It’s fall now. We have about 10-15 huge trees that are pouring out a steady stream of leaves into our yard. The leaves are beautiful to look at while they’re changing colors and still in the trees. But when they come down, they turn into a sloppy mess.
I’ve been coding a lot lately, for experimenting, for building tools for work, and for my own tinkering. Friday, I wrote a Python library for fun called zzip that’s useful for traversing over data and making immutable changes. I decided to build it after reading this interesting article describing how it works in Clojure and the original paper on the zipper idea. I’ve built tools similar to this before, but it’s always been an uneducated attempt at it.
I have time off in a few weeks. I can’t wait. I usually spend the first few days of a long break recovering from my work life. When I’m the most productive, I’m also the most stressed because of the way I feverishly work on projects. Though I might enjoy the work and love getting it finished, by the time it’s done, I’m spent. I’ve only recently learned this about myself. I hope that awareness leads to a better relationship with work.
After the recovery period, I’ll settle into a nice rhythm of relaxing, working on personal projects, or doing things around the house—which are all things I struggle doing at any other time. I’m looking forward to it!