OKRs are one of those business ideas that are just simple enough to be dangerous. You think you understand it in a day, and you can see where your company is falling short: lacking focus and underdelivering. You see how clear, measurable goals could improve the situation. Here’s the one sentence version: You set objectives, and for each objective come up with several key results that you can measure to see if you met the objectives.

Every so often I’ll see a meme on Twitter like: and it makes me so mad. For good reason! OSS project repositories that support merge commits to main are usually littered with useless comments like: “Merge change from $USER, $PR”. It makes the commit history on main utterly useless and you get to check the various feature branches in a never ending snake of commits to find out what the hell changed.

Every so often I wonder if I’m making trouble for myself by doing all of my typing in vim. Writing for this blog, writing engineering plans and design documents, and writing code. There are tools that are made especially for doing these jobs, and vim certainly doesn’t have any facility for making diagrams. All vim can really do is edit a bunch of bytes, trying to represent them as formatted text.

I’ve spent a lot of time the last 3 years watching Umberto Eco’s sign’s of Ur-Facism manifest, and manifest, and manifest. I’ve seen a lot of things that I was raised to believe ~wouldn’t~ couldn’t happen here happen in sequence, with frightening speed. Out-of-control (willfully so) police beating and gassing people in the street, night after night after night. Destruction of public schools, along with requiring states fund religious schools. A Justice Department hell-bent on revenge for the President.

TLDR; I learned a bunch about rendering fonts and I thought it would be interesting to read about them from a programmer’s perspective. I gained a ton of empathy for type design and type-setting developers, as they work with a dizzying variety of screen resolutions, font styles, and a wide variety of device speeds to produce type that looks as good as it possibly can under harsh conditions. Background I’ve been working on a project involving a two-color e-ink screen.