The structure and content of this week was much informed by Independence Day! 🇺🇸🎆🦅🎇

Software development

I got all top-level declaration forms (structs, enums, and functions, including methods) for my little learning-things-by-doing programming language. No imports yet, and no expressions yet (!), so it’s still very far from, you know, doing things, but: I feel pretty good about having made this progress, given I only decided to do this thing at all a month ago.

Music

Nothing to report! Just a breather week, after hitting my annual goal for music last week. I expect to div back in next week!

Writing

• I did the first half of a revision pass on the new async/await chapter for The Rust Programming Language. Managed to cut 6 of the 51 (!) code listings I started with by collapsing them together or eliminating where extraneous, and managed to chop almost 900 words out of the almost 15,000 I started with. Good progress!

• I got final revisions in for a book review which should be out (and therefore linked, of course!) next week.

• Two short blog posts here:

  • Red Pen, reflecting briefly on how and why I do revisions of big writing projects the old-fashioned way, by printing it out and taking a red pen to it.
  • An Observation on Constructor Syntax, a case of taking something I thought about sending as a DM to a friend, turning it into a blog post, and sending the blog post to the friend and everyone else.

Speaking

I did the first dry run (just of a rough draft) of the talk I am giving at StaffPlus NY in September. I have a lot of revising to do, but I have some time!

Reading

Mostly just a bunch of essays this week, and none so compelling that I feel like sharing them!

Career/etc.

Steady on with the networking/job hunting for my next role!

• I wrote an apparently-compelling cold email that turned into a call next week with a developer/engineering-focused startup whose work I really like, so we’ll see where that goes.

• I also had a second conversation with folks I was talking to already, and am mulling hard on that one. An interesting case of them making a bunch of decisions I agree with… leading to shifts in when a role I was super excited about may or may not be available!