Reflecting on 2024, preparing for 2025

I started playing clarinet in fourth grade, and dabbled in other instruments.. I never stopped entirely, but I took years-long breaks from playing music. Earlier this year, I picked up a new instrument while I was very sick. I got a wind synth, the Roland AE-20. It was a somewhat impulsive purchase, in the moment, but I'd been wanting one for a...

Recently, I read a blog post about doing software project estimates. It's a reasonable post with a reasonable method. But it does what all estimates do: it sells projects short. I don't mean in the sense of underestimating a young promising project's potential, relegating it to an unfulfilling career pushing paperwork. I mean in the sense of...

I'm working on a terrible idea of a project, and this project uses MIDI. That means I need a MIDI implementation! I chose to use an existing library, midir, to connect to devices and receive messages. But the reason I was interested in this not-yet-announced project is because I wanted to understand MIDI. So it was time to implement the...

My computer setup attracts attention when I'm out and about. This has two effects: engineers1 ask me about it, and everyone else ignores me. These effects are not undesirable, but further testing is required. The main reason I have such an unusual setup, though, is more practical: so my arms/hands do not hurt from using my laptop. I wrote about...

A little while back, I wrote that we shouldn't say "auth" but should use other terms instead. I stand by my argument in general, but it also has another side to it: my suggested terminology makes sense in some domains, but not in all domains. And that's because terminology isn't—and can't be—universal. After I wrote that blog post, I got an email...