“Work”

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing Nushell documentation. The Nushell core team has been banging out new features rapidly and the documentation hasn’t always kept up; improving the documentation feels like a high-impact way to help out.

Nushell’s got a big release coming up later this month and it has the potential to attract many new users. I want the documentation to be in a better place by then, I’m going to keep spending time on this.

I’ve tried to make a few commits to Nushell itself, but I keep bouncing off Rust. I’m reasonably familiar with Rust, but this is my first time working on a big Rust project. The compile times are painful and they inhibit rapid iteration; I haven’t found a development approach that I like yet.

Reading

Anthony Bourdain’s Typhoid Mary was pretty disappointing (3 stars?); you can tell that Bourdain was short on source material so most of the book is him imagining what Mary might have done.

I started rereading the Wheel of Time series in December and I’m on book 9 now. My interest started to wane around book 8; I think I’ll press onward but I’m really looking forward to the later books (written by another author).

Other

I think I’m a Dance Dance Revolution guy now. I ordered a fancy mat from Poland and have been playing Club Fantastic. I’m still pretty bad but it’s a lot of fun.

I’m officially unemployed again 😎. In the interest of self-accountability, I’m going to try to document what I’m up to on my break; expect more frequent updates to this blog.

HYTRADBOI

I bought a ticket to Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It?, which could loosely be described as a hipster database conference; lots of people using databases in unusual ways, not much in the way of enterprise RDBMSs. The speaker list is like a Who’s Who for offbeat database work, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Nushell

I’ve been using Nushell as my shell on both Windows and Linux, about half the time. Nushell is a fascinating project; it’s a shell that operates on structured data like PowerShell, but without PowerShell’s (many) pain points.

Nushell has recently seen some massive upgrades (the parsing and evaluation engine was completely rewritten) and it’s a very good time to give it a try. It’s still early days, but I’m hopeful Nushell will be able to displace POSIX shells; it’s liberating to work with much richer data types than plain text:

Nu is a way of saying “what if we didn’t need tools like awk so often?” Since you’re working with structured data, as we add more support for file types, it’s less often you need to reach for “awk”, “jq”, “grep”, and the array of other tools to open and work with common file types. In a way, it’s taking the original spirit of Unix — where you use pipelines to combine a set of tools — and imagining how that original spirit would work today, with what we know about programming languages and tools.

Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database

This essay touches on a lot of my favourite things: SQLite! The intersection of native apps and web UI! iTunes clones! In a nutshell, it’s a very cool approach to building GUI applications in which all of the application’s state lives in a local database.

It’s more of a provocation than a fully finished system, but I think it shows promise. I’d like to see a bit more investigation of “escape hatches”; how hard would it be mix in a little imperative code when SQL/SQLite aren’t the right fit for a task? Also, this was a bit depressing:

One challenge has been inter-process communication. When the reactive graph is running in the UI thread and the SQLite database is on a web worker or native process, each query results in an asynchronous call that has to serialize and deserialize data.

This would have been a non-issue in traditional GUI code (just query SQLite on a background thread in the same process); one more thing we lose as web UI takes over, I guess 😞.

It’s been a while since my last update. I wrapped up my sabbatical, did a whole bunch of interviewing, and have since been working on some interesting spreadsheet-related problems at a new job.

Oh, and there’s been a global pandemic on, it’s been weird. Anyway, I kept busy over the last year and a bit:

Switched to Windows

I switched to Windows full time, after a lifetime of Macs for personal use and a decade of Windows for professional use.

This was an experiment in intentionally shaping my own interests; I knew that if I used Windows at home I’d be more interested in the minutia of making good Windows applications.

It worked; I’m just over a year in, and I’ve learned a lot. I still miss a lot of things about macOS but I’m mostly happy on Windows. The Surface devices are really neat pieces of hardware.

ReiTunes

I built my own music player. This was the culmination of something I’ve been thinking about for years; I listen to a lot of long-form music and existing music services don’t serve that niche well. iTunes is progressively less interested in catering to users who bring their own music, and the Windows client has many irritating bugs.

So I decided to build my own music library system with an offline-first native client; how hard could it be? Well, 500+ commits later…