Lately

A lot of this past month was prepping for this next month. March will be a pretty busy month for me with traveling for work and a lot of events happening. Sometimes months like this are difficult for me since you look back at the work you've done and feel like you didn't accomplish much, until all that prep-work flourishes in the future.

Working at the Scala Center

As many of you may know, work has lent me out to the Scala Center and this last month was a lot of maintenance work around the ecosystem. The more I work in Scala tooling the more I recognize just how small that community of people are. The amount of work that the Scala Center gets done in pure maintenance alone across a handful of tools is miraculous.

Apart from maintenance work a large chunk of my time has been spent in preparation for a Scala Tooling Summit that will be happening in March. I look forward to give an update afterwards, but around 30 people from important tools in the ecosystem, the compiler team, and community contributors are all coming together to discuss the state of tooling, look at collective problems, and attempt to cement a clear roadmap moving forward focused on de-duplication of efforts between teams, unified approaches, and stabilisation. This has been an ongoing effort behind the scenes for the past few months. I'm quite excited about this, and expect to hear more after the meet.

Hardware

In part it could be because I'm now working on tooling full-time during the day, but also probably more attributed to a bit of burn out, but I've found myself coding much less in my free time and instead looking into new interests, or spending time re-exploring past ones. I don't have a traditional computer science or engineering degree like many of my colleagues seem to have, so much of the hardware / low-level things you'd explore in college I've never had the opportunity to. Lately for me that has manifested in my exploring circuitry, learning how to solder, and doing a few small projects. One project that I'm excited about is a Torn V3 build that I've started:

You can follow my progress on this on Mastodon.

Reading

Related to the above, I stumbled upon Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, which is a fantastic overview of how code was born. Starting with an wide overview of braille, logic gates, and binary calculators you build you way up to a modern computer. It's a fascinating read that has been teaching me a lot of things I've never dove into before. It's been a great supplement for me as I've started diving into the hardware side of things to better understand what I'm actually doing.

Software

A crazy amount of my time is spent on my computer, especially in my terminal. So my software choices in this area aren't made lightly, and I often don't switch. However this past month has me exploring a few new pieces of software, a couple which seem to be sticking.

Arc is one of the first browsers that I've tried that really seem to challenge the way I use a browser. Challenging the way you use tabs, shortcuts, and layout. At first it just seemed silly, but the more I've gotten used to it and have been learning the shortcuts the more I'm convinced that there's been barely any advancement in the way we use browsers since almost as long as I can remember. While I'm for sure not using Arc to its fullest I'm enjoying slowing getting accustomed to it, and I will likely stick with it.

I've been a long-time iTerm2 user. Even though I barely use most of it's features, especially because I use tmux as a terminal multiplexer, I've valued the stability it offered and the ability to just display things the way I've wanted. However wezterm offers much of the same stability, is super snappy, and is configured via Lua. I've recently made the jump and I'll definitely be sticking with it as the easy configuration that can be stored in my dots repo along with nice features like instant reloading are just great.

Listening

This month I stumbled on a new to me band called Hermanos Gutiérrez that have been on repeat. Such a chill vibe that's easy to listen to while working, relaxing, or commuting.

Watching

A movie I watched this past month that I really enjoyed was Bullet Train, which is a film adaption of a Japanese Book titled マリアビートル. Such an easy film to watch, some dark humour, and sprinkled with ridiculousness. Can we also take a second to appreciate the outfit Brad Pitt was wearing, which is one I'd happily wear.