Work
End of the year blues were in full effect. (And have been for the last couple of weeks.) I am in that zone where it’s just a case of looking forward to December 24 when my mini-vacation will begin.
The biggest news to come out of this week was that Thoughtworks Chennai office opened for the first time since March 2020. It goes without saying I was there on the second day of opening (Thursday, December 9). Currently only a minimum number of people are allowed, and there are understandably numerous restrictions in place in terms of where we can sit and so on.
Even so, it was still great to meet up with 2 other folks from my current team, along with a handful of folks who had joined us during lockdown. The best part was the free-flowing conversation that happened over a socially distanced lunch table that reminded me of what I had been missing for more than a year and a half.
In terms of actual technical work, I decided to use the December lull productively and started migrating one of our frontend Angular codebases from Jasmine to Jest. I had estimated to be able to complete it within the week, but then the bombshell dropped. (There might be more on this in next week’s post, but suffice to say everything has been dealt with.)
Learning
I started solving this year’s Advent of Code in GoLang just like I started last year. After solving the first two days, I realised I was not having any fun with it at all, and I finally made peace with the fact that Go was never going to be a language I will use in my free time. So I have now begun solving it in - no surprises here! - Rust.
Personal - Tech
After nearly 2 years with i3, I finally decided to switch back to XMonad this week. The main reason behind the switch was that I had hit a ceiling with the manual tiling in i3.
Primarily, my use-case was that I wanted to have one large window in the middle covering half of my 34" ultra-wide with two smaller windows on either side of it. If I swap my center window to the left, the window that moved to the middle should now be large. This is simply not possible in i3 since you’re resizing windows, not screen spaces or layouts. This turned out to be a piece of cake with XMonad.
I had used XMonad in the past, so this was not an entirely new shift for me. However, what surprised me was that I was able to go farther with some of my configuration than I had in the past. This was interesting to me since it kind of showed the power of XMonad, in that I’m able to pick up something new and become more powerful with it every time I return to it.