Assumed Audience : literally every single subscriber of this blog! I’ve just officially launched v5.chriskrycho.com, “Sympolymathesy”. As such, this is the final post on this site! For all the details, check out the relaunch post !
Assumed Audience : software developers interested in honing their craft—especially folks just trying to get a handle on good techniques for testing. A fundamental principle of testing software is: test the interface . Failing to keep this principle in mind is at the root of the majority of the problems I see in automated tests (including quite a few of those I’ve written in the past!). What do I…
Assumed Audience : people who find nerdy mistakes amusing—especially my wife, who rolls her eyes at all my shenanigans of this variety. Offered for your amusement, reader: As I’ve been working on my November writing goal , I set up a spreadsheet to track it—being a good nerd and all. I was confused because while I had estimated that 500 words/day would see me hit 15,000 words, and I had been…
I. Another thing word count goals are bad at Poetry! In some (important) sense the core of the art is brevity so word count goals best come inverted if they come at all II. An answer to Craig Mod’s question I’ve been reading Craig Mod’s fabulous Ridgeline newsletter all year. It’s a letter about walking—kind of. That’s the jumping off-point, anyway. Mod asked a question, back at the beginning of…
I’m a little over a week into my November writing project , and I’m very much enjoying it. However, I ran into a fairly obvious problem today: word counts goals don’t handle editing well. This morning I picked up a piece I started a few months ago, which I’d like to finish and publish by the end of the month. After ten minutes of working on it, I had written some new words… but there were 40 fewer…
Brent Simmons’ blog inessential has, as of today, been online for twenty years . That seems an astounding feat to me… and then I remember: I have been blogging for 14 years myself, and could not possibly have been blogging when Simmons started. I started a Xanga sometime in mid-fall 2005, my freshman year of college. In July 2006, I set up the Blogger site that first mirrored that Xanga and then…
There is something about the commitment to write that I always find not only tiring—as it is, at times!—but also liberating. Much of my best thinking has been done through the work of putting pen to paper or keys to keyboard, for well over a decade now. I do not recall when I first discovered the power of the act of writing itself for focusing the mind and sharpening thought, but certainly by the…
Assumed Audience : written with an eye to folks willing to think a little bit harder about attention —something we all need to get better at. Walking through the airport this morning, I found that my attention itself had caught my attention. I have had this bit from L. M. Sacasas bouncing around in my head for the last month or so: The ability to take photographs expands (and limits) the hiker’s…
Assumed Audience : people who find photography and/or personal biography interesting. For the past few months, I have been picking back up my long-dormant interest in photography. I started trying to learn how to take good photographs back during college—first with an inexpensive point-and-shoot with a decent built-in zoom lens, then with an inexpensive Canon DSLR that was my college graduation…
I am going to try something a little bit audacious in the month of November: to write every day, averaging (at least) 500 words each day. I have wanted for years to do NaNoWriMo , but at this point I am unwilling to commit to the time to write 1,600 words of a novel per day—not least because of the up-front planning it would take me not to run out of story-telling steam. I have also wanted to get…
Assumed Audience : practitioners or interested lookers-on for software development—and Apple itself. Edit: some folks rightly pointed out that my use of “garbage” suggests that the problem is the quality of the existing documentation; I’ve retitled the post to capture that the problem is the massive absence of documentation. You can see the original title by way of the slug. Over the past few…
Assumed Audience : practitioners or interested lookers-on for software development—especially indies. Today, I had about 3½ hours dedicated to working on re write and I did make progress… but it sure didn’t feel like it. For the past month or so, I’ve been sidelined from working on the project by way of getting very sick and then being swamped with travel for a conference followed by a friend’s…
I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Recommended: Thomas Kidd’s What is an Evangelical? is a short and accessible history of “evangelicalism”: where it came from and how it developed into the multifaceted movement it is today, including but very much not limited to its…
I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Recommended: The Themis Files is a delightful trilogy of books by Sylvain Neuvel, about the discovery of giant mecha (“robots” but they need drivers!) left on Earth by an alien race ~3,000 years ago. Popcorn, but really fun popcorn.…
Assumed Audience : software developers, especially those who work on user interfaces. Domain-driven design , and its near neighbor the ports and adapters (hexagonal) architecture all emphasize the importance of distinguishing between your internal “business logic” and your interactions with the rest of the world. Much of the time, the “ports” that get discussed are API calls (e.g. over HTTP ) or…
Assumed Audience : pretty much everybody. Everybody sleeps. I may never regularly set an alarm again. Last year, in the midst of getting increasingly burned out , I hit a point where I couldn’t set an alarm. I found myself needing 8½–9½ hours of sleep every night, and even in that range, setting an alarm often left me feeling exhausted for the rest of the day. As I have slowly but steadily…
Assumed Audience : lovers of books… and typography. I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Required. Beowulf is the great work of Old English literature, the oldest literary work in English full stop. It should be required reading (in a good translation!) for every high…
Assumed Audience : practitioners or interested lookers-on for software development—especially indies. This week, I started the actually writing software phase of working on re write . As of yesterday evening, I actually have a bit of code that, although useless in every way, and not especially attractive, does in fact displays a single reference on an iPhone screen. I have an incredibly,…
Assumed Audience : people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies. I have tried bullet journaling as a full-on way of tracking and planning my work in the past. It never stuck. The system I’ve landed on instead—making heavy use of Bear and a pomodoro timer —has been fantastic . However… I realized yesterday that the way I take notes during the…
Assumed Audience : design types and typography nerds… and digital economics and licensing geeks. Yesterday, I wrote a post extolling the virtues of the lovely (and quirky!) typeface Cronos . Today, I’m back to report on at least one of the reasons why it’s not in wider use. In short: Adobe has made it available for web font usage only if you’re on a subscription plan through Typekit or one of…
Assumed Audience : design types and typography nerds. I’m not sure when I first stumbled on Cronos , but it was a long time ago at this point. I launched a version of this website using Cronos for titles back in 2012. I’ve experimented with a number of typefaces for the body text since then—including Minion , Gentium , and finally Sabon —but Cronos has never changed. Every time I’ve thought about…
Assumed Audience : book lovers! I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Recommended: Regency period piece styled with language and plot reminiscent of an Austen novel… but with more magic and less irony and social commentary. I picked it up because I loved her Lady…
Assumed Audience : orthodox (note the little ‘o’!) Christians. You’re of course very welcome to dig into this material if you are not a Christian, but it’s a Sunday School class, so I’m not addressing non-Christians! Updated September 1, 2019: added EPUB and PDF links at the bottom of the post, as well as direct links to each class page on the Forestgate website. For the four Sundays starting…
Assumed Audience : people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies. One of the things I’ve found over the last couple months is that my calendar is increasingly full —full of meetings with this person or that team. This is not unexpected in an organization as large as LinkedIn, and I had a feeling I’d probably run into this as I transitioned from…
Assumed Audience : people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies and having an idea of what you accomplished over the course of the year. A few months ago, I described my current workflow for tracking what I do every day, using Bear . I’m still doing that, but I’ve made one small tweak that makes for a much nicer experience, and I figured I’d…
Assumed Audience : People interested in Ember and/or TypeScript . Over the course of the rest of this year, I’m going to be working regularly on expanding the set of available TypeScript type definitions in the Ember.js community. A huge part of that effort is enabling others to do the work . It’s completely unfeasible for me to be the only person (or even the Typed Ember team the only people)…
Assumed Audience : anyone who has ever struggled to start something new and unknown and therefore difficult and intimidating. I am sitting here on a weekday evening, trying to figure out exactly how to start building re write . There is an enormous amount to be done, and I genuinely have no idea how to do… almost any of it. I asked myself: “Where would I start if this were a web app?”—because web…
I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Required: Retrieving Eternal Generation , edited by Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain, is a collection of essays defending the doctrine of eternal generation from recent criticism (“recent” meaning the last half century or more) and…
I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either required , recommended , recommended with qualifications , or not recommended . If you want the TL;DR, this is it: Recommended: Hannah Anderson’s All That’s Good is a popular theological treatment of the idea of “discernment”. The first several chapters are worth the price of the book; after that, it’s fine but not amazing , and seemed very much…
I was delighted to spend a bit over an hour chatting with Adam Gordon Bell on the Corecursive podcast . I was there officially to talk about TypeScript, and I did a lot of that… but we also dug into Rust a bit, of course, as well as talking about my schedule and “productivity”. I’ve been podcasting for a few years now, but this was only the second time I’ve ever been on someone else’s podcast—and…
Assumed Audience : people interested in note-taking, research, and long-form writing. For the past four years, I have been dreaming of an absurdly ambitious application: a tool that can actually handle research writing well . Good research writing—whether it’s a college paper or a Ph.D. thesis, a journal publication or a magazine article, a scholarly blog or a big book—is a complex and challenging…
Assumed Audience : web development nerds like me. Those of you subscribed to my RSS feed most likely saw a bunch of posts again earlier this week. That’s because the canonical URL s for the posts on my site changed: from www.chriskrycho.com/<year>/<title slug> to v4.chriskrycho.com/<year>/<title slug> . So, for example, my announcement that I’m speaking at All Things Open 2019 moved from…
I’m very excited to announce that I’ve been accepted to give a talk at this year’s All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina, October 13–15. Here’s the pitch for the talk, titled “Don’t Go Bankrupt! Managing Technical Costs”: Every engineering organization—whether in a startup, a Fortune 500 company, or an open source project—must both sustain (keep the lights on!) and innovate (deliver new…
Over the last year, the Ember community has steadily delivered on the vision we all traced out in last year’s #EmberJS2018 and Roadmap RFC process, culminating with the shipping-very-soon-now Ember Octane Edition . (All the pieces are pretty much done and are either on stable or will be shortly; we just need another LTS release before we cut a full new edition!) So… what should we tackle next?…
Over the last year, the Ember community has steadily delivered on the vision we all traced out in last year’s #EmberJS2018 and Roadmap RFC process, culminating with the shipping-very-soon-now Ember Octane Edition . (All the pieces are pretty much done and are either on stable or will be shortly; we just need another LTS release before we cut a full new edition!) So… what should we tackle next?…
Assumed Audience : anyone willing to think hard about social media and its place in our lives. I got a particularly thoughtful email from a friend about his family’s use of Facebook in response to yesterday’s essay . I’ve reproduced most of my response here because I think it’s a helpful extension on that essay. I (a) totally hear where you’re coming from, and deeply sympathize; and (b) deeply…
Assumed Audience : anyone willing to think hard about social media and its place in our lives. I. The Itch I began writing this post from our vacation bedroom in Jamaica, about five days before I could possibly publish it: before we left, I shut down the machines which can generate new versions of my site. I wished, as I started this post, that I had an equally effective measure for cutting off…
Assumed audience: most anyone, but especially people who have followed along with New Rustacean, my experience with burnout, or both! I am cross-posting this to this site and my newsletter , and the reason it is a couple days late will be apparent in the content below. A good thing, but a big thing! I have in mind today the finishing of things. No surprise, given that today I concluded a…
Assumed audience: people into the details of endurance running and races. (Yes, I know that’s probably a vanishingly small part of my normal readership. That’s just fine.) Today I ran the half marathon event in the Colfax Marathon . You can see the details here (I prefer Strava’s presentation , but you have to have an account to see most of it.) I finished at 1:29:56 wall time, and 1:29:50 chip…
Assumed Audience : anyone who cares about mental health and recovery… but perhaps especially people who have been following me on this journey . It has been just over six months since I hit the rock-bottom point in my experience of burnout: when I had a panic attack… because a programming task came back with a list of small things that needed tweaking. I have made a lot of changes since then, and…
Assumed Audience : anyone who cares about the success of free and open-source software. A New Rustacean listener sent me a note lamenting the way Mozilla’s transition from IRC to Discord —i.e., from an open protocol to a proprietary service. For many advocates of free software, this is a deeply unsettling move. The kind listener who sent me an email pointed to Matrix , an open-protocol service,…
Assumed Audience : People interested in note-taking, effective learning, or the idea of a Zettelkasten (which I’ve written about before ). A friend recently asked me: “What exactly is a Zettelkasten?” Unfortunately, there aren’t any (easy-to-find, anyway) answers in a single place online… hopefully until today! 1 The short answer is: a well-organized box (or group of boxes) of notecards. The word…
Assumed Audience : People up for hearing a brief take on the history of the Christian confessions of faith—and why their long history gives me hope today. I wrote this as a tweet storm originally—not something I do often, but something I’ve decided to do occasionally just to keep things interesting for my very weird mix of a Twitter audience. As usual, though, my blog is the “source of truth” for…
Assumed Audience : Just about anyone… but I do assume a bit of familiarity with programming. Just a little note here, nothing long or fancy tonight. 1 I’ve just started working in earnest on my long-dreamt-of applications for research writing. This means I’m trying to figure out how to build some applications with native toolkits: UIKit and AppKit, specifically. And, for the first time in most of…
Assumed Audience : People interested in Ember and TypeScript . One of the real joys of working on ember-cli-typescript over the last few years has been the team that has grown up around it. When I started, it was just me—trying desperately to just make things work at all and blogging about it as a way of documenting what I had learned and maybe, just maybe , drumming up interest along the way. No…
Assumed Audience : Anyone interested in changing dynamics around work, especially “remote” work as enabled by the internet. I spent the week with a bunch of internet friends at EmberConf —and I have been mulling (yet more) on the dynamics of social media, embodiment, attention, and presence. This is the content of my email newsletter for the week—not my normal habit, but this piece lives in both…
Assumed Audience : People interested in Ember and TypeScript . I’m pleased to announce that the unofficial Ember TypeScript team (Dan Freeman, Derek Wickern, James Davis, and Mike North, and I) have just published ember-cli-typescript v2.0.0! Check out the upgrade instructions to get started with the new version! What’s new? There are just two changes, but they’re a big deal! The addon now uses…
Assumed Audience : Just about anyone. But especially people interested in ideas of “productivity” or accomplishing the things we set out to do. I have on my mind this week starting things, and finishing things. I picked up a chest strap heart-rate monitor again a week ago, and took a run with it. It felt like starting ( again , in this case!) with running. I am training for a couple of half…
Assumed Audience : People interested in habits, fitness, or emotions, or especially how they intersect Today I took the second “long” run of my training season for the first of two half marathons I’m running this year (in May; the other is in September). As I was showering afterward, I kept feeling that something was right in my world again—that I was actually seriously training for a half…
Assumed Audience : People who have followed or are interested in my experiences with burnout , or are curious about my new job change. I posted a week ago about my (then-impending, now-quite-actual!) transition from Olo to LinkedIn . My friend Stephen pointed out that, especially for long-time readers of this blog, it seemed a bit odd to write about a job change without so much as mentioning my…