So this is a habitual thing I'm starting this month. At the start of each month I'll publish a retrospective of things I read/wrote/built/thought/played over the past month. This one is for the past June. I'm hopeful that this monthly retrospective will help chart my growth and act as a garbage collector for my thoughts.

It’s been a slow month for my main side project. Mostly spent on reading and experimentation.

Reading/Listening

• Metaprogramming Ruby 2. I’ve been really enjoying reading this book. Ever since I picked up the author’s first metaprogramming book during my internship at Tinkerbox, I’ve been a fan of Ruby’s open classes.
• The Humane Representation of Thought by Bret Victor. Just Wow. Missed this by 5 months. Watch all of Bret Victor’s talks if you haven’t.
• What is Code? A fantastic piece of journalism. Highly recommended.
• Do Users Love Your API? Developer-focused API Design. There were some really good API design talks at RailsConf 2015.
• The Little Manual of API Design.
• How Web Maps Work and mapschool.io.
• Engineering Blogs.
• Building Analytics at 500px.
• Start Small, Stay Small. Very relevant in reinforcing what I’ve learned from SheetHub so far.

Thinking

• With projects like iron.io, AWS Lambda, and Huginn, I can’t help but doubt that my fledgling BotSquad will ever come close. They’re production-scale distributed systems built by teams of professional developers. To self: Cheer up! We can ship and built upon it incrementally. Nothing gets built overnight.
• When I started my internship I disliked the long commute. Turns out it’s been a productive time to read. I’ve made lots of progress and completed a few books this way. Beats napping on the train. Amazingly, I feel I might miss this reading time once school resumes.
• Really thinking hard in choosing between HAL and JSONAPI. They have completely separate tooling ecosystems. Choosing on API Spec Language over the other means foregoing tools made for that language.
• “Is there a right way to build software?” is now my go-to question in conversations with other engineers.
• Looking at SheetHub’s feature list, I feel stupid for not launching it earlier.
• I think startups like imgix, FarmLogs, and FullStory are really cool and I’d like to work with people like them.
• I’m hopeful that this monthly retrospective will help chart my growth and act as a garbage collector for my thoughts.

Playing

• Pavane pour une infante defunte by M. Ravel. I first heard an excerpt of this piece from an episode of Space Dandy. Too bad I couldn’t make out the flamenco second piece.
• Lost Seaside by Yoshinori Tanaka. Relatively easy to pick up and really fun to play!
• Merry Go Round from Howl’s Moving Castle, arranged by Jeremy Choi. Some parts seem out of place with this particular arrangement.

Elsewhere

• Went to RedDotRubyConf 2015, this time kindly sponsored by PayPal! Met Matz, talked to the author of the Ruby metaprogramming book, and listened to some great talks. Kinda want to do more open source now. Also, emojis. :D
• Open sourced SheetHub.
• Starting a new streak on Github. Let’s see how long we can keep it up!
• Going through the React tutorial to build a small API documentation tool with. Will be coupled with Browserify. Probably don’t want to do ES6 with Babel just yet. Hoping to dogfood it for BotSquad.
• Had another user signed up to SheetHub. It was a good Saturday. Went around messaging potential users.
• Published my very first NPM module.
• Deployed an instance of pgweb on Heroku with SheetHub’s DB to play around with. Useful. Very reminiscent of a similar tool in PayPal. There’s also redash.
• Weekend Hackers.
• Ran out of books to read on the train. Ordered some more books from Amazon. Should arrive before the end of June. EDIT: It’s here!
• Started a public collection of API development resources on Github.
• Started geogist.