As Stephanie March first reported last month, downtown Minneapolis restaurant Monello (and sister basement bar Constantine) closed today. I also received the nicest email today from Young Chef (Mike DeCamp):

Eight years ago a small group of great people took a chance and came to work with me in a new hotel restaurant that we would call Monello & Constantine. Many of them I had worked with in the past and, as of right now, I still have the pleasure of working with them. I recall the questions of ‘why would the city need another “fine dining” restaurant?’ That answer made itself clear by the end of 2015 when we lost many of them to changing times. When we opened Monello it was in the height of what was the crudo phase in our fair city with three crudo focused restaurants opening in the same year. Monello was the last one standing through all that. We made it through the The Rolling Stones being our very first guests on day one. We made it through the Super Bowl. We had some fun offering you Mama DeCampos. We came up against a large issue with the pandemic, but that gave us the opportunity to introduce Dirty Sams. Through all that there was one of the greatest places that this city has ever had, Constantine. Constantine, what can you say. It is/was an amazing place, always true to itself and never changing too much. Small adjustments over the years in the food menu. Who remembers the mortadella hot dog and the foie gras nachos? Constantine had some great food and cocktails but the thing that made both of these spaces was truly the team. The front of house and back of house always made time to joke around and have a little fun and I think that translated to the laid back style of service. A laugh was never too far away in that large space. We made a lot of friends throughout the years and we will miss you! It was a pleasure to welcome you through the doors every time you joined us. Thank you for everyone who dined with us over these eight years. Without you we wouldn’t have been. You always made us want to do better and better each day. And lastly thank you to every single team member I had the pleasure to work with over the years and sorry for my grumpy ass from time to time.

I loved every minute of my time with each of you, you made me want to be a better person.

We ate at Monello a few times, including once as Mama DeCampos. We’ve also visited Jester’s P.S. Steak on several special occasions (and of course the burgers at Parlour Bar are stellar).

Thanks, Young Chef – you are truly a Minnesota treasure…

It’s almost time – the 2023 edition of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference starts next week in California. It’s now been 15 years since my last in-person WWDC and I can’t remember the last time I signed in to the developer site. But I did attend a bunch of them back in the day (four years in a row starting in 1998, then again from 2003 through 2008).

Most recent WWDCs have dropped all pretense of having an enterprise IT track and just focus on people writing code (which is perfectly fine – there are other options for Apple admins). It was always fun to be a developer party-crasher, though. And as Bynkii says, it’s really all about the people you get to meet while attending that makes it so special.

My Mastodon social community has a heavy Apple developer focus, so it’s been fun reading everything that people are getting excited for on day one. Personally, I’m not a fan of virtual reality googles, so those rumors don’t do much for me. Would probably be most excited about the 15-inch MacBook Air rumors if I wasn’t already locked in to my 14-inch MacBook Pro for the foreseeable future…

Keynote: Monday, June 5 @ 12:00pm central
State of the Union: Monday, June 5 @ 3:30pm central

Wow – May 27th really snuck up on me. It’s the 20th anniversary of the web publishing platform WordPress and I created a draft of this post nearly two months ago. Thank goodness Jeremy Herve published his WordPress story a few days early so I remembered to come back and finish before the big day.

I won’t rehash all the details of this site, as I tend to do that here every year on March 30th already (the anniversary of my first post). This site is the one I have used WordPress on the most, however, and is the one I focus on more than any other. That said, I have used WordPress on many other sites over the years, including charity golf and sports news sites, personal sites for friends and family and several private intranet sites for companies I have worked for over the years.

While I have never been skilled enough on the coding side to contribute to the project directly, I have leveraged WordPress to learn more about PHP, MySQL, Apache, Nginx and UNIX in general. I ran most of my WordPress sites on Mac OS X in the early days before migrating to a virtual Linux environment on AWS. While I’m still not a fan of the Gutenberg direction, I truly appreciate everyone in the WordPress community – both the paid pros and the volunteer experts.

Happy anniversary, WordPress – stay jazzy forever…