2018: A Year of Activity

In late 2017, I was the manager of a team of infrastructure software developers. I was having a difficult time at work finding time to learn and grow technically, which created a deep longing to do more programming and learn something new. I settled on trying out Rust.

Thirty Years Squandered Since Congressional Hearing on Climate Change

Going Nowhere Fast on Climate, Year After Year contains a high-level summary of the last thirty years of climate change discovery, policy, coordinated denial, and recent rollbacks by the climate change deniers in the Executive Branch. It’s worth reading through the entire piece. Here is a selection of some of the points:

Rust 2018

Rust 2018 was the Rust v1.31.0 release on December 6. I read through the release notes shortly after it was released, but just now finally read through Rust 2018 is here… but what is it? to get another perspective on it.

On the Train

We boarded the train this afternoon in Seattle and will ride for at least thirty-seven hours before reaching Minneapolis.

Going to Iowa for the Holidays

The four of us are beginning a journey to Iowa tomorrow and will be there a couple days past the new year. We are doing something a little crazy to get there: we are taking the train. The chance for this to go sideways is pretty high, but in spite of that, I am not dreading the trip.

Climate Link Collection Pages

I read quite a few articles about climate change, but I don’t write about many of them. Still, I want to keep track of some of these pages, in case I want to refer back to them. I’ve created two pages to do this: Climate Change and Carbon Sequestration.

Rust Annual Survey

The 2018 Rust Annual Survey results are out. All of it was interesting to read through it, but I was interested to see the questions around adoption in the workplace. I’m not sure what it is about Rust, but I like the language and the community around it. I sort of feel like I am part of it, even though I’m really a leaf node.

The Carbon Impact of Mobile Devices and Supporting Infrastructure

The amount of carbon emissions due to mobile devices and all of the backend infrastructure to support them and their apps is growing rapidly. On the device side, a lot of the emissions are due to the mining and refining of the materials used in the device. Read more about it in “How smartphones are heating up the planet”.

Rust-o'-lantern

Rust-o'-lantern

Caroll Spinney, Original Voice of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, Retiring

Caroll Spinney has been playing the role of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since Sesame Street first aired in 1969. What an amazingly impactful career. See some of Spinney’s art and learn about his career in Original Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, Leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years.