Blog

• Thanksgiving was more solitary this year out of necessity, but still good. (Any meal we eat together as a family is good in my book.)
• I’ve finished all the readings for one class and have just half a project left on the other (reaction-diffusion is done and I’ve started implementing Perlin noise). So close to The Real End. I’m getting legitimately giddy. The experience of grad school has been fine, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still been taking up a sizable part of my brain for the last four years and there is so much I want to do with that space when I get it back.
• My protodecision to pivot my career back to design seems to be sticking. It’s been a few years since I was a designer, and my head hasn’t been in that space at all in the intervening time (I realize now that I needed to be fully in the engineering mindset to be able to do the master’s), but returning to design feels right and good — and a bit of a relief, too, if I’m honest.
• Since my flight to engineering a few years ago seemed at the time to be a one-way ticket, however, my younger self inconveniently neglected to put together a UX/product design portfolio. With time travel not among my hobbies (yet!), I’m now cobbling together a portfolio with new work as swiftly as I can. Once that’s done, I’ll start sending feelers out again. Oh how I wish I’d figured this out before I started applying and interviewing for all those engineer jobs. (That said, my experience has absolutely been that God works with me line upon line, a bit at a time, and I’m convinced that I needed to go through all that to get to this point.)
• We watched Enola Holmes on Netflix. Quite fun.
• Nonfiction reading: I just finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Whew. Rough lives. Harrowing. Glad to be done, really.
• I’m about to start Robert Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, which seems to be primarily about his time at Disney.
• Fiction reading: I’m halfway through The Crown Conspiracy. My progress slowed down mid-week because:
• I took a break to read Jim Butcher’s Battle Ground, the latest installment in the Dresden Files series. One very, very long battle. Whew. A quick read, though.
• I’m still on track to read at least 100 books this year. 93 down, just seven to go in the month that remains. The number doesn’t actually matter, of course — it’s just a slightly silly personal challenge.

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• Bret Victor’s Dynamicland — they had me at “a non-profit long-term research group in the spirit of Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC”
• James Somers on how more people should write — amen and amen
• Joel Hooks on blogs and digital gardens — this makes me want to finish my revamp of Slash so I can more easily add an actual digital garden to this site (and at some point I’ll write about that revamp since I don’t think I’ve gone into any detail on it)
• Amy Hoy on how blogs broke the web — it’s not quite as bad as the headline sounds, but still some good food for thought (you could say this is another way of looking at stock vs. flow)
• Deekay’s Animator Creating Animation — charming, loved this

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• 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.

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• Matt Webb on integrating more social features into operating systems — great ideas; I’m sure some are less feasible than others, but this kind of thinking is important (and exciting)
• James Somers on better tools for thinking about biology — love this
• Gravity’s latest jetpack tests — we’re living in the future
• Google’s Ocean of Books — mixed feelings on this (it’s the kind of thing I want to love, but the actual results weren’t as useful to me as I’d hoped)
• How ship anchors work — fascinating

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• Writing is still on hold, a fact that gives me an inordinate amount of guilt. (At this point I could and should start writing again, I think; only my human frailty keeps me from it.)
• The art hiatus seems to be over, though I still don’t have much free time for it.
• The reason I’m learning React, fyi, is that I’ve realized I want to focus more on frontend engineering from now on. I’ve also been deep diving into the DOM docs and modernizing my JavaScript skills. Cypress (the testing framework) is amazing, by the way. I wish I’d been able to use it ten years ago.
• My SurfaceBrush presentation went well, leaving just the semester project, and then I’m done with homework forever. (No, there is not going to be a PhD. At least not if I have anything to say about it.)
• Pleased with the election results. Disheartened at all the resistance people have toward accepting those (clearly legitimate) results. Sanity, where did you go? I miss you.
• I upgraded to Big Sur today. It immediately bricked my Internet connection. After an hour or so of debugging, I found that our university VPN client was to blame; removing it and reinstalling it did the trick. (Also, turns out having an Internet connection is pretty darn essential these days. That hour felt like being in a straitjacket, even though I still had access via my phone.)
• We’ve been watching Into the Unknown, the Disney+ documentary on Frozen 2. It’s delightful—I wish they made these for every movie they make.
• We’ve also been watching The Chosen (VidAngel) on BYUtv, and I’m loving it. Very humanizing, in the best way. (I find myself forgetting that the people in the New Testament were real people. This show is a great corrective.)
• Nonfiction reading: I abandoned Arthur’s Britain, at least for now. Still trying to make A Distant Mirror work, but I’m suspecting that this particular season in my life (job search and all) may not be a medieval history season.
• Obama: An Oral History is still good, and a lovely reminder of what a real president looks like.
• Fiction reading: it was a week for abandoning books. I dropped Mexican Gothic — it was perhaps a little too creepy for me right now.
• Apparently the type of horror I can tolerate is fickle, though, since I was fine with World War Z and finished it a day or two ago. (I have to admit, it was a little trippy alternating between it and the Obama book, since both were oral histories and the voices felt a little too similar in my head.)
• I’ve started Michael R. Sullivan’s The Crown Conspiracy. It’s nice to get back to epic fantasy — comfort food of sorts.

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• David Moldawer on getting your setup right — agreed, getting rid of friction is usually worth it (just make sure to avoid the trap of spending all your time working on your setup and not ever getting to the actual thing you wanted to make) (been there)
• Tania Rascia’s history of what she’s learned as a software developer — stellar example of both learning in public and blogging (and her React tutorial is well done, too)
• Jim Nielsen on Sass color functions in CSS — more verbose, sure, but I think worth it
• Tanya Basu on digital gardens — I think it’s a given at this point that I’ll link to anything that talks about digital gardens
• Matt Webb on Machine English — some fascinating history here, and it’s an interesting idea

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Another new artwork: The Lord’s Passover II. (I’ve wanted to do a simpler, better version of The Lord’s Passover and figured it was time.)

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The hiatus may or may not be over. New artwork: Mother in Heaven. I used Cirque to create the small circles, then did the rest of the vector work in Figma (which I’m liking much more than Illustrator).

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A short update on Cirque:

I took out the turbulence filters, because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place (at least not the way I had them). Instead, I’m planning to build a tool that makes it easy to apply filters to SVG elements. It’ll be more generally useful, since the SVG input won’t have to have come from Cirque.

Manually placing circles is partway done. (Placing them works; editing and deleting them is next on the list.)

I’m also refactoring to clean things up and to make the imperative code more functional where I can.

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This past week I turned off the self view for all my Zoom meetings, and it makes things feel a bit more natural. (I feel less self-conscious, anyway.) Recommended.

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