minors”. She didn’t use the word “illegal” even once to describe what Trump did, despite the clear violation of international law. She didn’t talk about the administration’s failure to get permission from Congress before this action. She effectively treated this illegal action as normal. She and her team chose to put this clip out on social media so they must think it’s good messaging!
If a journalist asks about Venezuela, lead with the illegality of what Trump did. Talk about the potential consequences for everyone who followed those illegal orders. Talk about the murderous boat strikes—also illegal. Talk about the mass deportations of Venezuelans to a country our State Department has announced is no longer safe for Americans there.
Better yet, talk about ICE invading American cities and kidnapping people just like Special Forces did in Venezuela. Talk about ICE murdering innocent people, just like Trump’s operation in Venezuela did. Compare Trump’s actions in Venezuela and his threatened action in Greenland to Putin invading Ukraine. And above all, remind people all the Epstein files still aren’t released—yet another illegal action by the Trump administration.
The thin line between entertainment and war
There may not be a more apt lyric to describe our present moment than that repeated line from No Shelter, a single from the otherwise forgettable soundtrack of the Godzilla movie from nearly 30 years ago. We’re a couple days into the aftermath of Donald Trump ordering the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro (and his wife), to stand trial in New York for violating U.S. law. Our president–who was elected and re-elected in large part because he played a successful businessman on reality TV–didn’t just order and monitor this raid from his tacky and unsecure club in Florida, he made sure pictures of him looking serious were sprayed all over social media.
In the lead-up to the blatantly-illegal kidnapping of a foreign head of state, the might of the US military has been given the task of blowing up defenseless speedboats and killing their occupants in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific on the suspicion (which has yet to be proven) that they are carrying illegal drugs. The Trump administration shared drone footage of at least one such boat being destroyed by a missile.
Whether it’s Trump, or Pete Hegseth, or Stephen Miller, or anyone else in his administration, it really seems that they engage in war and cruelty for entertainment. Social media accounts run by government officials regularly post either insulting AI slop, or ads that clearly reference fascist and white supremacist imagery from the past. Today brought news that someone used non-public information to bet on Polymarket that Maduro would be captured and netted over $400K on a wager of a little over $32K.
Even worse, it’s entirely possible that Maduro’s kidnapping is just the start of this latest escalation of Trump’s lawlessness. Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico could be next. It seems the only lyric of No Shelter that didn’t age well after all this time was “Trade in ya history for a VCR”.
Linux on the Desktop Revisited
I write blog posts primarily for myself, and the post I wrote about running Linux on my Google PixelBook back in 2022, came in handy as I set up the replacement for that Google PixelBook today. I bought an open-box Galaxy Chromebook Plus for under $600. Thanks to that old blog post, I was able to install the Debian version of Slack and Chromium and run it just like I do on my other devices (since there hasn’t been a version of Slack that runs on ChromeOS for years). I’ve also installed Visual Studio Code on the Debian Linux available on this Chromebook Plus. We’ll see if I can get a useful application written using this new device this year.
Compared to my old PixelBook (which now gets used very occasionally for my twins therapy appointments when they happen virtually instead of in-person), this Chromebook Plus is just as light (if not lighter), very thin, has more ports, and a bigger screen. This translates to a keyboard that has enough room for a number pad on the side. This device is my only personal laptop, having replaced my 16" MacBook Pro with a Mac mini M4 in late 2024 since I rarely took that laptop on personal travel.
This Chromebook Plus came with a free year of pro access to Gemini. I’ll do some prompt comparisons with Claude, which I used to experiment a bit with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to try their weather server and MCP client demos last year. I’ve been paying for the $20/month Pro plan for a bit and it’s been an improvement over my experience with Perplexity for the most part–but it’s had some hallucination issues. Other Google-specific stuff I will play with primarily on this machine includes NotebookLM, Whisk, and Flow (AI tools for generating audio, images, and videos from a variety of sources).
Revisiting Octavia Butler
If you love science fiction, I strongly recommend you spend an hour listening to excerpts from Octavia Butler’s fiction and interviews with authors she inspired in this Throughline episode of Winter Book Club.
I was thrilled to learn that Nnedi Okorafor--an excellent science fiction author in her own right—was as blown away by Wild Seed as I was when I first found it at the library as a teenager many years ago. As we enter year two of the second Trump administration, Parable of the Sower reads like prophecy. So it was important to be reminded that Butler looked at and listened to Ronald Reagan during his days as governor of California and extrapolated forward from there.
My list of “must-read” books didn’t need to grow any longer, but this podcast definitely added some titles to the list. In addition to revisting Butler’s Patternist series, Babel-17 (by Samuel R. Delany) is now on loan in my Libby app. I read Noor last year, and had planned to read more of her but the mutual Butler fandom has accelerated those plans for sure. I’m long overdue to read book 2 of N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities duology. It’s been too long since I’ve read any P. Djeli Clark (The Black God’s Drums was my introduction to him). I’ve heard Ring Shout is excellent, so that goes in the list for sure.
The New Year Brings The Same Dangers to Democracy
To kickoff my 2026 posting, I’m sharing this story from ContrabandCamp, on the anniversary of Medgar Evers’ birth. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court is poised to deal a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act—legislation which finally made this country a democracy for its black citizens as well as every other.
It’s tragic that a country which turns just 250 years old this year seems hellbent on returning to a past that was more violent and less free—while certain people pretend that isn’t exactly what’s happening. ContrabandCamp and other independent media organizations provide a vital counterweight to a mainstream media that has helped normalize the sort of gutter racism we haven’t seen since the days of civil rights leaders like Evers being murdered.
If you follow me on social media and you’re interested in supporting and sharing independent media more widely, reach out to me via direct message on whatever platform you see this post. I will share the five gift subscriptions I have to ContrabandCamp with the first five responses I see.
I wish everyone who reads this all the best in this year.
2025 Wrapped: Charitable Giving Edition
This post is my annual self-reminder to support worthy causes financially. If it encourages others to do so as well, so much the better.
Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving
In addition to tithe and offering to my home church, Sligo Seventh-Day Adventist Church, I gave an offering to Revision Church Atlanta. I only attend online, but gained enough from the sermons and worship see there nearly every week that it seemed appropriate to donate. I gave to Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington also. While I didn’t mention them in prior year-end charitable giving posts, the Helping Hands Sabbath School in Nashville, Tennessee is Bible study conducted via Zoom that I attend most Saturdays and help facilitate monthly. Along with donating my time as a facilitator, I contribute funds each month. Some of them they used to help a church in Jamaica recover from damage caused by Hurricane Melissa.
Other Charitable Giving
World Central Kitchen is new to the list of donation recipients this year. I donated to them in support of their efforts to feed starving people in the Gaza Strip. I’ve admired their efforts to feed the hungry in disaster zones and war zones for years but hadn’t donated to them before now. They’ve also been quite active domestically, providing clean water to families in Asheville, feeding firefighters in Los Angeles as they battled wildfires, and families recovering from floods in Texas.
Also new to the donor recipients list this year is ITSMF. The purpose of this nonprofit is to prepare people you don’t typically see in executive roles (women & minorities) to become candidates for and to excel in such roles. They’ve really helped me grow professionally, so I helped raise money from my Managment Academy cohort—Onyx 81—and contributed my own funds as well.
When Trump and the GOP zeroed out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I increased my donations to both local and national public media.
- Information Technology Senior Management Forum (ITSMF)
- ProPublica (monthly donation)
- International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) (monthly)
- World Central Kitchen
- RAINN (monthly)
- Internet Security Research Group (the organization behind letsencrypt.org) (annual donation)
- Wikimedia Foundation (annual)
- freeCodeCamp (monthly)
- Internet Archive (annual)
- Equal Justice Initiative (annual)
- The Bail Project (monthly)
- Capital Area Food Bank (annual)
- Friends of the Library Mongtomery County, MD (annual)
- WETA (monthly)
- WAMU (monthly)
Other Giving
What follows is a list of tip jars, Patreon memberships, Substack subscriptions, and other avenues I use to support worthy causes.
- Flaming Hydra
An independent collective of writers I began supporting this year, edited by Maria Bustillos. - ContrabandCamp
Another collective led by Michael Harriott, a writer whose work I’ve followed from his days at Very Smart Brothas, to The Root, to this latest venture. - Leah Sottile
She’s a journalist whose work I first began following in 2019 with her Bundyville podcast. She is the best and most prescient writer about right wing extremists in the western United States bar none. When she posted on Bluesky that her latest investigative podcast, Hush, was cancelled by Oregon Public Broadcasting—taking away the vast majority of her income and all of her health insurance—I subscribed to her newsletter immediately. - emptywheel
The blog of independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, she's effectively become the ombudsman of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. She doesn't just call out shortcomings and failings in their coverage, she clarifies issues that might otherwise be confusing. She's one of just two journalists I value enough to support directly. - The Contraband Wagon
I initially met him through Twitter, and he's taken on the exceedingly difficult challenge of creating constructive conversations on the issue of race. I had the honor of being a panelist for one of the live conversations he moderated on the issue of race in the tech industry. You can find clips of his conversations on YouTube and join his Patreon to get the full-length conversations. - Mastodon
I began supporting the Mastodon project through Patreon in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over Twitter. As we've watched Musk turn Twitter into a propaganda and disinformation platform to (unfortunately successfully) elect Donald Trump, those of us with the means putting money behind efforts to help decentralized social media networks succeed will only grow more important. They recently began selling merchandise which also helps support their operations, which gave me an excuse to buy a stuffed version of their mascot. - Hachyderm
Hachyderm.io is the Mastodon server I moved to in 2023. I sponsor them with a small monthly contribution via GitHub. - Blacksky
Created and maintained by Rudy Fraser, it is effectively its own social media network for black folks on Bluesky that leverages the AT Protocol. I began contributing to his work this month via Open Source Collective, a fiscal host for numerous open source projects I used back when I was still writing software full time including webpack, vue, ESLint, and thousands of others.
Beyond the individuals and collectives listed above, I’m currently donating my time as an assignment grader to a handful of students in the current Management Academy cohort.
I also donated time through my employer to a local charity A Wider Circle, and some peer training efforts for new hires.
Giving Plans for 2026
I expect my charitable giving plans next year to look a lot like this year’s plans.
2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 2)
Despite most of the movies and shows I watched being on (too many) streaming services, it proved more difficult than I expected to get a “Wrapped” summary of what I watched on each of them this year. What follows is an incomplete list of what I most enjoyed watching in 2025.
Andor
I’ve written about Andor already this year, but it’s worth reiterating just how good this show was. It's the best live-action Star Wars outside of the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. It rivaled the best shows on TV this year for quality regardless of genre. Trump’s second term made the show painfully-relevant to our present.
Adolescence
As a parent to twin 10-year-olds, the most terrifying 4 episodes of TV I watched all year when it comes to the impacts cyberbullying on children. Even though it’s set in the U.K., the ways young people have their own language, the cluelessness of police to what’s happening under the surface, the parents of the young boy trying their best but still feeling overmatched—all of it felt uncomfortably universal. It’s the only thing I watched this year that I recommended to another friend of mine with kids as a show worth watching. Disappointed as I was that Andor didn’t bring home any major acting awards, Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper really did earn the Primetime Emmys they won with their heartbreaking portrayals of father and son.
Dope Thief
This show was very good, and very stressful, primarily because of Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura’s portrayls of Ray Driscoll and Manny Carvalho. Small-time crooks get baited into a much bigger score than they can handle and so many things go tragically wrong. Corrupt cops, cheating, betrayal, addiction, grief, a gunfight outside a hospital—this show packed a lot of story into just 8 episodes.
Down Cemetary Road
Based on Mick Herron’s very first novel, this show skipped over a bunch of others in my too-long queue of show to watch—and it was worth it. Emma Thompson is great as a sleazy, sort of punk rock private investigator named Zoë Boehm. Ruth Wilson (an actress I’ve enjoyed watching since she first appeared in Luther) is fun to watch as Sarah Tucker. The show gives you a bit of the dysfunctional government agent bits we see in full flower in Slow Horses, but is primarily a mystery. There are 3 more Zoë Boehm novels. Perhaps Apple TV+ will put all the rest of them onscreen.
F1
One of just two movies this year I made a point of going to a theater to see, it delivered on the visuals and the sound that I expected from a movie about modern F1 racing, with the unexpected bonus of a 24 hours of Daytona preamble. Really impressive that Brad Pitt and Damson Idris really were driving those cars in excess of 180mph on camera. Not the best racing moving storywise (Rush was better), but a fun movie to watch.
Foundation
Season 3 of Foundation, while it has key differences from Asimov’s books in both characters and plots, is a show I really enjoyed. Lots of great acting performances here, especially Laura Birn as Demerzel and Lee Pace as Brother Day. I was blown away by the finale, and am very curious to see what Season 4 brings.
MobLand
A proper British gangster tale starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, & Helen Mirren. Mirren’s depiction of Maeve Harrigan in particular is amazing in this—a much different character than her potrayal of Cara Dutton in 1923. Playing opposite Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, the dynamic she creates is adversarial. I really hope this show gets another season.
The Pitt
Noah Wyle in a medical drama that wasn’t ER was one of the best things I watched this year. Despite some of the legal drama regarding whether or not it was an ER sequel, this show was much better than any ER sequel could have been. The entire season spanning a single shift, the flashbacks to COVID, the casting, the acting performances, setting it in Pittsburgh, the storylines (addiction, budget concerns, PTSD, burnout, etc)—every choice just worked. Season 2 starts January 8 and I’m looking forward to it.
Severance
Despite an awfully long hiatus between the first season and the most recent one,
Sinners
I made a point of seeing this movie in the theater on the biggest screen I could find because I watched Ryan Coogler geek out on film formats for about 11 minutes. An excellent story about racism, blues music, and colorism (and vampires both metaphorical and real) in 1930s Mississippi. The depiction of Delta Chinese people in this movie was spot-on, according to a documentary I’ve seen on Chinese folks in the Mississippi Delta. The same is true of the Choctaw people who appear briefly in the film hunting the vampire Remmick.
Slow Horses
Espionage is probably my favorite genre outside of science fiction, and the latest season of Slow Horses was excellent. This crew of mostly-failed MI-5 agents balances the serious and the funny very well. Gary Oldman as the profane and broken-down Jackson Lamb is the polar opposite of the capable and competent George Smiley he depicts in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I’ve read all of Mick Herron’s Slough House series except the latest—Clown Town—which released just this year. I sincerly hope Apple TV+ decides to put the entire series onscreen because they’ve done a great job with the first five novels.
Task
From the same creator behind Mare of Easttown, this show is another crime story set in Pennsylvania with a similarly grim tone. As in Dope Thief, some motorcycle gang members serve as key villians in this one too. Mark Ruffalo was excellent in this as an FBI special agent who was formerly a Catholic priest. It was very interesting to see Fabien Frankel and Thuso Mbedu in their roles here having and enjoyed their performances in House of the Dragon, The Underground Railroad, and The Woman King.
Tour de France: Unchained: Season 3
I haven’t been on a bike in years, or come anywhere near competing, but this documentary was compelling to watch.
2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 1)
Since Spotify and YouTube have started puttting out their “Wrapped” summaries of what we’ve been listening to and watching all year, I’ll use them as the impetus to discuss other media I’ve found interesting this year.
Books, Ebooks, & Audiobooks
Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford, was an amazing listen as an audiobook. Andy Ingalls narrates a murder mystery set in an alternative 1920s America where Native Americans thrived instead of nearly being wiped out by genocide. The same author previously wrote Golden Hill, another work of historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary War New York City that I will definitely check out soon.
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi, is a sci-fi story with black protagonists that plays with one of my favorite story elements—time travel.
Guardians of the Whills, by Greg Rucka, gives the reader some backstory for Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, who we see in Rogue One. I’d long ago fallen out of the habit of reading Star Wars novels (Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy is probably the last set I read) but Andor finishing up in May this year nudged me to check this out. It wasn’t a long book, but it did a nice job of fleshing out the characters, their friendship, and their motivations.
Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey, is the final novel in The Expanse series. It was a fitting end to a great series.
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, deserved the Pulitzer Prize it won for fiction. Published in 2022, this modern reimagining of David Copperfield may be truer than anything J.D. Vance ever wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. Here are a couple of choice highlights from my reading of the ebook:
“The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpost of hopeless futures. Goddamn.”
“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed."
Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, was a very engaging sci-fi novel set in Nigeria that brings in ideas about biotech, climate change, and the nature of humanity.
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, is being turned into a movie just like The Martian. The latest story goes much further afield than Mars, and is also a rescue mission—only with much bigger stakes. Not a short book at nearly 500 pages, but I was sucked in by the story and the protagonist so it took me about 7 hours to finish over the course of a few days.
YouTube
I spent a lot more time on YouTube this year than I expected. I blame the YouTube Premium trial for exposing me to a product so much better than the ad-supported version I may never be able to quit. My primary use case is watching church services (one from a church in Atlanta, another in Virginia). According to YouTube’s recap I also watched a lot of electric car reviews. Due largely to my obsession with Andor, I also watched a lot of videos from the GenerationTech channel.
Perhaps the most useful thing I started watching just this month (and expect to be watching and coding along with well into 2026) is an old series by Immo Landwerth where he builds a compiler from scratch.
Spotify
According to this year’s Spotify Wrapped, my listening age is a laughably young 36. I have no idea how they calculate these ages. I figured all the soundtracks and classical music I listen to would have skewed things more toward my actual age (51). I did listen to GNX and Let God Sort Em Out quite a bit though, so maybe they’re the culprits. In truth, since my Spotify account is the one we use with Sonos, the music we play for our twins every night to fall asleep to is probably the main thing pushing that age downward.
Because I commute from Maryland to northern Virginia for work a few days a week, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. The main one I listen to is The Daily, from The New York Times. Lately I've been listening more to Apple News Today (audio). My primary podcast app is Overcast, where I listen to shows like Fresh Air, Embedded, Hanselminutes, Reveal, and Throughline. Overcast doesn’t have a “Wrapped” feature, but Harold Martin on Reddit built a couple of projects to explore your listening habits and create a personal episodes page that I might need to explore.