Weeknotes № 16

After another workshop last week I did not have that much time to work on the Field Guide, but Dynamic Type is fully working now (and live). I’m hoping to write a bit about it soon as well.

This week, I’m giving a talk at a conference, and I’m using the Field Guide for my slides. This is where Dynamic Type comes in really handy: I can bump up the dynamic type setting and all examples increase their font sizes, which is incredibly useful.

In the future, I want to animate changes to the code (for example, animate the addition of a new modifier to existing code). I’ve been trying to think about this quite a bit. Currently, everything happens at the AST level, but should that maybe happen at the parse level (which doesn’t currently exist)? Or should I keep the syntax tree stable and somehow allow to add new root nodes? I’ve been experimenting a bit with the last approach but am not sure how it will work in practice. I’m unfortunately not aware of any research in that area (I’m sure there is some, I just don’t know what to search for).

Over the last months I’ve been preparing well for a marathon, and last Sunday was the race. I am pretty fit although far from PB level. For the first 25k, I was leading the race, but then slowed down a little bit. Just a few minutes later two volunteers sent me and the guy behind me in the wrong direction. This took us a few kms to figure out, so we ended up back at the start line in almost world record time (without having run the full distance, of course). This was incredibly frustrating after having spent all the time, effort and money just to be on the starting line. On the other hand, I know all too well how all of these events are run by large groups of volunteers and am very thankful for that, mistakes can happen. I think I did prove to myself that my fitness is increasing again, and hopefully I’ll run a full marathon somewhere in a few months!