October 2021

November 12, 2021

I spent most of October studying and working. I'm currently in the Advanced Programming module of the Bradfield CSI which covers the Go programming language in depth. Learning the guts behind some of Go's core features – goroutines, channels, the scheduler – has been rewarding.

October was my second month working at a large tech company, and it's still good. One of the best parts of working at a larger-but-not-quite-enormous tech company is that I'm finally working hands-on with technologies that I only knew by name before. I've been having a lot of moments where I go something like "oh that's what Airflow is for." It's not just that I have more tools, it's that I've seen how other people use them effectively.

Reading

"There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it."

I did my annual re-read of Robert Adams's Beauty in Photography in October. It's short – just eight brief essays in fewer than 100 pages of text – but it is so full of insight. It's probably the book that means the most to me. I first read it at an important time, and it was enormously clarifying for my own work. In particular, Adams's insistence that great landscape photographs must have an autobiographical element led me to my best photographs.

Watching

This short film about an diver who maintains Mexico City's sewage system is excellent. I'm not sure how I ended up on it, but I'm glad I did!

I saw Dune and thought it was great. I like everything Denis Villeneuve does, so that's not much of surprise.

James Bond: New Sequel was not great. The first half was good, but the second half was bloated with a videogame-like body count and cloying ending. Also the big maguffin was NANOMACHINES. Stupid! I yearn for the days when 007's big mission is getting ahold of a special typewriter like in From Russia with Love.

Listening

Grouper released an album, Shade, in October. I particularly like the song Unclean Mind:

I've also been listening to DJ Seinfeld's new album, Mirrors. I listened to this track a lot: