Week 46: Everything

23rd November 2020

• This week marks 6 months of me being in my job. I’d not have noticed the milestone if Tom hadn’t said he’d also just passed 6 months in his weeknotes. Thanks for the reminder Tom!
• It feels like I’ve come quite a long way in that time. When I started I’d never written any Elixir. I now feel quite comfortable writing it and can see why people rave both about both it, and also immutable data structures. While they tripped me up for quite a while I’m now totally sold on the benefits.
• Immutability got me much the same as hardware description languages did in University. With hardware description languages, or at least in Verilog which we were using at the time, my little brain couldn’t deal with registers not being around later on in the program (if you didn’t set the register at the end of the clock cycle then it would be empty on the next execution). I lost a good amount of time puzzling why my program didn’t work, or why it kept forgetting everything.
• Being back at a 6 person start up is exactly what I was hoping for though. It’s got that right level of having to do everything, and also having everything to do. Hopefully we do the right everything, and skip the everything we don’t need or have time for.
• We watched The Queen’s Gambit. I thought it was excellent, and it prompted me to launch the Chess.app that comes on MacOS and have a couple of games. It turns out I’m still terrible at chess.