Weeknotes 51

This week’s Song Exploder podcast about Different Trains by Steve Reich was wonderful. Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Reich about the 1st movement “America, before the war”. I enjoyed the fun technical details (early use of samplers and “more overdubs than The Beatles”) of course, but Reich’s recollections of his childhood travels between the East and West coast, his descriptions of the melodic character of the voices he used and why he didn’t want to “fix them”, and his explanation of why he chose to talk about the 1st movement instead of either of the other 2 were incredibly moving.

We started a small project with a startup, helping them build a basic data pipeline and some dashboards. I really enjoy this kind of work, I find the process of moving data around and cleaning it up very peaceful and satisying, and it’s great to be able to do a bit of analysis too. As the data gets tidier and more organised the analysis becomes easier and more powerful. I’ve been doing this kind of project for years now, but the tooling available now really makes a lot of things easier. I’m particularly impressed with dbt’s command line tooling and the way fivetran just does its thing and keeps out of the way.

On Saturday night I met some internet friends in real life. We went for a pizza and then to see Hainbach at Cafe OTO. I really enjoyed his set but the best bit was the opportunity to talk to people, make new friends and be out late in that London. I had a chat with Stefan (Hainbach) before the show, and one with Sam (Look Mum no Computer) after. I tried to pluck up the courage to talk to Steve Davis, who was also in the audience, but failed myself, and you.