Hello!
So that’s the first month of 2023! Feels like it was both very long and very short. I hope your month was great.
I got a fair amount of stuff done this month:
Near the beginning of the month, I gave a presentation at the Philadelphia JavaScript Club about JavaScript build tooling. I think it went well, and it led to some great conversations!
I did some crafts, too, fixing a dog’s raincoat, and printing a cover for my webcam:
Zadok, the bot I use to manage my life, got some upgrades for arranging work into piles to tackle and visualizing what’s next.
Also, I tend not to mention projects at work here, but it’s worth calling out we launched version two of the Squire text editor this month: complete with TypeScript support.
Music
Writing
After not really writing that much for a while, I think I might be getting back into the swing of things. I wrote three articles this month:
- Build your own productivity tools
- Wishing for a different virtual reality
- Surprises in optional chaining
Reading
This month, I read Canal Dreams by Iain Banks. Woof. My entry on the Banks List for this novel now reads:
I might have liked this one if Banks wasn’t just inexcusably cruel to his protagonist.
Next, I read Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. I thought it would have been a captivating book if it was about a fictional company on a fictional planet; it was one of those books that I actually set aside time to read outside of my normal reading habits. I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this one, though. Twitter was a huge part of my life, on and off; and you could even still say that it still is, even though I go out of my way to avoid it, because I use Mastodon. But when you peel back the cover and peek under the hood, interrogating every individual piece of its history — or, granted, something roughly approximating it — it’s easy to get extremely disillusioned with the culture and tools that support a world where we can all build things. It’s a sad story, and I’m glad I read it.
Other than that, it was a lot of picking books up and setting them down.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- “She Kong” by Sofie Verraest
- “Mothers and Daughters” Christine M. Lasek
Stats
- I typed 1,000,000 keys and clicked 155,580 times.
- I listened to 1,182 songs.
