The Season of Stamps

In 2026, for many white-collar workers, two circumstances have been very common:

1. They work remotely, from home; and
2. They spend a lot of that time talking to robots.

As a bit of bleak napkin math, I’d bet a good amount of money that most of my communication this year has been with robots, at work.

Despite how heavily my Season of Systems has skewed towards writing about LLMs, I don’t particularly enjoy talking to robots. On the contrary: they’re not a particularly great hang. Are they pretty damn good at writing code? Yes. Are they a good hang? Certainly not. They don’t make fun jokes in the group chat. They’ve got the vibe of the schoolkid who’d remind the teacher that they forgot to collect the homework. They can’t shoot the shit, for shit.

In many of the notes I’d consider to be highlights of the season– Software Gardening, Hostage Negotiations, many of the AI-related annotations– I talk about more effective ways to work with these very strange automatons that have started to run hog-wild across society. There is a part of me that does so in order to someday be a Very Good Engineer, but in another axis, it’s to minimize the amount of time I have to spend talking to the little bastards.

I’d still consider myself to be a generally lazy person: I like to maximize the amount of my time spent doing fun things, and minimize the amount of my time spent doing not-fun things.

Talking to robots is a not-fun thing to do.

People Being People

Sitting at home and babysitting robots, I sometimes feel shackled to my computer. While this is certainly not a great thing, it does make going out into the world feel far zestier. Especially when I’m out and about during the day, I’m not just leaving the house– I’m escaping. I’m running amok.

Since moving to Boston in August (I expected the move, but certainly couldn’t have predicted where we’ve landed), my favorite place to run amok has been Cambridge. One of my favorite things to do is to perch at a library, look out the window, and see all of the people just… walkin’ around.

In an hour period, I must see upwards of two or three hundred people going about their days, and not a single one of them is talking to a robot while they do it. Seeing people, in the world, being people? it fills me with a joy I can’t begin to describe. It makes me one to be one of those people, being people.

Season of Stamps

After really starting to settle into this new place and seeing how much life happens in a city like Boston, I’m ready to start winding down the Season of Systems. It has done great things in defending my time and minimizing the time I spend talking to robots, but that time isn’t worth anything if I don’t spend it doing the things that make me feel like a person.

After thinking about it for the last couple months, I’ve settled on Stamps as my new season. At a glance, it means… nothing, really. “Systems”, although broad, at least described the vibe pretty well. Stamps is definitely a callback to Rhythm, insofar as it needs a bit of explanation.

I think about Stamps in a few ways:

Stamp, like a passport

I’m hardly some kind of Mr. Worldwide, but whenever I see the two stamps in my passport (Sweden and the Netherlands), it’s a quick hit of nostalgia straight to the dome. There’s something about the stamp as the encapsulation of “I was there!” that is wonderfully satisfying.

Dropping into a new city, completely fresh, it has been my goal to just go… somewhere, anywhere, as often as possible. Of course, I’ve already started to develop favorites– Cambridge among them– but it’s so excited to feel like every new place is an adventure.

As part of Stamps, I want to explore– Boston, Massachusetts, the East Coast– and be able to say “Oh, I’ve been there!”. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new cafe, a new town, or a new state. I just need to go places, and do things[^1].

Stamp, like an envelope

I spent upwards of a decade in Salt Lake City, meeting people over the course of high school, into college, into the start of my career. Building up relationships over that long, it’s easy to get complacent in reaching out to folks. You get added to so many miscellaneous group chats, you become a regular at so many places, not much effort is required to find somebody to talk to at any point in time.

Moving to a new place, where you don’t know a soul? You’ve gotta get used to being the one who reaches out.

As part of Stamps, then, my goal is to make sure I’m reaching out to folks. Stamping the envelope and sending it out into the world. Some of that ends up being tightly coupled with “like a passport”– you can hardly find somebody to talk with if you don’t go anywhere, right?

I’ve had a great time attending local development meetups, ranging from formal seminars to casual grab-a-beers[^2], but that’s just starting a relationship: keeping up the momentum takes work, too, and that’s where “like an envelope” comes in[^3].

Stamp, like approval

“Like a passport” and “like an envelope” were both offshoots; “like approval” was the original source of the idea. “Stamps” came to mind when I saw a reference to the old “Official Nintendo Seal” that the company used to put on first-party products.

Growing up, my family had a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64, where that seal was prominently placed on the front of the cartridge itself. I chiseled away at that game for years, and the shape of the seal is stamped (ha) in my memory.

The origin of Stamps originated, admittedly, in a more work-focused mindset. I definitely don’t mean for Stamps to end up as work-oriented as Systems. However, I did a lot during Systems that I’m awfully proud of, but haven’t quite finished. Projects like Flowthru and Magic Atlas are functional, but they lack polish. There are some projects I have at work that are mostly there, but have some rough edges that need sanding down. I’m happy with the ideas behind concepts like software gardening, but after running it by some close friends, the narrative flow has much to be desired.

In all of these projects and ideas, I see a common pattern: they’re shaped, but their surfaces are rough to the touch.

I have a lot of things in my life that, quite literally, are not finished.

Stamps, to me, will be the season where I pay that extra attention to the last mile. That means giving a bit more attention to the packaging, not just the structure. It means polishing what I have before picking up something new.

It means: sign, seal, deliver.