Take it Slow, Take it Fast
My first visit to the Fort Mason farmer's market combined with my first visit to a Hackathon.
I’m keeping to this food & garden theme and I love every minute of the writing and research. Behind the scenes: I’m also working on a project that combines technology with food. If you’re interested supporting me as I explore what we eat, plants, nature and the culture behind it all, here’s the link:
I began this week at a Hackathon. My first Hackathon!
Now, why is Lorraine going to something so technical after all these years of design, drawing, cooking and baking. Well, because I’m kind of lazy. And the idea of speeding up or automating a workflow sounds very appealing. Voice to text or parsing pages of PDF for ideas sounds like time saved! It’s not dangerous to want to improve your own quality of life. I also have approximately 204 ideas in various journals that I never implemented because “who has the time!” and with some kind of templates that I can simply speak code into I think I’m falling into the age of non-coding with excitement.
I learned about langchain, and scale.ai’s templates, and chroma, and embeddings, and watched young men tap tap tap away on projects they had already outlined excitedly the evening before the start of the 2-day event.
You know what? It was amazingly, blazingly!! fast-paced and inspiring, but here are two take-aways:
After Open AI’s announcement on no-code custom GPTs, a lot of what I was exposed to—especially in regard to what tools were being used—seems stale. Like days, just days and one company could swallow or at the very least really, really challenge another company’s business model!
If you put a bunch of engineers in a room without a product person, any mention of something akin to “who are we really building this for?” or “maybe we should talk directly to that person it’s being built for?” falls on deaf ears; unless, that person experienced enough to realize that trying to solve an invented problem is side-stepping.
But you know what made me really happy?
Going outside the building at Fort Mason and browsing the Farmer’s Market.
It’s the tail end of fig season in California and I was drawn in to a vendor that had 3 kinds of figs overflowing from little baskets.
No recipe here, no comment except that as I sat on my couch I was more than happy to stare out the window and enjoy each bite of candy sunshine.
Coming this month:
Early next week: I’ve commissioned my daughter Leila to create a Thanksgiving-themed graphic for next week’s specially themed Holiday newsletter!
Nov 15th Focus on Morocco starts: Moroccan Gardens
Nov 22nd Moroccan Food
Nov 29th A Moroccan Menu for Two