Status Report

2020-08-16

Summary

Aimee and I started the week in Emigrant, MT, spent the week in Cody, WY, and then the weekend in Sheridan, WY.

This is a stunning part of the country. I hope to come back eventually.

In Sheridan, Aimee has been taking a lot of videos of “cutie-pies”, that is – cute animals.

She has many video clips of our travels and I hope she will edit them into a movie eventually.

We are making our way eastward, slowly. We will stop in either Minnesota or Wisconsin, where I’ll renew my drivers license and passport, and vote.

We don’t know what we’re doing after that.

I have been depressed frequently. I spent two days this week just laying in bed. It’s hard on Aimee.

This week Mozilla fired everybody on the Servo and Rust teams except for Niko, which stirs up a lot of old feelings, mostly bad. This prompted me to start writing my history of Rust that has been folding around my head forver. I hope that I can get it published soon, while I have some momentum, and while people are thinking about Rust’s past and future.

In July, Aimee and I participated in a hackathon, creating a simple DApp, The Big Announcement. The DApp-development experience is not particulary fun so far, with all the crappy tooling, poor documentation, and extreme smart-contract asynchrony, but I’m pretty satisfied with this first experiment. I hope to polish this up and publish it as a teaching tool.

I am feeling extremely ambivalent about programming lately. At PingCAP, others are starting to finish the work I’ve been doing for the last year on making TiKV storage engines pluggable, and that has me feeling out of the loop and worthless. I’m trying to see it as a good and validating thing that others are finally building on my work, but really they are picking up my work because I’ve been so slow to finish it. I think there is still maybe another year’s worth of work to get alternative storage engines fully working to a level I am satisfied with, at least at my own slow rate of progress.

I hope at some point I’ll find another project I want to work on again, and can make money from, but right now my main project is trying to be a good partner while surviving the pandemic.

Everything’s great. I’m living an amazing life right now, and having incredible experiences weekly. I just need to keep remembering that; and get out of bed.

Completed (work)

Completed (personal)

  • Started writing a history of Rust

Next (work)

  • Convert raftstore to engine_test
  • Come up with a MobileCoin-related blog post

Next (personal)

  • Finish writing a history of Rust