I’ve decided to experiment with a weekly blog post that consolidates my reading, programming, and general learning. Here’s week 1!

Reading

  • Some portion of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman

  • Quite a bit of Infected, a hard sci-fi novel by Scott Sigler

  • The Humanism arc of HPMOR (Ch. 43 to 46). It’s just…

  • Bits of Blindsight, which is our pick for the eSpark book club. This was my second reading. Surprised by how impactful it was on the second go around.

Programming

  • Personal project: how to visualize Chernoff faces using D3 and React.js. Here’s more about this.

  • Personal project: how to save all Reddit account data in one JSON file. Here’s my Github project.

  • Open source work: Ruby port of Clojure’s yesql: https://github.com/gnarmis/yayql (A bare minimum prototype)

    • This was particularly fun and actually quite easy to do. Albeit, I cut away much of the hard stuff to get it done in less than two hours, but the core functionality is there already: take a SQL file and make a Ruby function out of it that executes that SQL with a provided db connection.

Tools I heard about

  • MirageOS – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

  • Cryogen – A static site generator in Clojure

  • Words API – API for words! Pretty legit

  • Sqitch – database change management

  • Postgrest – REST API for any postgres database

  • DTrace Toolkit – just amazing index of tools/scripts that use dtrace to conjure arcane artifacts

  • Zapier has new email parsing capabilities!

Resources I bookmarked

Possible Projects?

Endnotes

I also started using Evernote for reminders too. They sync with Sunrise Calendar! Both ways! It’s nice to reduce the complexity of this reminders-and-done-list tracking process.

In addition, I managed to figure out a way to back up everything for Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc. It’s interesting to see how these different services package up data. One thing I still need is an easy way to export and auto backup all of Evernote.

Overall, a successful week. I don’t think I covered everything here (by a long shot), but this is a good enough summary.