Christmas
😐
Thanks to some turbulence in my sleep schedule and some competing activities, I didn’t get anything done on putting together my Christmas list. But interference from life is part of the reason I’ve started scheduling two weeks for projects like this one.
Productivity
😎
As a suspiciously time-consuming “side” project, I’ve been exploring ways to string together Notion features to add sophistication to my system. I found out how to create tasks in context using + mentions, I used a database item as a variable to filter multiple views at once, and I tried out a small experiment in automating Notion with Make.
Programming
😎
Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Joe Reis and Matt Housley fills in another large gap in my programming knowledge with a comprehensive framework for understanding the data processing pipelines most of my programming projects involve. I appreciated that it introduces the field of data engineering from scratch and emphasizes concepts rather than specific tools.
Foundations for Architecting Data Solutions by Ted Malaska and Jonathan Seidman digs into key practical issues in designing and managing a data project. This short book does assume familiarity with the data engineering field, and its coverage of topics is more selective than Reis and Housley’s, but my impression was that it’s a good supplement that packs in a lot of advice.
Nature
😎
My replacement binoculars arrived on Monday, and the secrets of the universe are being revealed to me, such as the moons of Jupiter. It is unbelievably awkward to take a photo through the binoculars with my phone camera, but I’ll see what I can do with my tripod or a phone adapter.
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Fiction
🤔
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu does a nice job of slowly unveiling the seriousness of Earth’s predicament while also offering some perspective. While I can understand some reviewers’ complaints about the novel’s characterization, since I’m not familiar with Chinese writing, I assumed some of that impression could be due to cultural differences, and in any case I was happy to let the very interesting science fiction ideas outweigh any problems.
