Entry 49
Short update this week; my mom is in town at the moment.
Finished A Wizard Of Earthsea, what’s not to love. As I understand it, at least a few of the other books in the series are just as compact, which is quite a breath of fresh air in fantasy. I started The City & The City, by China Méville. He seems to be of a similar lineage as Jeff Vandermeer - the New Weird guys. The City & The City is fairly weird so far, from the short amount that I’ve read.
Started playing a bit of The Outer Worlds. I haven’t sunk time into a game like that in a long time, but this one looks to be engaging in its writing, maybe it’s enough to hook me. I will say that it’s much prettier than I imagined - it looked a bit Fallout-ish from its trailers.
My only thing on the computing side: read a bit of a walkthrough on the Protobuf codebase, and was tickled to see a very thorough comment from Kenton Varda, who I now work with at Cloudflare. He took a lot of lessons from his time working on Protobufs and turned that into Cap’n Proto, which we use as well. After spending so much time in JS, a language where serialization is essentially free from a syntax perspective, it’s hard to understand a lot of the concerns around an RPC serialization library, and I don’t always understand the decisions behind its implementation. But I get more and more acquainted every day!