A few weeks ago the Z Upper Right Assembly broke on my Mini 2. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong I only knew that the tool head couldn’t raise on the right-hand side. In an email to Adrian (at Lulzbot) we figured out the part had a hairline crack. In a year without covid I could have gone down to LVL1 to make a replacement part, but not this year. Luckily Lulzbot was easy to get a print from, and really fast too (kudos to them, and that’s nice to know for the future).

I read a lot of books this year, but rarely write anything up after finishing them. While I don’t think I have enough to say about any one book after my first read, I want to capture a sentence or two about them to look back on, and to share with others. If I mention a book here that you want to talk about send me a message.

Last year I read the “The Checklist Manifesto” about the outsized impact a checklist can have on an individual and teams.

A few months ago I was reviewing a PR that handled relationships between entities. As I was working through the code I started to notice a pattern that made me go back to the original feature ticket for a quick review of the acceptance criteria. As I suspected there was a list of around 10 “if this then that” scenarios detailed, all of which manifested as conditions in the code. Grabbing a pen and paper I started to draw out the criteria and as I suspected all the scenarios were captured by relationships and operations for a Tree.

Over the last few years I built up a sprawling list of dependencies for my home project and blog workflow. Earlier this year I decided it was time to cut down on that list and host my service dependencies locally where I could. While it took me a while I reached a point where I no longer tweak the setup week to week and decided it was time to write up the process.