Hello!
There was about one week this month where it felt like fall. I spend as many of those days outside as possible… but other than that, it’s been hot and humid, and I think that’s definitely making me feel more sluggish than normal.
Nevertheless, I’m having fun, and I’m trying to get things done.
I don’t have a whole lot to report, to be honest — I spent quite a bit of time working on an app with the Spotify API, only to decide to set it down, for the time being. Their API is just extremely restrictive, so I wasn’t able to accomplish any of the goals I wanted to in a way that I was happy with.
I’m working on a smaller project that should, once I finally finish it up, beget many more projects. That’s all I’ll say about it now, but hopefully I can have it done early in the next month!
Music
Programming
Work has taken a lot of my focus this month. Fastmail just launched a way to generate bearer tokens for an account, as well as a small developer portal; one really cool thing that came out of this is our updated JMAP code samples repository.
I also made my own little Masked Email CLI, which is really all I’ve ever wanted — I’m now making even more email aliases to sign up to random services or whatnot. You can find that code here: https://github.com/tjwds/masked-email
As part of my reading Introduction to Algorithms — more on that below — I’ve been way more eager to just bash out some code to solve arbitrary problems. Someone on the Rands Leadership Slack mentioned making a solver for Summle, so I put one together. I’m pretty proud of some of the tricks I used to make this pretty fast.
Writing
This month marks one whole year of writing a pen and paper journal. It’s been extremely helpful for me, and I highly recommend it. More detail on that here: https://blog.joewoods.dev/projects/one-year-of-journaling/
I also wrote an article about the “why” behind the “how” we build things at Fastmail: https://technical.ly/software-development/fastmail-values-aligned-product/
Reading
Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein) is awesome. There are definitely parts that I’m more skimming over, but the sections I engage with are extremely engaging. I honestly thought I knew what I was doing before, but this book is plugging the holes in my knowledge that I didn’t even know were there. A lot of what I’ve picked up from this book isn’t immediately practical in anyone’s day-to-day work — unless your day to day work is, I don’t know, participating in whiteboarding interviews — but I’ve found it invaluable to have the complete knowledge that builds off of that knowledge, knowing what tools to use and when.
I finished Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb. It was, of course, extremely good; I really love that Hobb’s later novels work together in a great way. Taken by itself, though, the ending of this novel would be unsatisfying… if I didn’t already know that I was going to read the next one relatively soon. I’m not as enamored with the subject or characters of this one as her other series, but it’s still a fun adventure.
Now — believe it or not — I’m reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The first section is surprisingly funny, but we’ll see if I can get through it!
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
Stats
This month:
- I typed 900,000 keys and clicked 139,974 times.
- I listened to 1,643 songs.
