Entry 50
Alright, finally have some time to do a short update.
Getting my first taste for being on call at work this week - meaning I need to be available 24/7 if something goes wrong. I’ve already gotten paged twice, although neither of them past 8pm, which is nice (but probably a luxury that won’t be the norm).
One of the benefits of being on call is really honing your debugging skills. I feel like a real Go programmer now; we had a couple of alerts fire after a deployment went live this week, and I was actually able to dig in to the code and root out a pesky bug that slipped review.
Speaking of Go, I really enjoyed this talk from GopherCon 2022, about Go’s tooling around profiling. Really informative, but also just a really engaging talk, with really fun speaker.
Some other fun things from the past couple of weeks: I found a great artist: Logan Stahl. His website is chock full of fun characters and illustrations, and I’ve since followed his newsletter - it’s included some great interviews with other artists.
One of these interviews even tipped me off to a new author: Gene Wolfe. As I read more and more sci-fi, the more I want the weirder and expansive stuff. I know nothing about Gene Wolfe and have never read his work, but based on the interview, this piece in the New Yorker, and Ursula K Le Guin’s quote calling him “our Melville”, he has shot to the top of my to-read list.
As for other reading, I finished The City & The City, which was great. It was much more straightforward than I anticipated, which I suppose I was let down by. It’s mostly a familiar police/detective story, just set in an inventive fantastical setting. Nothing wrong with it, but I expected a more bizarre ending. I’m a fan of the author now though, and I just picked up another book of his: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. From what I can tell, it’s a history of the Russian Revolution, but told almost narratively. Looking forward to it.
I’m almost done with a book I picked up a while ago: Dawn Song. It’s interesting; a horror novel that almost veers to the erotic. It’s about a succubus that settles into Boston in the early nineties, an emissary of a demon lord vying for power in hell. It follows her and a collection of citizens as they navigate their own lives, full of their own hope and despair. It’s not very pulp-y, however. It’s dense and dark. I’m enjoying it so far, but we’ll see how it goes.
To close out, here’s John Howe’s website. This is another find from Logan Stahl’s site. John Howe is absolutely the best Tolkien illustrator, and seeing these gorgeous drawings is such a treat. I’m not watching the new Amazon Lord of the Rings show, so this is what I’m satiating my FOMO with.