January 2025: Would you like rust with that?
Happy New Year! I hope 2025 finds you all well. I rang in the New Year with some friends on a windy rooftop watching London's fireworks. The weather has been pretty cold and miserable recently, and spending time with people I care about helps offset the drudgery of the outdoors.
At the start of the month, I wrote my annual reflections, and thought about the year ahead. I don't know what the rest of 2025 will look like yet, but I have a big trip next month and I'm excited for the other things I have planned.
Until a few days before NYE, my yearly theme for 2025 was going to be “sustainability”. I’m pretty comfortable right now, and I wanted to build the practices and lifestyle that will keep that going. I dropped that theme because it carries an assumption that I can just maintain the status quo -- that no longer feels right.
It's hard to think about sustainability without acknowledging how fast the world is changing. This month alone, the news has been dominated by headlines about the California wildfires and US politics. I haven't written much about either of them because it’s not my area of expertise, but my heart goes out to everyone affected. Life in the US (and elsewhere) is getting harder for a lot of people.
As fascism rises and the world burns around us, "just keep doing what I've already been doing" is neither plausible nor moral. I can't do much to directly intervene in the US, but it has renewed my thinking about what I should be doing closer to home.
My new yearly theme is a bit more personal and not something I want to share – but in broad strokes, it's about growing and learning and making the world a better place, and not just following the status quo.
What have I been writing?
I started the year with How I use the notes field in my password manager. I was doing a semi-regular review of all my saved passwords, and I use the notes field to store a lot of information about the context and history of my online accounts. I’m sure other people do this, but I’ve never seen anybody write about it.
Next, I wrote about testing Rust command-line apps with assert_cmd – a handy crate. I've come to appreciate its assertion helpers so much that I miss them when I'm writing tests in other languages.
One of those Rust command-line apps is randline, and I wrote about both the tool and the “reservoir sampling” technique I’m using. This is a project where I probably got more out of writing the blog post than the tool itself – I’m still a Rust novice, but trying to explain my code really forced me to understand it better.
Finally, I wrote Looking at images in a spreadsheet. One of my house projects this month has been the long-overdue sort of my Lego collection, and I’ve been tracking it in a spreadsheet. Being able to see pictures of the bricks makes that much easier.
Plus another stack of “today I learned” posts:
Use shutil.copyfileobj and xb to avoid overwriting files when copying in Python
Google will delete your account if you don’t use it for two years
What’s making me smile?
🧀 I watched the new Wallace and Gromit film and I found it a delight that preserves the charm of the original films. There are so many gorgeous background details if you pause and read. Feathers McGraw remains one of the most chilling villains ever put to film.
🦾 I read Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a fascinating satirical novel about a robot apocalypse that has gone unnoticed by the robots, who are just waiting for more orders from humans. What does the end of the world look like from a robot butler's perspective? It's an absurd concept and gorgeous writing, which reminded me of Douglas Adams at times.
👔 I'm three episodes into the second season of Severance, and it's just as good as the first. I have no idea what's going on at the dystopian corporation of Lumon, but I'll enjoy finding out. Tramell Tillman is a particular highlight of this season -- he's struck a tricky balance between charm and menace.
Apparently what I really enjoy at the moment is hearing about the perils of technology and corporate overreach. I can't imagine why.
February will be an exciting month for me, and I hope for you too!
Speak soon,
~ Alex