ntietz.com: Gleam, Hurl, design docs, and more
Hello and happy Friday!
I made it to Santa Cruz for !!con and gave my talk! It went well, and I'm really glad to have made it out there. A recording of it will be up sometime, maybe before the October newsletter, and I might try to record the "extended cut" version I delivered for a Recurse Center group as well.
This was the last year of !!con. A few other conferences have ended around the same time, so we've seen the end of Strange Loop and xoxo as well. I'm sad that they're over, but optimistic because all of us who were the community that made these events thrum with excitement? We're still here and we can make the next generation of great events. If you have any weird, quirky, exciting conferences you'd recommend, let me know! I'd love to attend, and also boost it for all of you to know about too. I might have something brewing myself, but ssshhhhh...
My health has also improved this month. I still don't have a diagnosis, but we can treat some stuff, so I'm back to 60% or so. I've been able to start on some projects again! Some info about those after the posts.
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Blog updates
- First impressions of Gleam: lots of joys and some rough edges: I like to explore new programming languages, and Gleam is well worth the exploration! It's a neat little functional language that runs on the Erlang VM (or compiles to JS) and has some really cool bits I'm going to "borrow" in my own language in the future.
- You should make a new programming language: As programmers, we are in a really special position of being able to make our own tools. We should all learn how to make a programming language, because you learn so much in the process. And by setting out without the intention of it being good, you're much more free to learn.
- Sometimes, I can't talk: We live in a society, and that means we communicate a lot. Sometimes I have a challenge with producing speech. This article talks about what that means, what it feels like, and how I mitigate its impact at home and at work.
- Using search as a primary datastore since the docs said not to: I had the opportunity to try out Typesense and used it wrong on purpose, because if the docs say not to do something, that's just catnip. It was pretty fun, and I did some really sketchy things to make it work. Don't do what I did (the docs say not to!) but Typesense does seem nice if you use it for the intended purpose. (Note: this post was sponsored by Typesense; they did not review it before publication, views are my own.)
- Reasons to write design docs: As a principal engineer, most of my best work is done not in Rust or Python, but in English. Here are four reasons I write design docs, and one thing they don't help with.
Personal projects
There are a few projects that I have in the works right now. I don't want to spill the beans on the main thing I'm working on right now, but it involves the MIDI protocol, and some new-to-me hardware. It's going to be cute and fun.
And I'm starting to think about dusting off my programming language, Lilac, to actually finish up the first round of language design and move on to implementation. I might get something out about that this coming month to get a little bit of a design review.
I've made another iteration of my ergonomic setup! Lessons learned include that a particular contact adhesive is, uh, bad, so some of the glue I used to attach hook-and-loop will not hold. But that's okay, because I also ditched my old keyboard and moved to a new, smaller, lighter, more portable one! When this design iteration is done, there will be a post on it, too. If you're having trouble with your ergonomic setup, I'd love to hear from you and see if I can help.
I think that's it. It feels good to be doing some personal projects again, and hopefully these will have something to show pretty soon.
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❤️ Nicole