Now

November 2024

My sabbatical continues into its (likely) final few months.

On the coding front, much of my time and attention has been going towards coding interview practice, but I am also in the middle of a redesign and rewrite of my command-line note-taking tool, zeke. I'd like to put that into a 1.0 release before the sabbatical ends.

In October, I also started 3x/week Spanish lessons with a tutor, via Preply. Unsurprisingly, this has pretty substantially accelerated the rate at which I'm learning the language, and I regret not starting earlier. Bloom's 2 sigma problem rides again... Even with all these great language learning resources on the internet, there's still no substitute for one-on-one instruction by a teacher who is a native speaker.

Currently reading Bryan Ward-Perkin's The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, which is not going to make it into the Library. The book has the great advantage of a clear argument that cuts against the recent historiography. And I'm sympathetic to its thesis that the Western Roman Empire really did go through a calamitous "fall". But the book could have presented its evidence so much more comprehensively than it does. The whole thing feels like it was written prior to the advent of computation and data analysis.

Also listening to lots of Bobby Zimmerman and some blues as a post-election salve.

September 2024

I left Braze in March, after ten years working there. So for the past six months, I have been on a sabbatical.

After a decade working full-time, this has been a welcome change of pace and an opportunity for exploration. I've read a bunch of good books, baked lots of sourdough, and fallen down various programming rabbit holes. On the coding side of things, it's been great to try out some technologies that I hadn't previously built with, like htmx and axum. Running, lifting weights, and rock climbing more regularly has also been really nice.

I've been traveling a bit - to Singapore and Australia Specifically, to Perth, Port Fairy, Melbourne, and Sydney. on my honeymoon in March - and to Rockland, Maine and Bloomington, Indiana over the summer to see some friends and family. And while I am still quite far from being a capable Spanish speaker, I now know about 1,500 commonly-used words and some basic grammar.

Recently, at the end of August, I made the decision to look for another job when this sabbatical ends, rather than trying to found a company. So, I've started to take some preparatory steps for the eventual job hunt, like redesigning this website and daily coding interview practice.