Inputs

This month, I started my new job at Relay Payments after a few weeks off. So far so good - I’ve been working throughout their stack, and it’s been a nice change of pace to work on React/Typescript, as well as being challenged to level up my Go skills. I have a draft underway about what I’m learning as I try to ramp up on the latter, but I’ll say that Effective Go was probably the most useful resource thus far.

After having it recommended to me many times by various friends with great taste, I finally read The Remains of the Day, which was quick but affecting. I also read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation; I’d read excerpts in college and have heard quite a few audio interviews with him, so I felt I had a decent grasp on his perpective and arguments, but have been wanting to get around to reading the book in order to cement my understanding. The latest installment of Logic Magazine had a number of good essays; I particularly enjoyed the final piece, “Parliaments of the Earth”, about electricity cooperatives.

Acquired Podcast released the final installment of their three-parter on Berkshire Hathaway. If the idea of listening to two lovable tech bros talk about Warren Buffet for nine hours sounds like a good time, this might be the podcast for you. I’ll work on my pitch. I’ll also recommend the ALAB Series episode The Racism’s Baked Right In, which did not come out this month, but was a timely listen to explain what was going on with the NFL’s use of “race norming” in concussion settlements.

Since I’m primarily writing code, not attending meetings, in my new job, I’ve been taking in a lot more music as well. Black Country, New Road was probably my best discovery this month, and I’ve also been enjoying the new Tyler, the Creator album and Adrienne Lenker’s solo performances, such as this wonderful “Tiny Desk Concert”.

Outputs

As mentioned above, I’ve been ramping up on Relay’s code base and getting oriented with their stack. So far I have worked on an administrative feature that mainly consists of ReactJS/TypeScript code. I’ve also been working on the backend tests in Go, which has been at times frustrating as I looked to work within the conventions of Go and the design concepts of the code base, but ultimately rewarding and I am learning a lot.

I’ve been working on a small JavaScript library to help web apps provide product tours that guide the user’s mouse and keyboard input with permission, and hope to make more progress and share some of this by the next input/output check-in.

All of my writing from June is still in draft form, but I hope to wrap up at least one of the posts in the next week or so.