Here's hoping 2022 will be better for all of us.
Swan Song has returned after almost three years of inactivity! I wrote about half the script for episode 62 a year and a half ago, but it sat on my computer unfinished since then. I finally picked it back up and managed to put out a pretty good episode, all things considered. Seven more games to go and I will finally have finished 1999's games. Luckily for me, each year afterward has fewer games to cover.
Caesura Guided Tour videos have caught up to the functionality from the first two Caesura releases from last month. Interestingly, there will be a workflow change apparent in December's videos. I recorded footage throughout the implementation of all features developed over the month of November, so videos should feel less like a lecture about what the code I've already written does, and more like I'm coding and experimenting with the viewer in real time. Hopefully this will make videos less time-consuming to produce as well, as video production has been a limiting factor to Caesura development, especially this month.
Caesura has gotten a few more quality of life features over the month as a few friends of mine have started using it for their music listening out of frustration with iTunes, and I really wanted to get the Mac version in a more usable place before getting to work on splitting code into a framework that can be shared by both the Mac and (eventual) iOS versions.
Big month for Caesura, my iTunes-inspired music player project I've been wanting to work on for years.
The first public Mac release was published this month. There's been another bugfix update released since then, but it's nice to have something barebones but functional after spending years wanting this app. It gets me excited to make it even better over time and bring it to iOS as well.
I've also decided to make a video series, the Caesura Guided Tour. This video series will chronicle the development of Caesura feature by feature, and will serve as a sort of director's commentary to the codebase. I hope it can inspire others to work on their dream apps, as I feel software authored by people who are passionate about their work tend to be really great.
This month also marks the seven year anniversary of the Limitless Possibility podcast I do with Luc-Olivier. We don't have many listeners, given how it's mostly a personality-led podcast, and neither of us are that popular in the grand scheme of things, but I appreciate all of them very much for sticking with us and finding us interesting.
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.