Speaking
My second LambdaConf talk was published: Seeing Like a Programmer: Resiliency, Limits, And Moral Hazards In Software Engineering.
This is the best talk I have ever given, and also by far the most important. You don’t need to be a software engineer or even to know all that much about software to appreciate this talk. (Some of the people I think need to hear it most are people who work with software engineers but who are not themselves software engineers!) I hope you will take the time to watch it!
Software development
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I landed a bunch of small-but-useful improvements to Volta this week. They ranged from getting a useful debugging build up for a particularly weird issue to landing long-blocked pull requests to simplifying some of our dependency infrastructure to improving the UX of certain failure cases. Nothing ground-breaking, to be sure, but a lot of incremental progress! Hopefully we’ll be able to coordinate releasing the 2.0 in the next week or two (nothing too exciting there, just dropping support for some now end-of-life Linux distros!).
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I also made some improvements to the little
count-mdtool I built a little while back, so it performs even better than it did before, and started working out how to open source it. Right now its code is part of a larger project which I intend to keep mostly closed-source, but this little CLI tool is a perfect candidate for open-sourcing. The main tools on the table aregit subtreeand josh workspaces. That’ll need some time to muck around with in its own right, though! -
I added the ability to post feed-only items to this site, which never appear directly on the site, including in the archives.1 The approach I took is a bit janky, but I am trying not to invest too much in this site infrastructure when I would prefer to spend that time working on my own site builder.2
Music
Another nothing-to-report week. I might get to some composing this evening? We’ll see! Mostly a case here of deciding I needed to focus hard on job-hunting, and so dedicating the hours outside consulting to working on finding or applying to jobs or to open source software that can help make my case for me (see above!). That leaves evenings and weekends, just like when I had a full time “day job”. I am going to be working to find a good rhythm for it so it does not get lost!
Writing
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My review of A Quiet Mind to Suffer With went live at The Gospel Coalition. I actually wrote this months ago, but editorial takes time! You might also be interested in my additional commentary on the review. I have a lot more thoughts on the subject of the book; but doing it in a book review would only have worked at
3 – 4 × the length and in a very different venue, I think! -
I finished my first round of revisions on the new chapter on async Rust I wrote for The Rust Programming Language! This was a huge bit of work, but I can safely say the revision is much stronger than the first pass. It is both much less flabby and at the same time actually covers more ground. Now to get other folks’ eyes on it!
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I got out one other short blog post earlier today, Fast Tools are Wonderful.
Reading
Back to my The Lord of the Rings reread on the fiction front and my slow push through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Career/etc.
Made some really promising forward motion on one role, and had multiple other companies I had applied to reach out to schedule interviews. Next week is going to be full on this front, if the current schedule stands! This was a really encouraging, particularly coming as it did after a patch which had not been particularly encouraging.
One thing I can say for sure: cold emails do sometimes work — and I have had more luck on that front than I have with “through the front door” applications on the various normal job boards.