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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Weeknotes #13
- For the sake of my sanity, I’ve lowered the job search from a boil to a simmer. I’m still open to opportunities that come my way, but in the meantime I’m focusing more on leveling up my skills. (In particular, I’ve realized that my side projects haven’t been exhibiting the kind of engineering I’m actually most interested in, so that needs to change.)
- Unsuccessful so far at getting back into writing, and I suspect it’ll probably remain that way for a while, sadly.
- I’ve started using Figma as a replacement for Illustrator in making some art. That’s not necessarily what it’s intended for, but so far it’s working fine for it. Good tool.
- I’m finally learning React. (Correction: learning it again. I did a crash course in it a couple years ago at my day job and used it on a project for a few weeks.) I realized today, though, that if I’m ever going to get it in my bones, I need to start using it for all my personal coding projects. So that’s coming.
- I’m preparing another presentation for my graphics class, this one on the SurfaceBrush paper (VR drawing). I’m also partway through implementing the Gray Scott reaction-diffusion algorithm in Rust for my procedural textures project.
- Relieved that the election is going in Biden’s favor. Looking forward to it being over, whatever “over” means.
- Utah no longer sends out postcard reminders for vehicle registration renewal. Which we found out when my wife happened to look at the license plate and realized we were two months past our renewal date. Whoops. (Took care of that post haste this morning.)
- Nonfiction reading: I’ve been reading Obama: An Oral History. It’s good.
- The medieval history reading is still going very slowly. Starting to think it might be time to backburner those two books after all. We’ll see. (Sometimes the slowness is a sign that it’s not the right book for me, but sometimes it’s just a temporary glitch, and it isn’t always easy to tell the difference.)
- Fiction reading: I finished Half a Soul and quite liked it.
- I’m almost halfway through Max Brooks’ World War Z. The oral history format is fun.
- I also just started Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. (I’m one page in.)
Introducing Cirque
As schoolwork starts to wind down, I’m finally starting to make progress on the creativity tools and HCI explorations I talked about back in September. This week I’ve also realized that graphical tools for art and design are what I want to focus most on. (I do still intend to explore textual interfaces, but they’re on the backburner for now.)
In the spirit of working in public, then, Cirque is a small WIP web app I’m building for making patterns via circle packing:
This is very much a rough initial MVP. You can tweak some settings, generate new patterns using a simple circle-packing algorithm, and export SVG (with the turbulence/displacement filters enabled by default), but that’s it. Some of the features I’m planning to build next:
- Replace the settings text box with, you know, good UI (I’m also excited to explore color picker design here)
- Add the ability to manually place both circles and anticircles (so artists are able to create intentional negative space)
- Add a way to programmatically set the circle colors (probably via something like shaders, so you could say all circles smaller than a certain size get one color and the rest get another, or circle color is dependent on position or something else)
I’ve also thought about moving the circle packing code from JavaScript to Rust, to be able to play around with WebAssembly, but it seems overkill, at least at this point. (Instead I think I’ll plan to Rust and WebAssembly on the graphical type design tool I want to build.)
Links #24
- Jason Kottke on what ten million stars look like — this is breathtaking and mind-boggling and beautiful
- Animation of a medieval bridge being built — mmm, more of this, please
- Jeremy Keith on dev perception of boring technologies — seems wise
- Owen Williams on SPAs — in a similar vein
- Kyle Gene Brown on Smalltalk and design patterns — I found this interesting (such astute commentary, I know)
Links #23
- Jim Nielsen on cheating entropy with native web tech — the simplicity here speaks to me
- Chris Coyier on simple and boring web work — same kind of thing, and the minimalist in me eats this stuff up (though I think certain types of apps do warrant using the more complicated frameworks)
- Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Umberto Eco’s antilibrary idea — yes, yes, this ten times over
- Robert Hodgin’s Meander project — lovely work
- Brian Eno on forward momentum in creativity — this seems wise to me and rings true to my own experience
Weeknotes #12
- Almost all my free time this week was offered up to the thirsty job search. It’s important and necessary, but goodness do I look forward to having time again to work on side projects. I also yearn for the day the impostor syndrome again fades into the background. I anticipated its appearance to some degree, but it’s fiercer and stronger than expected. Such fun. (The silver lining there, though, is that it pushes me to work harder.)
- Virtually no creative work this week, see above. I need to find some way to incorporate it even when time is short and my brain is full.
- Schoolwork has also been on hold, though my work-ahead buffer allowing me to do so has about run its course. The presentation went well. As for the procedural textures project, I’m planning to start by implementing Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion (both the simple and multi-scale versions).
- Apparently my voicemail box was full for months and I had no idea until someone finally mentioned it. Whoops.
- Nonfiction reading: mere minutes ago I finished Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Enjoyed it. Sometimes I think I’d like to work at a game studio — interesting creative work and all — but in reality, crunch time isn’t for me. Evenings are reserved for my family. (I also don’t really play games at all, which seems like a good sign that my path lies elsewhere.)
- A Distant Mirror and Arthur’s Britain are even slower going right now thanks to incessant thoughts about the job search. I thought about abandoning both books, but since they weren’t particularly difficult reading before all this started, I’ve opted to just wait it out.
- Fiction reading: I finished We Are Legion. Looking forward to the other books in the trilogy.
- I’m about halfway through Olivia Atwater’s Half a Soul. Regency historical fantasy romance isn’t my usual fare, but I’m liking it. (I try to occasionally read outside my comfort zone.)
- My 100-pages-a-day reading goal is basically on life support. Once the job search is over, though, it too should pop back up.
Weeknotes #11
- Another week with hardly any writing to show for it. Ordinarily I would try to muscle through it regardless of my mood, but with the job hunt and other family things going on, it has to be on the back burner. Soon, though, I expect things to settle down enough that I can get back to both the novel and the story. (And this evening I saw the first sliver of movement in that direction. Hard to tell if it’ll stick, but it was something.)
- Decided on procedural textures for my semester project. I’ve done some preliminary thinking about which textures and algorithms I want to implement/explore. The presentation got bumped to next week.
- This week has seen many hours of responding to recruiters and taking assessments and brushing up on data structures and algorithms. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the latter. (Talking with recruiters is fine, too.)
- A wildfire chewed up our local mountain earlier this week, with a few nearby houses evacuated for a night and essence of smoke diffused everywhere. A stark reminder of how much worse it was in Oregon and California.
- Nonfiction reading: when my brain has trouble getting into writing mode, it also struggles to get into reading-medieval-history mode. Since books about the recent past are easier reading, I’ve started Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, about the development of several video games. A much better fit for right now.
- I completely forgot to mention that on Sundays I’ve been reading Bruce C. Hafen’s A Disciple’s Life, a biography of Neal A. Maxwell. It’s delightful.
- Fiction reading: I finished The Black Company and very much liked it. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series at some point. I’m not much of a series binge-reader, though, so it’ll be drawn out over time. (At some point I need to make a list of all the series I’ve started and intend to continue with.)
- I ended up losing interest in Pact and abandoned it. Extremely long serials feel like they might not be a good fit for me at the moment. (That said, I still want to try Twig, Ward, Mother of Learning, and The Wandering Inn at some point.)
- Two-thirds through We Are Legion. Things are getting more interesting than I expected. Good stuff.
After twelve years at the library, I’ve realized it’s time for a change and have started looking for another job. Doing this during a global pandemic is a little daunting, but it feels like the right time.
As part of this, I’m experimenting with what I’m calling a more humane resume. It’s basically a short list of relevant data points, with room to explain a little more about what I do and what I’m looking for. My hope is that it makes it easier for potential employers to see whether I’d be a good fit.
Weeknotes #10
- Not a great week for writing. The novel has largely languished. Progress on the story has been weak, too. (A few personal/family things have been eating up my headspace. Turns out headspace is important when writing, at least for me.)
- I’ve finished preparing my presentation for class. Also decided to shelve the procedural modeling idea and instead do either procedural textures (reaction-diffusion, that kind of thing) or 3D paint simulation. Two months to finish this.
- We voted, via drop box. Feels like an election more important than most.
- Over the years the CSS on here had gotten a little crufty, with accumulations left over from long-excised features of the site. This week I rewrote it all from scratch. Shaved it from 45k down to 15k (a large chunk of which is comments). I’m still using Sass, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I really need it anymore — is the nesting actually worth it? Time will tell.
- I’m also currently JavaScript-free on this site, but I’m planning to add a user-controllable dark mode sometime soon. (And stay jQuery-free, now that vanilla JS can do the things I was using jQuery for. The fewer dependencies, the better.)
- Nonfiction reading: still plugging away on A Distant Mirror and Arthur’s Britain. With everything else going on, it’s been more of a fiction week, for unwinding. Hard to get into the right mental state for medieval history. But I did learn that curfew comes from Old French cuevrefeu, which comes from cuvrir “to cover” and feu “fire.”
- Fiction reading: I finished The Physics of the Dead. A bit sweary (which is what Scrub is for). Overall, I think I liked it? Hard to say. I do still plan to read some of Smitherd’s other books, so probably yes.
- I’m halfway through Glen Cook’s The Black Company and really like it. Great voice. It’s leaving me with an itch to get back into Malazan (I’ve read the first two, liked them).
- I’m also a third of the way into Dennis E. Taylor’s We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Quite fun, very much enjoying it and looking forward to plowing through the rest of the series.
Links #22
- ProgrammingFonts.org — I’ve been using Go Mono for years now but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to change things up a bit
- Starship — a cross-shell prompt written in Rust, though I haven’t yet dived deep enough into the configuration docs to see if I can bend it to my will
- Mark Boulton on history and digital type specimens — ephemerality for some things doesn’t matter, but the lack of excellent solutions for others (family photos, etc.) bothers me
- Joseph Gentle on CRDTs — going along with the local-first idea I posted about in the last batch
- 100+ Blender modeling tips — I’ve been working through this, quite helpful