This is going to be a pretty short status update, as very little has happened since my last “Meta Reduce” post. I was mostly enjoying the last weeks of my sabbatical and I didn’t do almost any work on my OSS projects. That being said, now I’m finally back home and I’m ready for some action.

OSS Projects

My biggest short-term goals are new releases of nREPL and CIDER. Both are almost ready and I expect them to go live in the next couple of weeks. A big update of clj-refactor.el is also on the horizon. I also have to submit CIDER and clj-refactor.el to the NonGNU ELPA package repository.

I don’t expect any significant developments on my other projects, but I’d be happy to be surprised there.

Meta

I’ve spent the final weeks of my vacation mostly traveling in France and reading.1 I’m really glad that I finally found the time to read “Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove. I’ve been meaning to read this book for years and it didn’t disappoint! I also enjoyed reading the autobiography of Walmart’s founder “Sam Walton: Made in America”.

In the mean time I also finished re-watching Daniel Craig’s James Bond movies and I’m finally ready to see “No Time to Die”. And the new “Dune” movie! I haven’t been to the cinema in ages, but I’ll make an exception for those two movies. I also finished watching “Sex Education” season 3, and I have to say that this was the worst season of the show so far. Yesterday I wrapped up “Squid Game” as well - a decent show, with plenty of flaws, that didn’t live up to the hype. Still, at least now I understand all the “Squid Game” memes out there.

I was very excited the read about the partnership between Fastmail and 1Password, that allows 1Password to generate unique e-mail aliases for each service that you sign up for. That’s a great step for privacy, and some very fortunate timing for me, as I switched to both services just a few months ago. This also convinced me that for the time being 1Password fits better my needs than Bitwarden. I was really on the fence about which service did I like more before the Fastmail news.

I continued to play with HEY World and I wrote a couple of short articles there:

I guess it’s safe to say I’m quite excited about the freshly announced MacBook Pros and quite upset about the COVID-19 situation in Bulgaria. I like HEY World and I’ll probably keep using for sharing short musings, that don’t fit into a tweet or two. I continue to favor the use of Jekyll (and Emacs) for most of my blogging.

Last, but not least - I’ve kept refining my StarCraf II game and I have the feeling I’m doing slightly better as of late. With infinite choice of strategies that you and your opponents can go for, that’s one of the toughest and most mentally rewarding computer games I’ve ever played. And one massive time sink!

Epilogue

And that’s a wrap. Now that I’m full of energy after my long vacation I hope to make some good progress on my OSS projects. By the way - I can heartily recommend doing a long vacation to everyone, especially given how tough the last couple of years have been on all of us.

  1. And eating! French food is great and now I don’t fit into half my pants. ↩