BuffaloFeeds » Planet Matt

Planet Matt (5 unread)

Bookmarks: The Kid Should See This.

Posted: November 15th, 2011, 10:14pm MST

"There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them... But we don't underestimate kids around here."
Bookmarks: MAKE | A Curriculum of Toys

Posted: November 11th, 2011, 4:09pm MST

"What are the fundamental things kids should know to help them understand and enjoy the complex physical world we live in, to modify or repair it in the future, to succeed as adults? How do we enable kids to be masters of their destiny? Can we do it with nothing but good toys and experiences?"
Journal: Some people say the sky is just the sky

Posted: November 6th, 2011, 11:42pm MST

Eleanor enjoys seeing the moon (a rare treat for a girl in cloudy Seattle, with an early bedtime to boot), so when I glimpsed a third-quarter moon through the skylight last night, I pointed it out to her, then pointed our telescope through the skylight for a better view. I had trouble explaining what craters were, so I grabbed a nearby tablet (since I started doing mobile development, they are lying around everywhere) and showed her some pictures from the lunar surface. She was disappointed the mountains weren't like the ones in Wallace and Gromit.

Next she wanted to see stars, so we went out on the back deck with a warm blanket. The moon and the city lights and the house blocked out a lot, but we did see a number of stars, plus Jupiter rising in the east. (Seeing Jupiter's Galilean moons through the scope was especially interesting to me because I'm in the middle of Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is set partly during the life of Galileo Galilei and partly on the moons themselves.) We stayed up past Eleanor's bed time, and I tried to answer her questions about planets and moons and stars and scientists. We used Google Sky Map to identify some of the things we'd seen outside.

Being around a five-year-old makes me remember how intense feelings and experiences were at that age. It's a lot of pressure for a parent, because every offer you make, or wish that you fulfill or deny, can lead to either thrills of pleasure or depths of disappointment. I don't have the energy to keep up with even half of what Eleanor wants to do, so I just work at finding enough I can manage. Yesterday she got to spend several hours playing with her best friend from last year's preschool class, which was perfect, Those two girls could keep up with each other so much better than I could hope to. Socializing is also hard work for Eleanor, though, and today she didn't seem to mind having a boring day at home.
Journal: Rewrite

Posted: November 6th, 2011, 10:36pm MST

At work we're in the process of rewriting Firefox for Android to replace most of our JavaScript/XUL front-end code with new code using Android's Java frameworks. This is looking like a very good move technically, but on a personal level it sort of cast me adrift. I've been working on the XUL front-end code for almost two years, and suddenly everything I've done or was about to do is living in a codebase that's soon to be abandoned.

Most of the team has jumped straight into the new front-end code, but I've had trouble doing that, partly because I had some loose ends to wrap up in the old code so we can ship the next few updates, and also because I was tired out from our last big project and didn't have the energy to jump right into another one. So I spent a couple weeks doing simple janitorial work like bug-fixing and sheriffing. This gave me some extra mental energy for my free-time projects like the AI class, and learning enough LLVM to contribute some patches to the Rust programming language.

I'm glad that I've learned to recognize swings in my productivity cycle. Instead of denial and procrastination during the low-motivation periods, now I try to accept them and use them to regroup. I think my anti-burnout strategy worked this time, since I now have some ideas of new projects I'm excited to try in the new codebase. If I'm lucky, that means I'm back on the upward swing of a new cycle.
Bookmarks: The Architecture of Open Source Applications: LLVM

Posted: November 3rd, 2011, 10:35pm MDT

Very nice introduction to what LLVM does and how it works.

← October 2011 (3 items) December 2011 (2 items) →

BuffaloFeeds » Planet Matt » November 2011

Feeds

Planet Matt (5 unread)

Bookmarks: The Kid Should See This.

Posted: November 15th, 2011, 10:14pm MST

Bookmarks: MAKE | A Curriculum of Toys

Posted: November 11th, 2011, 4:09pm MST

Journal: Some people say the sky is just the sky

Posted: November 6th, 2011, 11:42pm MST

Journal: Rewrite

Posted: November 6th, 2011, 10:36pm MST

Bookmarks: The Architecture of Open Source Applications: LLVM

Posted: November 3rd, 2011, 10:35pm MDT