Essential Effects: From Smoke to Rain
Quite the weather we're having here in Seattle. First the smoke from fires in the west, then an immediate shift into constant rain. Oof.
In the past two weeks I've focused on two areas of Essential Effects: a new chapter about concurrent state, and making the book more readable. I really want a beautiful book, and the AsciiDoctor system I'm using gives you a lot of options that I'm trying to tweak.
Here's a previous version (from the Prerequisites chapter):
And a new version, where I've increased the margins, removed the grey and inline color of the literals:
I think it's much nicer. YMMV. (The silly DRAFT background isn't helping much, sorry.)
In other news, Noel taught the Essential Effects course last week, and promptly gave me an earful of complaints criticism about the holes in my exposition. The book often focuses on exploring the Cats Effect APIs so the reader can learn how to use it, but sometimes I don't call out the underlying concepts--asynchronous boundaries, cancelation boundaries, etc.--that can best explain what's going on. That's what I'll be working on next.
Stay safe,
.. Adam