Resigned from work this month. I'll be taking the rest of the year off to focus on special projects and re-evaluate what the hell it is I'm doing with my life.
As I had expected, the return to the office and the resulting clear separation between home and work was greatly appreciated.
Spent about ten hours this month working on the Mac version of Caesura and implementing the first third of its minimum viable feature set: library management. Tracks can be added and removed, its metadata is (partially) being read and inserted into the database, and the library view can be sorted by different table columns and filtered by keyword. I have a lot of new thoughts and opinions regarding AppKit because of this, so look for those in a future Limitless Possibility episode.
Speaking of which, the podcast was on hiatus this month. I recorded episode 166 about MiniDisc with our special guest Richard in late July, and released it in the first week of August, but otherwise no podcasts were recorded or released in August. The next episode (which has yet to be recorded) will be released on September 11th.
I managed to get my 2nd COVID vaccination earlier than planned. What had originally been a date in mid-September became a date in late July. Today, I bought my first monthly bus pass since the month of November 2020. The separation between home and work will be greatly appreciated.
After a few weeks of frustration with the current state of the Apple Music app, I decided to go ahead and post up my plans for Caesura, a music player app I've been wanting to write for myself for years. My patience has been worn by the state of modern music apps, and I need to do something to have some sane way of listening to music in the near term. Right now, the work being done is more structural than any kind of tangible development, but once that will be done, development should theoretically be pretty smooth and straight-forward.
Another highlight of the month is the knowledge base article How I learned Japanese, which details exactly what I did to study Japanese between April of 2012 and late 2014 when I took the JLPT N2 test which I successfully passed. Hopefully it can be of use to anyone else interested in learning Japanese.
Inspired by the 100 Rabbits changelog, I've made this little section of the site to keep track of progress being made on my various personal projects on a monthly basis. It'll be nice to be able to look back at what I've gotten accomplished over a period of time and deliver short personal updates on this page.
In favor of dependency aversion is a notable knowledge base article that went live this month. It is the first piece of writing I've published publicly regarding software development practices in almost a decade. While I do regularly write these kinds of posts, they tend to stay internal to my workplace, and are more documentation-focused than philosophical. There has been no shortage of commentary on software development on my podcast, but in terms of published writing, there has been very little, so I'm glad to finally have something out there. Hopefully more to come in the future.
I got my first COVID vaccination this month. It felt like an eternity compared to my friends in the US, but it's such a relief that my time has finally come. Getting my second shot some time in September, although the government has mentioned they think they'll be able to speed things up and get people their second shots early. Stay safe everyone, and see you next month.