jfo
— archive — feed — contact

Week two point one

Jul 01, 2022

My goals for this week were fairly modest. Here are some of them with notes and links to resources I found useful.

Get my feet under me for fully remote interaction

This is going pretty well. I've set up a good mic and I have a decent enough webcam, I think the zoom experience is as good as can be expected at the moment given how distributed people are (and that many are in the US). Here's a helpful guide I found on optimizing that. I did run a LAN cable to my desktop earlier this week which dramatically improved my connection's speed and stability. The highest I've seen on fast.com is 1.2 gigabits down, which is, uh, good enough for me!

Of course like many of us I had been through periods of fully remote work in the past few years, so this wasn't too much of a shock. But I've definitely never met so many people fully remotely at the same time, so that was a bit new.

Yak shaving

Yes, that old chestnut. I've been pruning my configuration and setup files to be less crufty, more aligned with the software I'm actually using, and specific to the computer I'm primarily working on. It's actually been really satisfying, like getting an actual much needed haircut. This included learning about and switching to stow, a "symlink farm manager." I was considering switching to a full fledged configuration manager, like home manager or chezmoi but these and other options presented were either platform specific or too heavy for my needs and tastes. stow essentially does what I was doing before with sticks-and-glue scripts but is more generally useful on top of that. I run the command in my dotfiles repo and it creates the appropriate symlinks where I point it.

This category includes setting up LSP clients for both Deno and Zig for use with neovim. Both of them work incredibly well, actually.

I'm feeling like I'm getting into a pretty good state with these particular yaks, so I am going to try to switch back into maintainance mode from next week, although still on the list: lsp aware omnicomplete, snippets, and re-blinging my shell prompt 😎.

Static site generator hacking

I wrote a static site generator for use with this blog before starting my batch, and though it's really basic, it works just fine. There are plenty of little features and improvements I can make to it that have been really fun to pair on with other people, though, and it's nice to work on something that's immediately and actually useful to me.

Meet my cohort

This has taken up a lot of my time and with good reason. Again, and just like the first time, there's just a stunning array of different people with all sorts of backgrounds. I've already learned about so many things I had never heard of before! here's a sample:

One thing I love about RC is that it's an extremely safe place to say "I don't know." This is not accidental and should be expected when people are coming from such different starting points, but committing to it as a principle can yield fantastic results.

Start collecting resources

This one wasn't really on the list to begin with but as I've gone through the week I've encountered so many links to resources that look worth investing time in that I'm trying to make a point of cataloging them to come back to later. I'll collect them at the end of my weekly recaps starting with this one. Here are some:

Next week

My intention next week is to start on some more substantial projects I have in mind, with a real emphasis on writing one to throw away. I want to produce a lot of code. This was not the focus of this week and that's what I had planned but starting next week I want to do more hands on keyboard hacking.

I also want to pair a lot with other people's projects. These days are long but the "most people getting online in my afternoon" thing is actually quite useful for splitting the day up- I have hours in the morning and early afternoon for focus time. It's not a sustainable model to work from 9-9 every day, but this isn't really "work", I take lots of breaks, and it's only a short period, so... so far so good. Ask me in 3 weeks.