Update for 12/9/2018

A shorter one this time.

Spirituality

🤔

I’m paying more attention to the church calendar this year, starting with Advent. In preparation I listened to Vicki Black’s Welcome to the Church Year. Once Advent started, I was going to use Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, but right away I realized it was going to be too much work for me to keep up with. Maybe another time. So instead I’ll work with Vicki Black’s book throughout the year. There’s plenty of food for thought, and she has exercises at the end of each chapter.

Christmas

🙄

My self-imposed deadline for finishing my secret Christmas project was Saturday, but it didn’t happen. The first reason is I still had too much work to do on it, and the second is I ran into a severe technical difficulty that I’ll have to work around. So I’m giving it an extra week. But it’s hard to feel too bad about blowing the deadline, because this project has gone so much better than my usual projects and especially my Christmas ones. And also I have time.

Programming

🙂

My reading project in software development is progressing as usual. Last week I finished Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. It’ll be useful when I work on software in that category, but it’s a little too technical to be an enjoyable listen. Now I’m revisiting one I read a long time ago, Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming (available for free from the author’s site), which is much more engaging. It’s interesting to hear the same software design issues addressed by someone outside the camp of the other authors I’ve been reading. There’s a lot of overlap in the advice, but he expresses it in different ways and from a different starting point, the history of Unix rather than the history of object-oriented applications.