August 2017

I spent the entire month in Berlin, half telecommuting, half being my summer vacations. So, I had some free time I spent in many ways, in particular:

• Riding bike. Berlin is a very nice city to visit with a bike. Most of the streets have room dedicated to cyclists. Gardens and parks are a few minutes away, wherever you are. I guess the average velocity of the bikers is higher compared to Italy. Average attention and respect is higher too.
• Programming
  • Some progress with my Scheme interpreter, the environment model is kind of working (enabling features like closures), but I'm still having problems with quoting (this is what prevents me from pushing lastest changed to a public repository).
  • Minor fiddling with Lisp, specifically using CEPL (I have I rather ambitious project idea).
• Reading
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
  • The Rise and Fall of Dodo by by Nicole Galland and Neal Stephenson
  • Winter of the World by Ken Follett. A friend recommended the Century Trilogy to me (this is book two). Not my usual genre, but it flows easily and as I developed an attachment for some of the characters, I want to know what is going to happen to them.
• Painting
  • I was scouting the web for technical conferences to attend, but I found instead a watercolor course for beginners. One could even register for just one lesson. I ended up doing five (7.5 hours total). It was very fun, interesting and useful, absolutely worth the money. And I made some new friends in the process. Call it serendipity.
• Playing
  • See below about The Swapper