Lately

March and April were pretty busy for me. Looking back, it was a whirlwind, but a good one.

Working at the Scala Center

In the last months quite a bit of my time went into planning the last Scala Tooling Summit that happened in Lausanne, Switzerland. I wrote about this on the Scala site here.

The summit was incredible for me. For the last few years I've spent so much time working on tooling in the Scala ecosystem without ever really meeting many of those I rub shoulders with online. It was incredible to be around so many that have had such a large impact on the community, both past and present. It was one of the highlights of my "scala" career.

Some of the other work I've been focusing on is diving back into structured diagnostics in Dotty and working towards actionable diagnostics. Here's a few links related to this:

• The Journey of a Dotty Diagnostic - A talk I gave at Scala.io about this in Paris.
• The written version of the talk if that's more your thing
• Large progress tracker for DiagnosticCode and DiagnosticRelatedInformation
• Large progress tracker for actionable diagnostics
• Contributor discussion about actionable diagnostics

In the coming month I'll be heavily focusing on moving these forward.

skan

This last month I spent a chunk of time on writing skan, which is a minimal terminal kanban board. I use it to track my ongoing work, and work I'd like to do. I wrote an article about it here.

Hardware

I finally got my Torn V3 build finished. It took longer than I expected, I ruined one PCB in the process, and I learned a ton. Overall a success. I still haven't nailed down the keymappings I want yet, so I'm constantly re-flashing. That's why the cover isn't on the left hand side. I also don't love my keys, so I plan on updating those and then taking a non-potato quality photo. For now, enjoy this!

Listening

Some fantastic music was released in the last couple months. So these two recommendations couldn't be further apart, but I've listened to both of these albums a ton this last month.

Did you know there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is wonderful. I wasn't a Lana Del Rey fan in the past, but this album is one of my favorites this year so far.

In a totally different vein I've also been listening to Still Life In Decay by FACS on repeat.

While not a new album, I recently came across Maxime Denuc and was blown away. Specifically this album, Nachtorn. Here's a short blurb about it:

Nachthorn takes its name from one of the 78 stops that make up the main organ in St. Antonius Church in Düsseldorf. This instrument, equipped with a system developed by the German company Sinua, offers the possibility of controlling all of its keyboards and timbres via a computer. The organ thus becomes a powerful synthesiser. This set-up allowed me to fulfil an old dream of mine : to create an entirely acoustic dance music piece with the organ as sole actor. Oscillating between dub techno, harmonic locked grooves or after-hours pop, Nachhorn proposes a hypnotic music piece whose lines sketch the outline of an imaginary warehouse.

It's just so good.

Watching

I'm probably late to the party here, but I've been watching and enjoying Narcos for the first time.

In the movie realm I watched Come and See, which was a roller coaster ride of emotions. I didn't know much about it before watching, but it's not a film I'll ever forget.

Traveling

Since the previous lately post, I've found myself in Brussels, Newcastle, and Lausanne.

There's a building right out of the Brussels Central Station that always catches my eye.

I was in Newcastle for work. Work is looking at expanding there, and I did some presentations on our involvement in open source to a couple local universities.

The last night of the tooling summit we hiked up to a restaurant in Parc de l'Hermitage for some Fondue. The route was full of hills and beautiful buildings.