Hello!
This is going to be a short one, because, honestly, a lot of my life was taken up by work this month. The cat is out of the bag, and our partnership with 1Password is now live, and I’m extremely excited by it. But this was taking up a lot of processing time, so to speak, so I don’t have much else to show for this month other than that.
I’ve continued my workout habit with Fitbod, and I’m really happy with the results so far. If we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic, I might consider actually joining a gym soon, but I think that’s off the table for the time being, considering the state of things.
Music
Here’s this month’s installment of the playlist! I hope you enjoy it. Here’s the article, and here’s the playlist on Spotify:
Programming
I’ve thrown a few things on GitHub this month:
nwork, a simple tool to enable development of your modules. There’s clearly a lot more to do in order to get this past “proof of concept” stage, but I think it’s going to be useful for some of the things I’m working on.
Series, an API for creating Generator instances in JavaScript. I’ve recently taken a complete 180 on generators — I used to avoid them, but now I love them. They’re blisteringly fast, and once you get a handle on them, they solve so many problems in an elegant way. There is, however, a lot of boilerplate involved in order to instantiate one, so Series provides an interface to make this a lot easier. Because this is also a bit of a proof of concept, the best demonstration of what this actually does is probably a quick read of the test cases.
vesta-image, a server which can be used to generate composite images representing the state of Fastmail’s Vestaboard split-flap board. Essentially, you load a url which includes the state of the board, and the server combines images for each applicable flap in the spliftlap to make one single composite image that looks pretty close to what you would actually see on the board in real life. This was more of a problem to solve with Photoshop than anything else, but the results are pretty dang close, and I’m pretty proud of how this one came together!
Reading
This month, I read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I honestly wasn’t a fan. I couldn’t really identify with any of the characters; I didn’t really understand their decisions or motivations. It felt like a perpetual bait-and-switch: when things were set up to be in interesting environments, or when the action of the novel seemed to be building up to something big, there was just a let-down at the end of it. And speaking of the end of it: yeesh. I don’t want to give anything away, but there are many aspects of this book that are just plain unhealthy and bad.
I decided to dip back into the most comforting thing I know again in the Culture, proceeding with my re-read by getting through Use of Weapons. This is definitely not my favorite Culture novel, and re-reading it, it has a lot of problems, but it’s still a Culture novel, and therefore it still makes me feel good.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published “Stay Home, Stay Safe” by Laura Hulthen Thomas and “Photographic Memory #9 (Nocturne)” by Hun Ohm.
Stats
- I typed 750,000 keys and clicked 113,302 times.
- I listened to 861 songs.
- 0 albums escaped from the Album Gauntlet. (😧)
- I wrote 22,958 words in my personal journal.
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Feel free to get in touch with me any time at joewoods@fastmail.com.
