Regular Communication #033
From Jason Rodriguez
This week brought another round of layoffs at Microsoft and GitHub. I'm safe still (my team is small, getting smaller through attrition, and—I'd like to think—vital to the marketing/sales/revenue orgs), but morale is noticeably—and understandably—low. A few people I routinely worked with got laid off, and the impact is being felt.
I’m mostly focusing on getting shit done as best I can, supporting other teams as much as possible, and doing non-tech stuff outside of work since the whole industry is so anxiety-inducing these days.
That means mostly playing music (trying to learn to write my own songs after playing other people’s my entire life), continuing to run consistently (I’m up to doing a 5k now!), reading, and doing family stuff. It’s hard to turn off work brain outside of working hours, but necessary.
How are you doing? Email me back and let me know.
Interesting Things
My friend and former colleague Chad S. White has just released the 4th(!) edition of his classic tome, Email Marketing Rules. Everyone that works with email mar- keting in any capacity should pick this one up. I had a fun time helping out with the cover again on this edition.
Jason Kottke's website just turned 25. That's a hell of a milestone. Still one of my all-time favorite websites and easily the one I've been following the longest.
Paul Murray has a very entertaining, funny, and sometimes depressing tale of his time spent in Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse. Worth the read.
I mentioned last email how sad I was at the apparent demise of CSS-Tricks with the firing of its longtime editor, Geoff Graham. Geoff posted a great tribute to the site in the form of his top 10 CSS-Tricks articles, the ones that truly stuck with him through the course of writing or editing around 3,000 (!) articles for the site.
Like Brad Frost, I too quit calling myself an artist at some point. Most likely for the reasons he's listed. But creating things has always been in my blood. It's probably time to embrace it more.
Ricky Mondello has some good advice.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link out to that demo for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Breath of the Wild is probably my all-time favorite game. I cannot wait to jump back into that world in May and take advantage of all the new mechanics they’re adding. It looks fantastic.
On Repeat
Nickel Creek’s new album, Celebrants, finally came out and it’s excellent. They’re all such absurdly good musicians and their songwriting is better than ever. I think the funnest track is Where the Long Line Leads. Sarah Watkins kills it on the vocals.
There are a few great videos of them doing it on YouTube, but my favorite has to be this one from CBS Mornings, primarily due to Chris Thile’s outrageous mandolin run at 2 minutes in. That last bit at 2:16 is amazing. I got my ticket to go see them live in July and I can’t wait to see stuff like that in person.
Find something to celebrate,
Jason
Thanks for signing up for Regular Communication. If you get sick of me,
Send your condolences, unused musical instruments, and favorite books to:
16914 Shrewsbury, Livonia, MI 48154