Quitting my job! This is my last week at GitHub after working there for about 5 years. Very excited to do nothing and hang out with my kids for a while.
I hope so! I’ve heard mixed opinions on academia and it seems to depend a lot on the professor and the group, but I’m pretty sure both are a good fit for me :) Anyways, I’ll be doing quantum metrology, i.e trying to build a new kind of clock (one that works on the basis of an atomic nucleus and not on electronic transitions, it’s called a nuclear clock)
Tomorrow I’m getting my hologram microcosm to complement my Moogs, Mother-32 and DFAM. So I’ll be spending time just synthing around and making noise (alone or with the family, my 1 year old loves the knobs and lights and sounds)
I’ve finally started working on a game idea I’ve had for 6-7 years, yesterday I got a free day and spent all day pushing the project forward. The units are programmable using Uxn and I was working on an in-game debugger for them. I’ve decided to build it in the open and write devlogs at least weekly. Here’s the itch.io page for the project plus the devlogs.
$WORK: Final cleanup of the last release we did, fixing some bugs. General janitorial work.
The microcosm looks very sick. I’ve been eyeing it or the Chroma Console for sometime in the future. I also have little ones who like synths. There’s nothing cuter than my 3yo asking if we can play the “sympathizer” as he calls it. He “got me” a Dato Duo for Christmas this year and we jam on it all the time. Highly recommend for parents who want to “jam” with young kids.
It’s an audio mixer/looper doohickey! It lets you dial in a sound distortion/effect you like, then record, loop and play snippets live while adding or effects. Looks like this one can also record multiple samples and mix them together in different ways? I wouldn’t know what to do either, but if you’re good you can make things like this or this.
While it does have a small phrase looper the main attraction for the microcosm is not particularly the type of music you sent. The microcosm takes sound you give it, chops it up into little pieces and then has several ways of producing sound using those tiny pieces. For example it may take some of the pieces and play them back to you backwards in very small loops that are randomly pitch shifted. It is very good at adding depth to music by layering sounds related to what you just played using randomness.
$WORK: Interviews! Two, actually! I was laid off in May 2023, so it’s about time… my first in almost a year. This industry is starting to feel well and truly doomed…
$PERSONAL: finishing setting up my 1996 Compaq laptop, and trying to figure out why my beige G3 no longer wants to see its internal hard disk (I checked the disk and it’s fine in another computer).
Then I have two… I guess the fashionable word is “side-hustle”?… making some apps to try and have a little side income while improving peoples lives. Nothing much to report there, yet, but hopefully soon I’ll start writing more about it and have something to post about.
It will take me a while to digest and face the beast. I am quite nervous about this being a new chapter in my life. The whole body is recharged by this energy
After 9 years at my company, I gave my notice a few weeks ago and have 1.5 weeks left. Strangely enough, I now have a sudden boost of energy at work and work longer hours than I used to.
Either way, looking forward for a change and working on defining how my next chapter will look like. New job? Starting a company? Changing career? Long vacation? Feels unreal to have this open!
Prepping for a convention trip in May! Planning for a train trip or drive instead of the usual flight, unfortunately, since xe now feel inordinately unsafe doing the latter.
House sale prep! Not looking forward to clearing out all of xir things next week, necessary as it will be.
Refining xir Obsidian workflow. Xe have never written as much as xe have since starting this daily notes habit, not outside of NaNoWriMo. We’re talking hundreds to thousands of words per day. A lot of this includes xir own pithy chat messages that have otherwise been lost to the aether.
Adding more of the drawers xe already have waiting for xir KALLAX and then installing more whiteboards in front of these same drawer shelves on hinges. Life hack!
Continuing to make a deep study of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method. Been too long since xe have wielded a highlighter like this!
For $WORK I need to get around finishing up some report automation, but I’m more hyped for $PERSONAL where I’m hacking in revealjs+multiplex in my website to host some talks. Just need to make more talks at this point 😅 and tune some formatting issues in places.
Completing my home automation project. The final delivery of the smart outlets comes in tomorrow and will be set up through HA and HK. Nice to see the whole project come together as planned.
Woot! “HA” and “HK”? Xe picked up a few IKEA light bulbs and a couple of their remotes xirselves just this month. Been meaning to delve into Matter and Zigbee in order to control them purely on a LAN. Are you doing something similar?
The DX affordance of defining an effect is too much boilerplate. Most of that in there is to help facilitate the separation of declaring and effect and evaluating the effect, and to type check the thing. I’m not sure what the solution will look like and LLMs won’t be of much help. Mostly just trial and error. Found the problem while building a sample pipeline last week: https://interjectedfuture.com/lab-note-061-early-application-on-a-sample-pipeline/
I’ll also be finishing up an essay on what fine-grain reactivity means to me and when it clicked in my head.
At $WORK, it’s an onsite meeting so I get to go into the office and not have any free time outside of work beyond being in the hotel room (it’s in Downtown San Jose which I find to be a very droll area).
In personal stuff, I released an alpha of a CMake library this past weekend and have been fixing bugs/implementing features as I finally run into them. At least being onsite means I can spend after work hours just hacking away on it :P
Quitting my job! This is my last week at GitHub after working there for about 5 years. Very excited to do nothing and hang out with my kids for a while.
Me too! I’m also quitting my job but unlike you I’m going straight on to my next commitment, being a PhD candidate at TU Wien…
That’s awesome! I’ve always toyed with the idea of academia. What are you going to be studying?
I hope so! I’ve heard mixed opinions on academia and it seems to depend a lot on the professor and the group, but I’m pretty sure both are a good fit for me :) Anyways, I’ll be doing quantum metrology, i.e trying to build a new kind of clock (one that works on the basis of an atomic nucleus and not on electronic transitions, it’s called a nuclear clock)
Same - I have 1.5 weeks left, quite daunting to have freedom after this!
$PERSONAL:
$WORK: Final cleanup of the last release we did, fixing some bugs. General janitorial work.
The microcosm looks very sick. I’ve been eyeing it or the Chroma Console for sometime in the future. I also have little ones who like synths. There’s nothing cuter than my 3yo asking if we can play the “sympathizer” as he calls it. He “got me” a Dato Duo for Christmas this year and we jam on it all the time. Highly recommend for parents who want to “jam” with young kids.
Oh! The dato duo looks amazing! We’ll definitely get it once she is a bit older :D Thank you!
I wouldn’t know what to do with it, but that’s a beautiful piece of hardware
It’s an audio mixer/looper doohickey! It lets you dial in a sound distortion/effect you like, then record, loop and play snippets live while adding or effects. Looks like this one can also record multiple samples and mix them together in different ways? I wouldn’t know what to do either, but if you’re good you can make things like this or this.
While it does have a small phrase looper the main attraction for the microcosm is not particularly the type of music you sent. The microcosm takes sound you give it, chops it up into little pieces and then has several ways of producing sound using those tiny pieces. For example it may take some of the pieces and play them back to you backwards in very small loops that are randomly pitch shifted. It is very good at adding depth to music by layering sounds related to what you just played using randomness.
Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDp9S50qyT4
You can see here how it adds depth after he toggles the pedal on at 1:42.
It has 11 different ways it does that, with 4 variations each.
$WORK: Interviews! Two, actually! I was laid off in May 2023, so it’s about time… my first in almost a year. This industry is starting to feel well and truly doomed…
$PERSONAL: finishing setting up my 1996 Compaq laptop, and trying to figure out why my beige G3 no longer wants to see its internal hard disk (I checked the disk and it’s fine in another computer).
Then I have two… I guess the fashionable word is “side-hustle”?… making some apps to try and have a little side income while improving peoples lives. Nothing much to report there, yet, but hopefully soon I’ll start writing more about it and have something to post about.
New job!
It will take me a while to digest and face the beast. I am quite nervous about this being a new chapter in my life. The whole body is recharged by this energy
After 9 years at my company, I gave my notice a few weeks ago and have 1.5 weeks left. Strangely enough, I now have a sudden boost of energy at work and work longer hours than I used to.
Either way, looking forward for a change and working on defining how my next chapter will look like. New job? Starting a company? Changing career? Long vacation? Feels unreal to have this open!
Feels like plenty enough for one week!
For $WORK I need to get around finishing up some report automation, but I’m more hyped for $PERSONAL where I’m hacking in revealjs+multiplex in my website to host some talks. Just need to make more talks at this point 😅 and tune some formatting issues in places.
Completing my home automation project. The final delivery of the smart outlets comes in tomorrow and will be set up through HA and HK. Nice to see the whole project come together as planned.
Woot! “HA” and “HK”? Xe picked up a few IKEA light bulbs and a couple of their remotes xirselves just this month. Been meaning to delve into Matter and Zigbee in order to control them purely on a LAN. Are you doing something similar?
Writing two conference talks for the first week of March. It’s gonna be a hectic weekend. I’m pre-emptively taking time off so I can recover.
The DX affordance of defining an effect is too much boilerplate. Most of that in there is to help facilitate the separation of declaring and effect and evaluating the effect, and to type check the thing. I’m not sure what the solution will look like and LLMs won’t be of much help. Mostly just trial and error. Found the problem while building a sample pipeline last week: https://interjectedfuture.com/lab-note-061-early-application-on-a-sample-pipeline/
I’ll also be finishing up an essay on what fine-grain reactivity means to me and when it clicked in my head.
At $WORK, it’s an onsite meeting so I get to go into the office and not have any free time outside of work beyond being in the hotel room (it’s in Downtown San Jose which I find to be a very droll area).
In personal stuff, I released an alpha of a CMake library this past weekend and have been fixing bugs/implementing features as I finally run into them. At least being onsite means I can spend after work hours just hacking away on it :P