Work
This week I took the opportunity to become the tech lead for a new team which is starting on Wednesday. This will be my first time tech leading, so I’m sure there’ll be a lot to learn which I can talk about in this section.
It’s a brand new stream of work, with lots of user research to do, and there’s nothing on GitHub yet, so I’ll refrain from sharing details until stuff starts to go live.
Books
I’ve decided to try to read 100 pages a day1, to get myself back in the habit of reading daily and to make some progress through my ever-growing backlog.
This week I read:
Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erikson, the first of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It starts in media res, with lots of characters and events, and took a couple of chapters to get into. I’ve seen someone on Reddit describe it as if ASoIaF started in the middle of Robb’s war in the North: there are clearly things going on elsewhere in the world, and sometimes people from elsewhere show up, but you only have enough information to put a small part of the picture together.
It’s apparently much weaker than the rest of the series. I think that’s fantastic news, because I really enjoyed it; so if the rest is even better, great!
Anecdotes of the Cynics, in the Penguin Little Black Classics collection. The Cynics were a bunch of Greek philosophers who aspired to asceticism, so that they would be content in just about any situation. It was a significant influence on Stoicism. Though, there does seem to be some question of whether Diogenes, a great Cynic philosopher, was actually just vain: is it really virtuous to flaunt your lifestyle in front of others? Or is that just vanity? I liked this anecdote:
He [Diogenes] once begged money from a statue. Asked what he was doing, he answered, “Getting used to being refused.” When he begged—a practice he began owing to his poverty—he used to say, “If you’ve given to others, then give to me too; if you haven’t, now’s a good time to start.”
I also published my book wishlist.
Link Roundup
- Qualified do
- Using authenticators to protect an online service
- Issue 212 :: Haskell Weekly
- This Week in Rust 339
- meaning and origin of ‘to steal someone’s thunder’
- PA Presents: Call of Cthulhu
Finishing a book counts as finishing the 100 pages regardless of how many I actually read.↩︎