Speaking in public, mushrooms, and skincare

We're already 8.5% of the way through 2023.

Feb 1

Happy 2023, friends! It’s my first newsletter of the year, so I get to still say that. I can’t believe January is already over. Hope you’ve started to make some good progress on your goals for this year.

Some things I’m working on

It was preschool registration week for one of Everyoak’s preschools. I’ve done this enough times that I can do it with my eyes closed, so it went pretty smoothly.

We’ve started to record season two of the Engineering Advice You Didn’t Ask For podcast. Spotify Wrapped said we were in the top 5% most shared and top 5% most viewed (we’re an audio as well as video podcast) categories! Stay tuned and I’ll let you know when we start to release the episodes for this season.

Thiago Ghisi @thiagoghisi

Looking for Podcast Sponsors for @EngAdvicePod. DM me if you're interested. This week, @ramannoodlez, @keyurhindocha, @VicVijayakumar, @LBacaj and I started to record the second season of our podcast and we are looking for sponsors to help us to take it to the next level.

Finally, I’ve been invited to speak at a conference this year, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how that talk will go, and how many memes my slides should contain. It’s rather long at 30 minutes, so I’m stressing out a little bit about this. I intend for it to be a storytelling kind of talk to do with software engineering. If you have any advice for me, I’m all ears.

Some things I recently cooked

I think the best thing I’ve made this month has been a Mushroom French Dip au Jus which we enjoyed on a ciabatta with roast brussels sprouts on the side. I was inspired by this recipe but the actual mushrooms I used were baby portabellos and chanterelles.

The chanterelles were a poor choice - they easily fall apart. I should make this again with oyster/shiitakes.

Speaking of mushrooms, I also recently saw this recipe on Instagram, which I really want to pay someone else to feed to me but don’t want to have to make it myself.

Some things I’ve recently learned

Tim had a tweet about his skincare routine, and I asked what all he does, and a ton of people responded to me. One particular response sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole and I ordered myself a skin cleanser, retinoid cream (start slow with this if you do it), and higher SPF moisturizing face cream after watching a bunch of videos from dematologists on which products actually work.