What I Read in 2022
In 2021 I really tried to start focusing more on reading. I didn’t do a great job keeping up with my 2021 reads, but I did better this year. I’ve not done as much of it as I’d have liked, but putting this list together helped me realize I’m doing better than I thought.
Here’s the list! I’ve roughly sorted it by category.
- The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
- A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, Hank Green
- An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green
- Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
- Paper Towns, John Green
- An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers
- Clean Architecture, Bob Martin
- Domain Driven Design Distilled, Vaughn Vernon
- Visualizing Google Cloud, Priyanka Vergadia
- Code That Fits in Your Head, Mark Seeman
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Samin Nosrat
- Food Lab, J Kenji Lopez-Alt
- Maus, Art Spiegelman
- Watchmen, Alan Moore, David Gibbons
- The Sandman, Neil Gaiman
Starting on The Wheel of Time series is daunting, there’s 13 books to go. I’m not in any real rush though. I loved The Eye of the World as an introduction to the series. I can’t remember the last time I was angry that I had obligations like work and eating to get in the way of my reading.
I got through everything I hadn’t read by John Green, and went ahead and read his brother’s books as well. Solid hits all around. Reading John Green just puts me in a better mood.
I’ve been part of a book club at work where we’re trying to read some software-oriented books, and I have to say it’s been great! Seeman’s Code That Fits in Your Head stands out as a really good book that I’m going to start recommending to people.
I decided to read more comic books and visual novels this year. I finally got around to Maus and Watchmen, which have been on my to-read list since college. I was really surprised how much I enjoyed Watchmen, the art alone would have been worth the read. The Sandman was a big surprise, I watched it on Netflix and decided I wanted to get the OG material and ended up reading through all of it as quick as I could.
Looking back at the list I’d feel great if next year I was able to match this. If the rest of The Wheel of Time series is as good as the first book it won’t be much a problem at all. I’d also really like to work through the rest of Neil Gaiman’s work.
Kittens!
It’s official. We got cats! 2 perfect kittens. Gus (black) and Tibbs (tabby).
Is This Thing On?
Gave up on this for a while. Now I’m trying it again.
A lot’s changed, and a lot has stayed the same. Waves in the ocean.
I think I’m going to start talking about programming things now. I’ve been in the industry nearly a decade, certainly I’ve got some original thoughts, right?
2018 In Review
Great things from 2018 — I turned 30 and moved to North Carolina!
No real order to any of the things listed, inspiration taken from fogus.
Great blogs and articles read
- UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right? - I’m a sucker for a good talk about time and timekeeping, this has become a go-to recommendation for friends working on timekeeping problems.
- See No Evil - supply chains fascinate me, so this introspective piece about the role of software and supply chains in society stood out as a pretty fantastic read
- Software Disenchantment - likely my favorite read this year. I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt strongly disappointed in the sorry state of modern software. Nikita brings all that out with such perfect clarity.
- There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security - I recognize that I have a pretty strong paranoia about software security, it’s pretty closely related to the aforementioned feelings on software disenchantment. Jeff’s points here are strong — and I strongly hope that U2F gets broader support this year.
Favorite technical books read
- Programming Language Pragmatics - I’ll admit that I’m far from finished with this book, but every time I pick it back up it challenges my understanding of programming in all new ways; it’s been a genuine joy to read.
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - for a book that came out when I was in high school it’s still referenced and recommended an absurd amount. After getting through it I feel like it really is one of the better explanations and references for enterprise patterns.
Favorite non-technical books read
Sadly, none.
Favorite food
- Chef’s Table on our Carnival cruise - this experience is hard to wrap into words, but the 8 course meal was out of this world.
- Rigatoni with Easy Vodka Sauce - I’ve made this probably 4 times now, and it’s definitely my favorite recipe I picked up in 2018.
Favorite video games discovered
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance - I played a lot of games this year, but I never connected with any of them quite like I did KC:D. The challenging gameplay mixed with thoroughly authentic local history was sublime.
- Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - I was a fan of the older AC games, but Odyssey shifted the series to a very new direction with excellent storytelling and open-world gameplay. I am so excited to see a AAA development team come up with something so great.
Favorite podcasts discovered
- Somehow I Manage - a podcast dedicated to watching and talking about one of my favorite TV series, The Office.
- Playing For Fun - a show about playing video games, for fun. Good title, really.
Interesting tabletop/role-playing games
- Monster of the Week - this was a game played on The Adventure Zone (an Actual Play podcast) and I fell in love with the strong narrative that the game allows for.
Plans for 2019
- Produce more - my theme for the whole year is to get to producing more blogs, code, ideas, anything!
- Document my media intake - so many people I follow are able to put concise thoughts together on the movies and shows they watch, but I honestly don’t have a good enough recollection of what I’ve watched.
- Read 10 non-technical books
- Finish the technical books I’m still in-progress reading
New Blog
So I’ve given up on doing my own hosting. It was a fun run, but I’m looking for a more reliable toolchain.
I’ve played with the various static site generators, I still advocate Hugo and Jekyll to a lot of people. For now though, I’m using blot.im.
It’s affordable, it’s managed, and it lets me just write markdown in plaintext which is all I want to do.
For what it’s worth I’ve had legitimately good experiences with every hosting strategy I’ve concieved of, but none of them fit my incredibly lazy workflow.
I started on nearlyfreespeech.net with hand-coded HTML. The host was great, especially back when I started. Their pricing model was very tightly coupled to usage, which I had none of thanks to my incredible laziness and the amount of effort required to tinker in raw HTML. I gave them $20 in 2013 and there’s just under $10 left in the funds for the account today. I’ve certainly never dealt with a more affordable host.
They sought to charge a premium for DNS, so I went and made a Cloudflare account and moved all my DNS there where it remains to this day.
When I finally learned Git it wasn’t long after that I started playing with Jekyll on Github. This was fun and I ended up doing a project for a makerspace hosting their website and blog through that platform.
At some point in the past few years HTTPS became a requirement, with the rise of Lets Encrypt I was happy to add some automation to my Nearly Free Speech setup in order to get that good HTTPS traffic without depending on Cloudflare’s management. This is back to the front of my mind given the move to Blot, I’m not sure what I’ll end up leaning on for HTTPS.
Sometime in the past couple of years I started getting more drawn into Go, which somehow led me to Hugo. I never actually got to the point of publishing anything with Hugo, but in my tinkering with it I found it nice enough.
Now it seems du jour for web developers to create their own static site generators. I’ll admit, I threw some ideas at an editor in that front. Before long, I caught myself rewriting a terrible version of IIS and had to step far away from that project. For now I think it’s wise to leave that to better motivated individuals.
So here I am. Writing Dropbox-synched markdown in Visual Studio Code on my desktop, or in Byword on my iPad. Blot picks up the files and generates the HTML for me. It’s my abhorrently lazy dream.
If I were more bound to the current zeitgeist I might label this page “Colophon” or something. But I grew up on AIM and GeoCities, so we’ll stick with the “New Blog” label for now.