This year I have been continue to assist with the IceCube Upgrade, deployed this Austral Summer season at the Geographic South Pole. After contracting with UW-Madison since 2022, I started as a full-time employee at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) in July.

Also,

• Regular drawing from life at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts;
• Learning to play Mom's old Haynes concert flute;
• Learning more Mandarin.

Like everyone else, I've been trying to make sense of how LLMs fit into work and life. As part of this effort, I have been reengaging with Clojure programming, being reminded how fun Lisps and a good REPL can be. The new AI tooling landscape has not changed that – if anything, Clojure is even more fun than ever, since a knowledgeable assistant can help sand off some of the sharp corners. Learning a new programming language is fun, too, as you can bounce questions and ideas off the tools in real time as you go. I am learning more Rust this way. Emacs, too, has become interesting again, since the new robots can help one shave off all the prickly bits and customize things to one's liking to an extent not really possible with other editors (so far as I know).

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• I showed fourteen pieces in the August group show, "Sites of Arrival", at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago. Participated in a few other shows as well.
• I continued work for IceCube: embedded systems programming, test visualization, and communications tests in preparation for the 2024-2025 Antarctic field season ("IceCube Upgrade");
• I did regular "quick sketch" figure drawing at the Palette and Chisel;
• I spent more time than usual on family care, reading, and private writing.

• IceCube work
• Playing with compilers and toy languages; learning OCaml;
• Drawing and painting practice
• Taking care of family.
• Making A Tiny E-Paper Status Display for the Raspberry Pi Zero
• Wrangling Half a Thousand Dreams

Worked on my painting and drawing practice, including a series of self portraits. Worked as an independent software developer for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

Prior to September, 2022, I took a five month sabbatical from paid work. Here are some of the things I worked on:

• Improved l1, my Lisp dialect written in Go, and wrote the beginnings of a roguelike-inspired mini-game in that language.
• Made a tiny 1-d roguelike in Python.
• Improved my Scheme implementation in Python.
• Tinkered with Common Lisp projects, including this library of functions inspired by Clojure, a text-based histogramming library, and a bookkeeping program for War Permutations.
• Did the first 50+ Common Lisp problems on Exercism to train myself better in this old, strange, fast language.
• Paintings and relief prints. Example: War Permutations print. See also works in progress here, or my Instagram feed.
• Practiced 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.
• Learned about Quantum Computing by reading books and playing with Qiskit.
• Worked on the Web site you're reading.
• Journaling and working on improving my handwriting.

• Implemented a Lisp in Go, with detours into Crafting Interpreters and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
• Learned 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 impressed by how fast Go programs are, including the program used to build this site.
• Learned some 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!
• 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.