Newsletter July 2020

Published on 3 August 2020.

This is what I’ve been up to in July 2020:

• I read Atomic Habits by James Clear and blogged about the key takeaway that I got from reading it: the two-minute rule.

• I read The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. I am planning to blog about the key takeaway that I got from reading it.

• I read Thoughts from a Not-So-Influential Educator:

  So, what would I change in 2020? First, I believe we should teach students design by having them study the great works of the past, just as other disciplines do. They should spend at least a full course reading code and building working models of common applications in order to become familiar with prior art and prior thinking. In their assignments, they should compare and contrast undo/redo handling in Emacs and Vim or the data structures beneath Git and Mercurial, or create programs like Mary Rose Cook’s Gitlet, Matt Brubeck’s layout engine, or Conor Stack’s little database.

  The mentioned resources are interesting, and I want to study them more. It feels to me like simplified (but not dumbed down) versions of programs to understand them better. That approach feels interesting to me. Can we structure all programs in a similar way with a simple model/core and then addonds to make it more practically useful?

• I played around with Sway. As a big fan of i3, I’m looking for an alternative that works under Wayland as that seems to be the future. My conclusion is that Sway will probably work well for me.

• I though about shooting some videos of RLiterate to demonstrate its features and show what I’m working on at the moment. Let me know if you would be interested in that.

• I continued with RLiterate:

  • I worked on an improved representation of selections.

  • I though about how to visualise a selection that is not active. Say you select some text and focus another application. What should happen to the selection? Grayed out? Disappear? Just hide the cursor? Different applications seem to handle this differently.

  • I though about when to clear the selection entirely? The obvious solution, now that I think about it, is to clear it when something else is selected. But what if the page that the selection is on disappears? How to notice that and clear selection?