Question: What do you do at val.town? What's your day-to-day like?
Answer: It's a pretty small team and when I started it was just three of us, so I've done a lot of everything. More recently though, I do a ton of reviewing PRs and helping out with questions, and also a lot of engineering work on big features that we're trying to ship. Then a bit (not enough recently) of community support and business backend kind of stuff.
Question: What is your favorite monospace font?
Answer: I use PragmataPro every day when I'm writing code and in the rest of my terminal - I think it looks really good and is super readable.
Question: Any sports you wished you played?
Answer: It's be cool to play tennis and basketball, because both are easy to access in the city. All the activities I like are sort of focused on moving forward in one direction (running and cycling) so the agility is lacking.
Question: Have you ever been to Japan?
Answer: I have! Visited Tokyo, Yamanochi, and Kawasaki in 2015. Would love to go back, especially because I'm in the middle of reading Craig Mod's Things Become Other Things, which is all about living in and walking through Japan.
Question: what is your favorite city
Answer: New York City! Which is thankfully the city I live in. Objectively there are better cities in the world (Amsterdam, Tokyo, etc), but having friends & speaking the language bridges the gap.
Question: How do you post to your microblog?
Answer: I actually have a post on my microblog about just this: https://macwright.com/2023/12/14/blog-about-blog
Question: What is your third favourite dinosaur?
Answer: I don't have a good ready-to-go dino ranking but I do like the gastonia because it's very pokemon-esque and being armored at the skeletal level is nice.
Question: What are the most memorable live shows you’ve seen?
Answer: Seeing Wilco play in 2006 was a big one - for me, that's the peak of the music of theirs that I really love. More recently, I saw John Carroll Kirby perform and that was great - Logan Hone, their flutist, has an incredible stage presence.
Question: What kind of biking do you like to do and what are you favorite bikes?
Answer: Right now I'm very into anything that's very long distance and as separated from car infrastructure as possible - which means trails like the Empire Trail in NY, the C&O outside of DC, the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, etc. Used to be really into mountain biking and maybe I'll return to it someday if I have the time and the access to the outdoors. Bikes-wise, I love a good steel gravel bike right now, and there are a ton of cool ones being manufactured.
Question: During your career in the tech industry, have you ever experienced burnout? If not, do you fear it happening?
Answer: I've experienced burnout very often. I've dealt with it, mostly successfully, by constantly varying the kinds of things that I work on and giving myself a little grace when things aren't feeling as vivid as I'd like to. I don't really fear it anymore, but I do fear a more long-term decline in my belief in the space or my optimism about tech in general.
Question: Do you think you'll ever be pulled back in the direction of geospatial?
Answer: I think if I ever do, it'll be because I think I can do something useful, rather than a narrow focus on moving the technology forward or doing big fancy innovation. I think a bunch of Mapbox folks have ended up doing some of both - I've really liked seeing Nick Ingalls for example work on CloudTAK, an emergency responder system for Colorado. Something like that could be really cool and rewarding to work on.
Question: Favorite musical artists? Favorite painters or visual artists?
Answer: Hard to pick long-term favorites, but the musicians I'm really enjoying right now are Slow Mass (rock band from Chicago) and Mammal Hands (avant-garde Jazz from the UK). I really like Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler and my favorite piece of art that I own is a pen drawing by Everest Pipkin.
Question: Test question
Answer: Hello! This is tom!
Question: Name a feature of a programming language **that you use** but also think should be removed
Answer: In TypeScript, I use and like enums but they were totally a mistake - really all of the parts of TypeScript that are not erasable, I wish were never included in the language and instead were proposed as JavaScript core features. The constructor shorthand (like constructor(public foo: string)) is in the same bucket. It's just a little too magic to pretend that JavaScript has these features but in reality enums are integers and you can get into weird situations where you mix the two.
Question: if you could code one thing to change the world, what would it be?
Answer: That's a really hard question because I basically started my career high on the optimism of Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz and civic tech, and it's been a gradual decline ever since. There are a lot of ingredients to anything that changes the world - power, community, culture, luck - and in most cases technology is the least crucial part. The activist who keeps pushing on some issue for a decade and builds bridges changes a lot more for the better than the programmer, as far as I've seen, and I'm, to my own disappointment, not very good at community work yet.
So, what would change the world the most, one thing, with code? I would say total decentralization that works. Most decentralization either isn't total or doesn't work. Actually creating protocols that worked as well as iCloud or decentralized storage that really worked as well as S3 - that would inch the world along a little, and I think it'd make things a little better.
Question: whats your favorite peanut butter
Answer: There's this new brand called NuttZo that has not just peanuts but all kinds of nuts, it's very exciting. I think you can only get it at Costco though.
Question: What even is webassembly?
Answer: It's a psyop from Figma to trick people into burning VC money.
Question: What's your favorite color?
Answer: Yellow!