I am going to try something a little new this week and for the foreseeable future: writing up a “weeknote” with a summary of the things I got done over the week that are of “public interest”, as it were. Being totally honest: this is part of an attempt to market myself a bit to potential employers (whether full-time work or consulting). I do a lot of interesting things day to day, but those are largely invisible at present, because I don’t have a daily standup or a weekly check-in or any such way of

So now I do. Hope it’s interesting to folks out there in the world!

Software development

• I made some headway on a small Mac app I am writing, which is a fun mix of SwiftUI and Rust. I may share it when I am done. I may not! It’s a good learning experience so far, and I am enjoying the work. It’s interesting to see how the things I know very deeply from web UI programming do and do not translate.

• I wrote a bunch more of a parser for a very small programming language I am working on. This one I am quite sure will only ever be for me (though I may open source it for curiosity’s sake when I am done). The point is to solidify a bunch of what I learned by reading PLAI and Crafting Interpreters: make it something that I can do rather than that I did once by following a book.

Music

I spent the afternoon on Tuesday trying to fix a significant structural issue with a large orchestral work. I succeeded! I ended up resuscitating an idea that didn’t work the first time I tried it, three weeks ago, and shoving it in new directions tonally and rhythmically. This time it worked, and that section now feels in need of polish, but no longer structurally incomplete. It felt good!

Writing

• This week’s visible progress on The Rust Programming Language was less than I hoped, but it wasn’t zero! I spent the week writing (and honestly, a lot of time stuck trying to figure out how to write) about the Stream API. It’s not quite done yet, but it’s getting there — I think I’ll finish a draft of the chapter next week. Then again, I said that last week. This kind of writing is slow going. We will see!

• I started two other small blog posts about things I noticed around the Rust ecosystem, which I hope I will publish over the weekend or next week. (Check in on the next weeknote and find out!)

Speaking

• I got roughly the first half of my StaffPlus New York talk drafted. My goal is to have the draft done at the end of next week, so that I can start doing dry runs and revisions on it. This first pass is very much a first draft, so I expect that I will end up with more content than time and cutting it down during revision, as usual.

  If you’re thinking that it’s wild to be doing the drafting now and dry runs and revisions in July for a conference in September, well: I have never been this far ahead before and let me just say that it is great. I prefer to give any talk at least five dry runs, each of which tends to produce meaningful revisions — and if I can give a talk ten or fifteen runs, that is even better.

• I ended up recording an episode of The Changelog along with Predrag Gruevski, talking about a bunch of the same themes as I discussed in The Cutting Edge of Versioning at LambdaConf 2024

Reading

Robin Sloan’s really wonderful Moonbound. I described it to a friend earlier this week as Miyazaki cyberpunk infused with a great deal of Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guin, and seasoned with dashes of Gene Wolfe, Robert Jordan, and Tad Williams. Having finished it last night, I stand by that. It’s a lovely book. I am still chewing on it, and hope to share some other kind of reflection on it in the future. It might need a reread before I can manage it!