Music
😎
I tuned in to Jacob Collier’s livestream on Monday and found out he’s going on tour next year, and he’ll be in Chicago again. Unlike earlier this year when I found out about his Chicago concert only hours before and foolishly skipped it, this time I know four months in advance, and I’ve already bought my ticket. I almost never go to concerts, so this is very different for me. The concert is two days before my birthday too.
Programming
🙂
I’ve started my latest programming project at work. I’m using test-driven development for it, with advice from Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests and xUnit Test Patterns, and like the past couple of times I’ve tried TDD, I’m finding it’s harder than it sounds. I assume I’ll eventually settle into it.
While that’s going on, I’m continuing to churn through my list of software development books, listening to them via a text-to-speech app. I’ve had these on my reading list for years, so I’m going through most or all of them because I don’t want to lose my momentum and put them off again. Last week I got through Refactoring and Design Patterns–two of the first software development books I ever heard about–and Clean Architecture, the book that got me thinking about software development again last year and led to purchasing half my current list. Now I’m on Domain-Driven Design, which also contributes to my conceptual modeling project.
Projects
🙂
I’m experimenting with applying professional project management techniques to my personal projects. Last week I revisited the book I’m learning from, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, to prepare for using it this week. I also started researching project management software. This week I’ll try to sprint through the planning phase of my first experiment: my Christmas labels project, where I make creative labels for my Christmas presents to my family.
Christmas
🙂
I finished my Christmas list, and it feels even more elaborate than last year’s. Oh well. The point was to give my family plenty of options.
People
🙂
Thursday I got invited to a coworker’s game night. I don’t go to game nights often, but last time he invited me to his I had fun, so I went and had fun again. We ate Halloween candy and played Barony. We were all tied just before the end, so it got a little tense vying for first place. I tied for second. After that they set up Pandemic, but I needed to not stay out too late, so I left.
As I ramp up my project work at home, I don’t want to completely crowd out social time, and I’m glad I made the decision to avoid that this time.
Politics
🤔
There’s an election on Tuesday. An important one. The past few elections I’ve tried to take them more seriously and make somewhat informed decisions, so I do a bit of research. But the typical lists of candidates’ positions on the issues don’t really help me, because it seems like there are other relevant considerations that are harder to pick up on.
So now I read endorsements. One site that lists endorsements for some of the races is Ballotpedia. For the rest I just do a general web search for each race. To find out who’s on the ballot, I enter my address into my county’s election website, and it shows me a sample ballot.
Our political system is broken in many ways, I’m sure it goes without saying. One major, difficult change that would improve things is if we picked a different voting system. Here’s a series of videos about that by CGP Grey that I watched last week.
Thank you for updating your Christmas list.