David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #6 (August 2023)

Posted 2023-08-06 under #dispatch

Nice to have a quieter month, though we still managed to spend a weekend at Lake Norman and took Nev on her first camping trip at Carolina Hemlocks Recreation Area. We also had a nice visit from my folks to celebrate my mom’s birthday.

Tech-wise, I switched from Vim to Helix, which I’ve detailed over here. I was also able to work through a whole bunch of the Go track on Exercism – it’s a good way to get a handle on the basics of a language, but doesn’t cover using third-party packages, organizing large codebases, etc. To get that kind of experience, I’m going to try my hand at an app for fantasy sports drafts – take a set of player projections and a scoring formula, and output a UI I can use during a live online draft. I’ve been doing this with spreadsheets for years, and it’s pretty cumbersome. I’m going to use TOML for configuration, SQLite for data persistence, and Bubble Tea for the UI itself. We’ll see how it goes!

I’ve signed up for the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon in October. Training starts … tomorrow. I’m going to try to mix in some better eating habits + cross-training this time.

This Month

• Adventure: spending a weekend at Virginia’s Eastern Shore with some childhood friends and a week at the beach with my family
• Project: build a fantasy draft TUI app in Go using Bubble Tea
• Skill: learn how to organize a larger Go codebase as part of 👆

Reading

• Fiction: Tress of the Emerald Sea, Brandon Sanderson
• Non-fiction: The Creative Programmer, Wouter Groeneveld

Links

• Why I don’t use Copilot

  I enjoy programming because it’s about reasoning, thinking, models, concepts, expression, communication, ethics, reading, learning, making, and process. It’s an art and a practice that is best done with other people.

  Increasingly I think it’s imperative for programming to be done more slowly, more deliberatively, and as part of more conversations with more people. The furious automation of everything is eating the world.

• Phase change

  What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?

  I don’t pose that question with any sense of wide-eyed expectation; a reasonable answer might be, eh, nothing much. Not everything in the world depends on the transformation of symbols. But I think that IS the question, and I think it takes some legitimate work, some strenuous imagination, to push yourself to believe it really will be “just about any X” into “just about any Y”.

• The looming demise of the 10x developer: Why an era of enthusiast programmers is coming to an end

  That is to say, I’ve come to believe the era typified by the enthusiast programmer—autodidactic, obsessive, and antisocial—is drawing to a close.

• Notes on Conflict | Yes, Mike will do.

  Over time I shifted on the matter a little, but when I look back on it I realize I wasn’t really evolving my attitude toward conflict, I was just evolving my response to its existence, while still believing that being in a state of conflict is a problem. I just got better at keeping my blood pressure low and gritting through it. I think I was looking at conflict as a thing that you have to acknowledge exists, but that you need to get through as quickly as possible, because it’s a bad place to be.