Now
Last update:
Here's what keeps me busy at the moment. What?
🌨️ Winter Blues
It’s end of January. I’m done with winter. Yes, I’m taking my vitamin D, I’m spending enough time outdoors, but I’m still happy when this is over. End of January is usually where I hit my low, and I’m definitely having it. Luckily the sun seems to come out in the last few days and I can tell how energizing this is. Winter is for renewal, they say. I think I’m renewed enough, thank you. Let’s get on with it. Bring the sun. I want to take walks with Lenny without having to take a flash light. I want to start the gardening season. I want to sit outside and hear the birds sing.
🎨 Side Projects
After endless experimentation I think I finally found a way to build a solid vim exporter for Root Loops. This one might also work for neovim but I’m starting to grok that neovim’s theming is much more complicated than plain old vim. One step at a time.
📚 Reading
A Philosophy of Software Design by John K. Ousterhout
We read A Philosophy of Software Design for a book club at work. I’ve got mixed feelings. On the one hand it’s a much more reasonable take on designing good software than the stuff than the dusty old “Clean Code” recommendation that we’ve all (myself included) mindlessly put out there for ages. Ousterhout shares the essence of good software design as learned from asking many cohorts of students to design and build a text editor at university over and over again (I’d have loved to take that course). There are a lot of great takeaways from this book, and I think it’s going to become my go-to recommendation for early-career software developers. You learn a lot about good abstractions, designing errors out of existence, tactical vs strategic design, and decomposing systems into smaller components. My number one gripe is Ousterhout’s apparent obsession with code comments over using tests to guide and document your design - I think tests are much better equipped to give us the traits he’s looking for with comments. The book starts strong and fades out into a little bit of waffling towards the end but overall this is a solid one.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
I picked this up based on a recommendation of a team mate. Science Fiction, time travel, solid world building, intertwined plots. Sea of Tranquility tells a short story about multiple timelines several centuries apart intersecting in weird ways. It’s a solid one.
🏋 Working Out
I’m focusing on hypertrophy at the beginning of the year. For the first time in my life, I’m actively and consciously looking to gain some weight to grow muscle. I’ve been training at a maintenance level or on a deficit for a long while now which allowed me to shed some weight but severely limited how much my strength and muscle mass grows. As someone who used to be concerningly overweight in the past, gaining weight consciously feels weird and makes me nervous but so far I’m making healthy progress in the gym. Let’s see where this goes.
🎧 Music
Harakiri for the Sky is an Austrian metal band sitting somewhere between Black Metal and Post Hardcore. I’ve been enjoying their suff quite a lot lately. They put out their new album Scorched Earth last week, and it’s a solid one.
🎮 Video Games
I’m back to playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m enjoying it as much as during my first playthrough. Such a good game.