Category: Uncategorized

Disclaimer: This post was written by ChatGPT.

It’s been quite a year for Ben Garvey in 2022. He traveled to a number of exciting destinations, including San Francisco, Austin, New York, Iowa, Maine, and Chicago. Along the way, he experienced some ups and downs, including the loss of his Uncle Mike and Aunt Betty, who he’ll always remember for their great laughs and sharp wits. Ben even recalls the time he tried to drive Aunt Betty back to the airport on the chaotic day of September 12, 2001.

Despite these losses, Ben had a lot to be grateful for in 2022. He made the move to a new house in Collingswood, NJ (where he’s lived for the past 12 years) and even got his company, Common Paper, accepted into the Y Combinator program. In his free time, Ben developed a number of new hobbies, including making clear ice for cocktails and pickled onions. He also had a lot of fun rating and charting 17 local pizzas with his hot, funny girlfriend Carolyn Busa.

Other highlights of the year included getting a Twin Peaks tattoo, watching his kids perform in plays like Urinetown, Matilda, and Murder in the Garden, and coaching an Odyssey of the Mind team to the world finals in Ames, IA (where they placed 11th in the world). Ben and his family also had the chance to spend some time in a cabin in Maine, where they got to see the incredible Milky Way.

In addition to all of these exciting events, Ben also attended weddings at Morris Abortetum and the music venue PhilaMOCA, dressed up as Nathan Fielder for Halloween with Carolyn, and even went to a wild dance party at the PUB.

As for media consumed in 2022, Ben had a wide range of interests. Here’s a list of some of his favorites:

Books
Such a Fun Age
Eragon
Fire and Blood

Movies / TV
White Lotus
Rings of Power
The Rehearsal
Succession
Search Party
Attack on Titan
Alllll of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings with Sasha
Terminator 1 and 2 with Owen (which was wild because he didn’t know the twist in T2)
House of Gucci (#boof)
1899

Music
ARTHUR
Charlotte Adigery
Mr Oizo
Mike Krol
Mitski

Ben also saw some great live music this year, including Snail Mail and Michael Imperoli’s band, Zopa.

Previous year end recaps:

2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011

From Ben:
I wanted to see if I could write my year end recap faster using an AI tool and since I’m publishing this almost two weeks into the new year I’d say it slowed me down. It was fun re-writing my prompts over and over and see what tweaks it would make. This is the prompt I gave chatGPT.

Write a definitive and fun year end blog post authored by Ben Garvey where he recaps the year 2022. Don’t write the entire the post as a bulleted list. Include everything below.

During the year he traveled to San Francisco, Austin, New York, Iowa, Maine, and Chicago. His Uncle Mike died and Aunt Betty died and he’ll always remember their laughs and sharp wits. Ben famously once tried to drive Betty back to the airport on the chaotic day of September 12, 2001. He moved and bought a house, but still in the same town he lived in previously (Collingswood, NJ) for the last 12 years. His company, Common Paper, was accepted into a program at YCombinator. He got really into making clear ice for cocktails. He got into making pickled onions. He rated 17 local pizzas and made some charts about them with his hot, funny girlfriend Carolyn Busa. He got a twin peaks tattoo that he loves. He watched his kids perform in plays called Urinetown, Matilda, and Murder in the Garden. He coached an Odyssey of the Mind team to the world finals in Ames, IA where they placed 11th in the world. He and Sasha and Owen stayed in a cabin in Main and got to see the incredible Milky Way. He went to weddings both at Morris Abortetum and the music venue, PhilaMOCA. He and Carolyn both dressed as Nathan Fielder for Halloween. He went to a wild dance party at the PUB of all places. What a year.

The title of the blog post should be “Best things this year 2022”

Don’t finish the blog post with a conclusion or any paragraph that starts with “overall” or “all in all” Don’t say, “it’s been a wild ride” or anything like that.

At the bottom of the post, add in bulleted lists for various media consumed this year.

Books: Such a Fun Age, Eragon, Fire and Blood

Movies / TV: White Lotus, Rings of Power, The Rehearsal, Succession, Search Party, Attack on Titan, Alllll of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings with Sasha, Terminator 1 and 2 with Owen which was wild because he didn’t know the twist in T2, House of Gucci (#boof)

Music: ARTHUR, Charlotte Adigery, Mr Oizo, Mike Krol, Mitski. I think the only bands I saw live in 2022 were Snail Mail and Michael Imperoli’s band, Zopa.

Write a vertical list of years that I can link to for previous recaps from 2022 to 2011.

Write a disclaimer at the start that says, “This post was written by ChatGPT” only

I’m going to type the same prompt next year and see if I get a better response. The tools will improve, but for now it gives an acceptable response only if you don’t care about the voice at all. Everything sounds like bland SEO content. You get something ok quickly, but writing something good takes hours and getting something great might be impossible. For now.

The AI didn’t generate, organize, or select any of those images. That takes the majority of the time here, even with some improvements in WordPress’s UX. Maybe it will do that for me next year.

I did have a ton of fun making images with MidJourney

I should have given chatGPT more details on my travel, which was extensive over the last few years. I had a great time in DC (visited friends and stayed at a hip hotel), Maine (hiking, stars, and the most amazing cabin), and Austin (Barton Springs).

One other accomplishment I’m proud of is that I finally, finally, finally moved all my websites off of the webhost I’d used for over 20 years. That was the project forever on my todo list.

I ended the year on kind of a rough note, throwing my back out on NYE while painting Sasha’s bedroom. I could hardly walk or get out of bed for 4 days but seem to be ok now. That’s mostly why this post is later than usual.

Over the last year Sasha got way into Ramen. She’s soft boiling eggs, making her own broth, growing basil, making me take her to the best Philly spots (Hiro, 11th & Chestnut), etc. but after a lot of trial and error I think we’ve settled on a god tier ramen recipe that’s easy to make. It’s vegetarian (and I think vegan if you skip the egg).

Serves 2 people

Ingredients
2 packs of Soy Sauce instant ramen
Some mushrooms
Vegetable oil (Grapeseed or canola oil are fine)
2 eggs
Green onion (you have some growing in your kitchen right?)
Sesame seeds
2 cloves fresh garlic for mushrooms
3 cloves fresh garlic for chili oil
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tsp red pepper flakes
Trader Joe’s umami seasoning

Mushrooms
Chop up the mushrooms and 2 cloves of garlic. Sautée them together in a pan with some oil and sprinkle some of the umami season in there. You won’t need a ton for the ramen, but save whatever you don’t need and use in tomorrow’s batch.

Soft boiled eggs
Bring some water to a boil. Make a separate ice bath with some ice cubes and water. Carefully put in the eggs and boil for 6 minutes, then move to the ice bath for 4.5 minutes. Peel the eggs and set aside until the ramen is done. Some people think its easier to peel them under cold running water, but I don’t. If at all possible, make someone else do this for you.

Chili oil
Put sesame seeds, chili powder, red pepper flakes, chopped green onion (chop with scissors), and chopped garlic in a mixing bowl. Heat a small amount of vegetable oil in a pot until it is hot, then pour into the mixing bowl. It’s magical. Stir it a little. If you want to get real fancy, add whatever else you want here, too. Ginger, basil, etc.

Ramen
Make the ramen as usual, but use 3 cups of water instead of 4. Add a pinch of salt to the water. Boil the noodles for just under 3 minutes and add the seasoning packs. Split the ramen evenly into two bowls. Stir in 2-3 spoonfuls of your chili oil. Toss in some mushrooms. Cut in half your soft boiled eggs and place one in each bowl. Scissor chop more green onions on top and sprinkle more sesame seeds. Take a photo for the gram and watch the fire emoji roll in.

If it’s not salty enough, add a little soy sauce, but otherwise it should be incredible.

Thank you to everyone who helped develop this recipe, mainly Sasha, Carolyn Busa, and the InstaNoodls guy on TikTok.

Recently I wrote a post about building tiny data pipelines with bash and the most common feedback was that people hadn’t heard of csvkit before. It’s fairly new to me, too, so here are some things to get you started.

CSV stands for comma separated values and it’s the most common data format for flat, structured data. This post is about a tool called csvkit that makes working with them easier.

csvkit isn’t just one program, its a collection of tools. I use in2csv and csvsql a lot, so I’ll talk about them first.

1. Convert json to csv. Use in2csv somedata.json > somedata.csv and it will create a csv with a header row based on the properties in the json object. If you need to go the other way, use csvjson somedata.csv > somedata.json.
2. Query your csv file like it’s a database. Maybe you want a local postgres instance, but I don’t. The one thing that tripped me up with this in the beginning was not knowing it used SQLite under the hood. Some of the SQL syntax is peculiar if you’re used to mysql or postgres. Doing your csv data transformations in SQL has a lot of advantages to to doing them in excel or code.
   csvsql --query "
select message as text, created_at from messages order by created_at desc
" messages.csv > tidy_messages.csv
   As I mentioned in my pipeline post, stick this command in a file and execute it with bash.
3. Date operations in csvsql. Let’s say you want to calculate the number of days between two dates, such as the number of days it took to merge a pull request. You can do this.
   csvsql --query "
select
id,
created_at,
merged_at,
julianday(merged_at) - julianday(created_at) as days_to_merge,
strftime('%Y-%W', merged_at) as year_week
from pull_requests
" pull_requests.csv > tidy_pull_requests.csv
   
   What is this julianday function? From the docs:
   The SQLite julianday function takes a date, allows you to apply modifiers and then returns the date as a Julian Day. A Julian Day is the number of days since Nov 24, 4714 BC 12:00pm Greenwich time in the Gregorian calendar. The julianday function returns the date as a floating point number.
   
   strftime is how dates are transformed or truncated. In this case, ‘%Y-%W’ gives you the week number of the year.
4. Combine a bunch of csv files together. When I wrote Haram Baby I found the data for the most popular babynames in each year, but it was spread out over 138 files, one for each year. They all used the same format and writing a script to combine them wouldn’t be too hard, but csvstack makes this easy. The command below combines 10 csvs from 2010 – 2019 into one file.
   
   csvstack -g yob2010.txt yob2011.txt yob2012.txt yob2013.txt yob2014.txt yob2015.txt yob2016.txt yob2017.txt yob2018.txt yob2019.txt > most_popular_baby_names.csv
   
   The -g modifier adds the filename to the column, so you can figure out which year it came from. This command is great if the files all use the same schema, but if they don’t there’s even a command for merging similarly constructed csv files called csvjoin. I haven’t used it yet.
5. Quickly remove columns. The baby name data broke the lists down by gender and I wanted to remove and reorder them, so the first step was to look at the columns in my new huge dataset.

csvcut -n baby_names_1880_2018.csv
1: year
2: rank
3: name
4: gender
5: total

The command below removes the rank and gender, which we won’t need because we’ll be re-ranking them. If all you need to do is remove columns, this is easier than writing sql.

csvcut -c 1,3,5 baby_names_1880_2018.csv > tidy_names.csv

I feel like I leveled up my data skills with csvkit, or at least made my process a little more sane.

I wrote about this on Medium recently.

I wrote a few blog posts for work using Medium and they were pretty good.

Use an Updated-At Column in Your MySQL Table (and make it update automatically)

Multidimensional Engineering Management

The latter even included my first published D3 block!

Medium is an interesting blogging tool. Sometimes I love the UI and sometimes I find it frustrating. The sparse UI reduces cognitive load and allows you to focus on writing, which feels great, but there were times when I just wanted to be able to type some html and it fought me on it. I settled for pasting it in from another site.

I don’t think I’ll continue doing it for any personal blogging. I want to own my own long form content and I think it’s important to keep your work in a place that won’t get shut down on a whim when the VC money runs out or if the parent company closes the door.