Weeknotes No. 2

Engineering 👩‍💻

These are the more industry / web tech things I’ve been spending time with:

• Kotlin Overview: I started to get into Android development a little bit as a hobby (I’m boring) and I dived right for Kotlin over Java. Very early days on this pursuit but I’m enjoying the language so far. Small point of joy: functions are defined with the keyword fun versus JavaScript where you have to type out function. It just makes me 😁.
• Announcing TypeScript 3.5: I really can’t write JavaScript without TypeScript anymore. Couple of cool features I’m glad are in the release: the Omit utility finally makes its appearance (which is very handy for passing around parts of objects or objects without certain keys) and there’s better support for Union Types. It did add smart select, I’m just not sure why you can’t smart select something and turn it into an interface declaration, I would use that way more.
• VS Code Roadrunner: This is a VS Code extension that turns npm scripts into a GUI. It’s nifty! And it’s very useful when you’re onboarding onto a new project.

Read 📖

Other points of interest in things that I’m reading:

Articles, Posts & Misc. 📝

• Feedbin: This service continually gets recommended to me for an RSS reading service and there is a clear reason for that: it’s very fucking good at doing at being an RSS reader. It keeps things in sync and lets me maintain my feeds. Right now, I’m using Readably for Android and the website and Reeder 4 for desktop. Very much worth the $5 a month.
• “Ethics” and Ethics from Oliver Reichenstein on iA.net: A brutal discussion of ethics and morals in tech and how to have meaningful conversations about them.
• Summer Reading List from NYT: A visually stunning reading list; a lot of the things on this list look like literary candy that I just really wanted to unwrap.
• iTunes Expected to Be Retired After Over 18 Years from MacRumors:
• Huck: Sound and Vision Blend: This isn’t something I read but something I tried. I see this coffee advertised to through Trade Coffee on Instagram and Facebook a lot, so being heavily susceptible to the power of suggestion: I tried it. It was good, it wasn’t as dark as the description made it seem like.

Books 📚

Finished Marvel Comics, the Untold Story by Sean Howe and I really enjoyed. It was a very thorough history and it was interesting to see where certain plots came from, for instance, I didn’t know the whole concept behind Secret Wars was dreamed up by Mattel as a promotional gimmick that they actually failed to deliver on.

Other books I read this week included:

• Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1: Back to Basics by Nick Spencer: I haven’t read too many Amazing Spider-Man titles and this one feels very accessible to me. So I got this and its follow up Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2: Friends and Foes 🕷.
• Google It: A History of Google by Anna Crowley Redding: This is a little bit of light reading, it feels a little more like a coffee-table book and its pages are very visually appealing versus being information dense. It’s pretty much an abridged everything you’ve ever heard about Google or the mythology behind the founding of the company. I didn’t find it as interesting as I thought I would, mostly because there weren’t any shocking moments and all of this history has happened in my lifetime 🔍.
• Daisy Jones & The Six: A Novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid: I just started this novel and it’s like a fake oral history of a band that doesn’t exist. It’s been getting mixed reviews but it came recommended to me, so let’s roll those dice 🎲.
• How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark: I’ve had this on my shelf for awhile and it’s a really short guide to writing better in short formats and observing the way we communicate so much in so little ✍️.

Watch 📺 & Listen🎙

• Listen: Sufjan Stevens Shares Two New Songs For Pride Month: If you didn’t have a gay crush on Sufjan Stevens, you’re doing something wrong 🏳️‍🌈. So these songs fit, I like Sufjan a lot and I just wish he’d put out a full-length album soon.
• The Banach–Tarski Paradox from VSauce: This video unpacks the chocolate bar illusion (just google it) and the concept of infinity. It uses the Banach-Tarski paradox and a really really interesting explanation of infinity to dissect this myth and your brain will get a work out.
• White Lies from NPR: This podcast reminds me a lot of Atlanta Monster buried secret, southern town, decades later, putting the pieces back together.
• Up First from NPR: I needed a news podcast for the morning, I was churning through the Daily before I got to the office.