What I'm Doing Now1
Note: I am currently taking a break from many things that resemble work!
Current Activities (during my "sabbatical")
- Paintings and relief prints. Example: War Permutations print. See also works in progress here, or my Instagram feed.
- Tinkering with Common Lisp projects, including this library of functions inspired by Clojure and a bookkeeping program for War Permutations. Also working problems on Exercism to train myself better in this old, strange, fast language.
Recent Projects
- Until late April, 2022 I was a staff software engineer at OppFi, where I wrote software (mostly in Clojure), mentored and taught other engineers, and tried to improve process, code quality, and architecture wherever I could. I spent nearly four years at OppFi, learned a lot, helped a lot of people, and am happy to move onto other things.
- Practicing Python programming (again!). I did a lot of Python development up until about 2014, after which I switched to mostly Clojure for day jobs. But I still like Python and it's fun to get back to it for awhile.
- Learning about Quantum Computing by reading books and playing with Qiskit.
- Working on the Web site you're reading.
- Journaling and working on improving my handwriting.
- Implementing a Lisp in Go, with detours into Crafting Interpreters and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
- Learning the Go programming language. I've written a few modestly useful things and am really enjoying the experience after years of focusing primarily on Lisps and functional programming. Go emphasizes a different kind of simplicity than Clojure does, and it seems to occupy a sweet spot on the speed vs. power spectrum. I'm regularly stunned by how fast Go programs are, including the code used to build this site.
- Learning Mandarin (reading, mostly). I got my vocabulary up to about four hundred words. It's a beautiful language, and a slog to learn, but thanks to technology it is definitely possible!
