I’ve joined the Nushell core team. This doesn’t really change what I’m doing day-to-day, but it makes my work on Nu feel a little more official 🙂.

SQLite Support

This is the biggest feature I’ve implemented so far:

I’m pretty proud of how this turned out; it’s very convenient to be able to browse SQLite databases in your shell and interact with them the same way you would any other data source. Nu is often-but-not-always smart enough to avoid unnecessary work when loading things from the database; there’s still some work to do here and it will probably involve rearchitecting how Nushell queries data.

File watcher

I also implemented a watch command that runs arbitrary Nu code in response to file changes. Nothing groundbreaking, but I find myself needing this kind of low-key automation all the time: run tests when code changes, restart a development server, log changes in a directory, etc. I think the ability to respond to file changes should be a more widely available primitive, and now it is.

Rust for Windows

Against all odds, I somehow got sucked back into Windows development. I spent a solid week helping one of Nushell’s dependencies do a big upgrade of their Windows functionality. This required a deep dive into the current state of calling Windows APIs from Rust, and… it’s a mixed bag.

I used the windows crate which is maintained by Microsoft. It’s an automatically generated set of Rust bindings for Windows APIs, which is both good (very comprehensive, always kept up to date) and bad (some rough edges that might be solved in a handmade solution like winapi). The crate is actively being worked on and it frequently has breaking changes; this means documentation is a little scarce and often out of date. Overall I was impressed and I think the crate has a bright future . But until it settles down a bit, expect some growing pains.

I handed in my notice; my last day at work is next Wednesday. My employer for the last 2 years has been excellent to me, but I’ve been itching to try something new.

I don’t have a new job lined up yet; I’m planning to use this time partially as a sabbatical, and partially to see what’s out there on the job market. A “serendipity break” during which I will actively explore different possible paths.

One of my plans is to explore the intersection of native apps and web UI; I’ve done some promising experiments with that and it would be a good excuse to overhaul ReiTunes. I’d also like to build some new tools for working with the best database. Here we go!

I’ve been busy for the last month, and I completely forgot to update the blog. In no particular order, here’s what’s been occupying my time lately:

Coworking

I joined a coworking space in East Vancouver with a friend, and I’m working from there 3-4 days/week. It’s like an airy spacious café with fast internet and quiet space, I love it. I find that getting out of the house helps me be more disciplined with my working hours; I’m much less likely to disappear down a Wikipedia+YouTube rabbit hole at the office. And then when I inevitably do that at home, I feel less guilty about it because I’ve accomplished so much at the office.

Node.js

I got really into Node and the modern back-end JS ecosystem.

javascript.info has been remarkably helpful (I can finally remember exactly what a closure is!), it might be the first .info website that is genuinely a great source of information.

This talk by Franziska Hinkelmann on the V8 team is a great overview of JS engine internals.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Node APIs a few times; the Cluster module makes it trivial to fork workers and take advantage of multiple cores, and Buffer+friends make low-level bit manipulation quite pleasant. Which leads me to:

Cryptopals

The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges by Matasano Security are a delightful introduction to practical cryptography. I decided to do them in Node to get more practice with back-end JS, my solutions are on GitHub. The problems are very well-designed. They’re small enough that you can (usually) do each one in a single sitting, and it feels great every time you decode a ciphertext.

Raspberry Pi

I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and have been loving it. For some reason I always thought of the Pi as only relevant for education and hardware hackers, but I was wrong – it’s a remarkably capable little Linux machine. I’m currently turning mine into a private Dropbox clone using ownCloud.

Anki

I started using Anki flashcards. I have decks for Node internals, uncommon JS syntax, and infrequently-used keyboard shortcuts and CLI options. Creating cards is a bit of an initial investment, but once that’s done I find that 5 minutes of daily study is enough.

I’m taking a self-funded sabbatical after 8 years of working full-time. It feels like the right thing to do at this stage of my career.

I’ve had an unusually stable career for a software developer. When I graduated from university in 2011 I interviewed at a few places, including a mid-sized investment firm. I didn’t know anything about finance and the… rustic state of their website was a little concerning, but the people seemed great. So I took the job, and told myself I’d stick around for 2 or 3 years.

8 years later I was still at the same company. Orbis offers a lot of different opportunities; I wrangled big financial data systems, ran a small team, got my hands dirty building a modern web stack, and worked in London and Cape Town. It was a blast, and I’d highly recommend Orbis as an employer.

Still, after 8 years, it’s time to try something new. I miss the open-ended learning that’s so common in school, and I want to explore my technical interests with no regard for immediate relevance to my day job. Gianfranco Chicco’s description of a “serendipity break” really resonated with me:

In the note I sent out to my friends and network I mentioned that I’d be undertaking a Serendipity Break, which wasn’t a nice way to say that I wasn’t going to work for a few months but that I wanted to actively explore different possible paths.

In the book The Craftsman, sociologist Richard Sennett describes how “skill builds by moving irregularly, and sometimes by taking detours”, which is akin to keeping the Serendipity Engine in perpetual motion to encourage the strengthening of current skills and allowing the development of new ones.

Leaving a great job at a great company was a little scary, but I think it’s necessary for my long-term growth. Reading about Joel Spolsky’s sabbaticals helped a lot; it’s reassuring to see successful developers following similar paths.

My last day at Orbis was July 27th, and since then I’ve been trying all kinds of things. I’ve been diving into database internals, rewriting this website, and even learning Lisp/Scheme. I’m not exactly sure where my interests will take me next, but I’m looking forward to finding out.