Weekly Pull Request: August 23rd, 2026

👋 Hey What’s up! My name is Shawn, but you can call me “Paps”. I am a Software Dev & Photographer writing to you from Tampa, Florida. This newsletter is all about bridging the gap between tech & creativity, and helping you build your creative life and/or career. If you’re new here, thanks for looking. Consider subscribing or supporting if you like this week’s article!

I recently had the opportunity to shoot for Yaleo: the Ultimate Santana Experience. In fact, I’m flying out to Utah with them this week to capture their show at Edward A. Kenley Centennial Amphitheater. Stoked is an understatement.

Anyways, connecting with Yaleo brought me back to Carlos Santana’s catalog and I’m glad it did. His guitar playing is iconic, and these songs bleed passion, love, and feeling.

If you’ve never listened to Santana, I highly recommend diving into his catalog. There is something for everyone.

And if you catch yourself out in Utah on August 29th, come check out Yaleo. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Continuing my adventures into Linux land, I decided to give Omarchy a try. Omarchy is an opinionated version of the more complicated (and most fun) version of Linux, Arch.

I really enjoyed Arch when I installed it earlier this year, but did not enjoy the maintenance side of things. Having to maintain my own app updates & OS updates manually, alongside knowing that I was one busted package away from bricking my system was a pain in the ass.

Omarchy aims to eliminate that. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson, aka “DHH”, Omarchy gives you a better experience with Arch. Think of it like the MacOS of Arch Linux. It is designed with intent to give developers and tech nerds the tools they need right out of the box.

I opted to set up my gaming pc in a dual boot configuration, where I have both Windows and Omarchy installed. I gotta say, it’s nice to play around in Linux again.

While shooting for Yaleo this week, I got to finally put my newest piece of kit through it’s paces, and my was I blown away. This lens is tack sharp, and perfect for my concert photography setup.

Here are a couple of shots from the show using this lens:

Stay Creative, Stay Caffeinated.