Weeknotes: initialize
Every year I tell myself I’m going to write more and every year I tell myself I didn’t write enough.
In reality though, what I didn’t do was publish enough. In an effort to address this, I’m going to have a go at writing weeknotes.
I use the daily note feature Craft provides as a sort-of journal, so I hope to have enough content to create weekly-ish posts like this.
I published a post about pattern matching in Ruby 3.1. A lot of this content is taken straight from the Ruby documentation, but actually sitting down and writing everything out myself really helped me understand these new features and helps me decide whether or not I’ll be using them in the near future or not.
At Spark, we’re in the process of upgrading to Ruby 3, so we should have access to some of these features soon. There’s quite a lot of awkward looking syntax so I’m not sure if we’ll rush to adopt any of them, but I look forward to discussing with the team.
New year daily workouts have started fairly strong. I haven’t been overdoing it, but moving a lot more has been nice. Actually doing the exercises prescribed by my physio has already improved back movement. Vicky is training for a sponsored marathon walk to support JDRF, so we’re both getting out a bit more.
We watched the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’d seen the first movie and some of the second back when it released, and just never gotten around to finishing them. We committed to it this time, and did not regret it. They hold up incredibly well for 20-year old movies.
I started reading A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms. I find many Computer Science topics are just not my forte, and I pick up books like this from time to time to try and identify non-academia approaches to understanding complex algorithms. The book is good, but I was pleased to find that it didn’t really teach me anything new. I’d recommend it, though.
I watched a video titled Make Your WiFi Faster! and it was very good, despite what you might think about the title.
We’re still playing It Takes Two and cannot recommend it enough. It’s a lot longer than I expected (or maybe we’re just slow) and it’s a lot of fun. We think we’ve almost completed it.
I also learned about Zachtronics games. I haven’t installed any yet but I’ve heard good things and hope to give them a try soon. I have been recommended Opus Magnum and Infinifactory.
We both got our COVID booster with some very minor side-effects.
Nx (a Machine Learning library written in Elixir) was released at version 0.1 which I found really interesting, despite not really having any experience with ML and numerical computing. It was a fun Wikipedia dive though!
I learned about the Object#presence_in Rails method which I could see cleaning up some of our controller param filtering code.