Hello! As I sit in the Irish countryside (home for a couple of weeks) devoid of anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon I said I would try something a little different.
Firstly, some updates.
I was somehow allowed onto eBPF Summit’s (virtual) stage. This was a cool experience, as the very first instance of “Why Now” was a primer on eBPF. Thanks to those of you who subbed from day one! Talk’s here.
** breaks golden rule of not directing readership elsewhere **
Most of my “dev” time of late has been within the sublimely crafted walled garden that is the Godot game engine. I’m currently remaking Pokemon Yellow which has been a bunch of fun; the code+commentary can be found on my blog: mack.work/pokemon_yellow
Any residual dev time has been spent on learning Zig + on tinkering around with Manim. I’m currently animating some graphs associated with the world of venture investing which I’ll share on my Twitter.
Manim is a math animation library created by Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown fame. If you haven’t frequented his YT channel yet then check out this primer on neural nets — you truly won’t be disappointed. Grant is a big source of inspiration for my technical writing.
** Something different **
Anyway, much like what you’ve come to expect from these newsletters, I am bloviating. Below I’m going to share the topics I’m thinking about tackling next; the thought here is that I won’t get to all of these areas/technologies but you may wish to explore them on your own accord.
I’d love your thoughts on them + I’m always open to suggestions. Feel free to say hello at alex[at]tapestry[dot]vc or on the thread associated with this newsletter.
Nix: a build tool + package manager that explicitly defines an application’s dependencies via a graph database. Tobi Lutke is a fan.
WebGPU: Remember WebGL? A next-gen web GPU API based on Vulkan, Metal, and Direct3D 12. Superb primer by Surma.dev here.
AlphaFold: Honestly I don’t think AlphaFold’s receiving enough hype en masse given how profound of an unlock it is. + I know very little about computational biology so this could be fun/humbling.
Nitro Enclaves: an isolated compute environment avec some cryptographic attestation. Leveraged by companies like Evervault.
Godot: my weapon of choice for game development, not the play. If you’re keen to learn about the engine / game dev more broadly I’m happy to chat also.
Zig: general-purpose programming language/toolchain. Learning new languages/their data structures is just fun. Bun is written in Zig, fyi.
Thanks for reading as always + lmk what you think of these occasional updates/polls.
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