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Weeknotes #15

/ #weeknotes
  • School and the job search have expanded to fill pretty much all my project time. But not for much longer! (School’s finite end draws near, and rejoicing is nigh.) In the not too distant future I’m hoping to blog more, resurrect the novel and the incubator story, and finish up Cirque.
  • I began writing my semester project in Rust but recently decided to move it to JavaScript (and Canvas), so that it’s easier to see the output as it processes.
  • My recent decision to focus on frontend engineering has, I think, led me in turn back to design, which was my original career. This is a fairly massive surprise to me. I still change my mind on this almost every day (to my own unending frustration), but as of tonight let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if my time as a full-time software engineer is nearing its end.
  • Nonfiction reading: I finished Obama: An Oral History and very much liked it. Political history has become my jam, it appears. While I have a long list of books in that vein already on my mount TBR, if you have any particular recommendations, send them my way! That invitation holds for other genres, too.
  • I’m about a fourth of the way through Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about poverty in a Mumbai slum. It’s earthy and tragic, the kind of book I look forward to finishing because it’s painful to read, but that pain is kind of the point. Far too easy — at least for me, cocooned in my comfort — to forget how rampant and dire poverty still remains for so many people. Heartbreaking.
  • Fiction reading: I’m almost halfway through The Crown Conspiracy. It’s perhaps not quite as well crafted as some of the other books I’ve read lately, but still enjoyable. (And isn’t that a wonderful thing, that we can still enjoy flawed things. It gives me, a maker of very flawed things, some much-needed hope.)
  • Earlier this week Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi came in on hold for me and I ended up scarfing it down in two days. Loved it, particularly the main character’s voice and the lovely use of odd capitalization.