Updates for June and early July
Hello readers,
Welcome to nearly mid-July. I recently celebrated my birthday in a socially distant fashion with a minimal hangout in the outdoors. It was different but not unpleasant.
New things by me since May
A lot of the work I’ve been doing recently has been to make the development experience faster and safer for all the developers at my current employer. Part of this work has been migrating the large Scala monorepo off using SBT to build and replacing it with Bazel. Some of this was the inspiration for a short article I wrote on using Bazel to help fix your flaky tests.
I also released a tiny TypeScript application called Photo Fit. It is a very purpose built web app that helps you use on your phone to resize photos to fit better as your phone’s background. This article has some screenshots that demonstrates what I mean.
Interesting things from the Internet
Twitter thread from July 7th on COVID vaccines: “There absolutely is a light at the end of the tunnel even if it’s hard to see sometimes. Even if our leaders have made this harder.”
Turning implicit understanding into explicit code is a great productivity & quality step. by GeePaw Hill. Good twitter thread about this idea.
Twitter thread about COVID cases increasing while deaths decreasing. I though this was particularly interesting because I learned the name of The Simpson’s Paradox
Wendell Potter, former health insurance exec, coming clean about pushing the idea that a single-payer system is bad.
Thread about late-night comedy that ends up going off about media in general
Article: Why Your Efforts to Fix your Pipeline Aren’t Fixing Your Pipeline
Books I’ve finished
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
I finished fewer books in June and the beginning of July compared to May but they were pretty god ones. Both Come as You Are and Half of a Yellow Sun earned five out of five stars for me.
Come as You Are is an interesting book on how women’s sexuality works, backed by research. I’m not really the main audience for it but I still learned or confirmed quite a bit both about women’s sexuality and men’s. The Goodreads blurb (which is linked) does a pretty good job summarizing the book. I thought it was pretty interesting and there are definitely some tips for people to be more supportive partners. It is probably worth reading for everyone.
Half of a Yellow Sun is by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and it is the fifth book of hers I’ve read in the last couple of months. I’m really enjoying her writing. This book tells the story of Biafra, a short-lived state in Africa through the experiences of a handful of main characters.
The End of Policing was good, 3 out of 5 stars. It presents a lot of data and makes the point that the police in the USA do too much and we are probably better served by having a variety of non-police alternatives to police.
I’m also reading the book White Fragility with a group from work. Reading it, along with the study guide, and discussing with a group has been useful.
End
There you go. My June + Early July update. We’ll see what the next month brings.