In November, we rented a house in Indio with our friends, and drove down to Southern California. Oddly, I didn’t take any photos at the house, but I took a bunch on the couple of trips we did into Joshua Tree National Park that week. More...
In previous years, when fire season came around I took photos of the city skyline, complained about the raining ash, and marveled at how fires hundreds of miles away can impact our daily lives so much. Unfortunately, this is something I’m used to now, but yesterday was different. The air quality has been much worse than it was yesterday, even in recent weeks, but the sheer mindfuck of seeing the whole city shrouded in orange from dawn to dusk made it a truly surreal day.
I took most of the photos below around 1PM. There’s minimal postprocessing, and the little color correction that I did was to get the white balance closer to reality, instead of the reddish tones that the camera applied to the photos. If anything, these look a bit over exposed, brighter than reality. We’ve worked hard on making our cameras capture light to seem realistic under normal conditions, so it’s easy to forget technology does not actually capture reality. It’s hard to get this right. The map is not the territory. More...
The first weekend after I got back to the US, Amol and Annabelle invited us to drive down to Monterey with them. Because of the fires, and because of COVID, we weren’t sure the trip was going to work out, but it did, and I took a ton of photos. More...
A few months ago, as the prospect of replacing my individual contributor (IC) hat with that of an engineering manager started to become real, I did what anyone who knows me would expect me to do: I dug up management books from my to-read list, and asked friends for recommendations of what to read first. Opinions varied, but Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager kept popping up as a practical one to start with. Continue reading...