2021-01-27 Daily Links

As previously mentioned, I’m on sabbatical. Part of my job right now is learning how to actually relax for once, and how to be more present with my family and with life in general. The other part is spent exploring potential next career moves. It’s absolutely a position of privilege, and not a day goes by that I don’t think on that.

The majority of my career (25 years) has been focused on Technical Operations, Site Reliability, and various levels of management within software engineering organizations. I’m giving serious consideration to stepping back into the land of individual contributor, but am interested in doing so in a different capacity than before. I want to put my “beginner’s mind” on again, and learn something new. Rather than pursuing something in infrastructure or operations, I believe I’m going to chase down a path of software development and have a chance at growing in something very different than I’m typically used to. The two software paths that come to immediate mind are Ruby on Rails and iOS development via Swift. I’ll be spending some time playing more with both of these over the coming weeks and months.

Today’s links:

• Listened to an interview w/ @dhh Remote Ruby yesterday, and hear that Rails 7 is expected to ship with structured logging support built in. This has long been on my wish list – any systematic nudge to bring people straight to structured logging will be a boon to the industry, regardless of format
• Been kicking the tires of Twist, with my buddy Brad. I’ve been longing for a different communication tool for the workplace – something effective, but something that honored asynchronous work. Tooling like Slack feels like ‘shoulder tapping at scale’. So far, after nearly a month of use, this seems like a strong contendor
• I’ve begun working through the Ruby track on exercism as a means to get back into practice before I consider re-entry into the workforce. I’ve worked through it in the past, and this is a great way to get direct support learning the idioms of the language
• Noting that I was interested in learning more about Swift in a hands-on manner, Brad also sent me a few links over Twist for some of his favorite learning spots. Among the list: Paul Hudson, John Sundell, Ray Wenderlich
• Make Noise, my favorite Eurorack module creators, has an announcement later today that I’m very interested in learning more about