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Plans for 2019
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2019-01-13
Last year was pretty good. I worked on choo, datrs, and got 2 cats. I started working out (more) regularly, and towards the end of the year even consistently stayed on top of my email. Also I’ve cooked a ton of food, and definitely feel like I’m a better cook than I was at the start of the year.
In this post I want to share my plans & goals for this year.
No more injuries
I’ve had problems with my wrists since I was about 16 years old. This has mostly been due to bad posture while using laptops, and working too long and too hard. Last year it never got so bad I couldn’t work, but I’m definitely not healed yet.
This year I’d like to continue working towards making a full recovery. This means probably working less long hours, taking more breaks, and not working on weekends. Also paying more attention to my workrave timers.
Being better about timing work is a good idea by itself. But having a goal motivating is the little extra nudge that really makes me want to commit to this.
p2p
datrs has been really fun to work on last year. It was my first full-time Rust job, and I’m really pleased with the results. This year I’d like to get the networking stack going, based on async/await and romio.
There’s is useful for many reasons, but in particular I’m excited for the possibility of helping the peermaps advance. Emphasis on “possibility”. Regardless going to be useful to provide feedback on async/await by building out more networking implementations outside exclusively HTTP contexts.
I hope to have time to work this in Q2/Q3 this year, on the side. However if you’d like to get involved to help it advance more actively I’d be more than happy to take a more managerial role and help people move in the right direction!
Web Services
Because Rust’s async/await story isn’t stabilized yet, the ecosystem on top of it still needs a lot of work. This year I’ll be working on building out modules that work on on top of async Rust.
On the one hand there’s a ton of protocol work that’s in various stages of completion. HTTP/2, SSE, HTTP/3 crates exist, but they don’t feel quite as polished as stdlib’s TCP interface. We should probably have support for these, which we can likely get in the near term by wrapping existing C libraries.
There’s also the higher-level web-app stories. It don’t feel like we have a good story yet for generating REST docs, reusable middleware, and authentication. I feel there’s a lot of room to experiment and improve this space!
I think it’d be great if we could tackle these problems with the rust-net-web WG. But this requires us to become better at organizing. Which is why I think this is a good opportunity to become more involved, and help guide this along!
I’ve already started working on this, and plan to continue on it for the foreseeable future!
Frontend
I’m very curious if Rust can help us build better interfaces on the Web. To me it’s clear that it has potential, but it’s not clear yet what the abstractions should look like.
I’d love to contribute this year to the Rust WASM by leveraging my knowledge of building choo, and helping the ecosystem succeed. I’ve already started joining the WASM WG meetings, and plan to become more involved as the year goes on.
Relationship
My partner is more concensious than I am, and that’s sometimes hard in our relationship. Especially when it comes to doing chores around the house, I’m usually less organized about most things. (Except the kitchen. I run a tight ship.)
I want to be better at managing the cat, the house, and the other cat this year. Also be better about planning trips and weekend plans. I feel we’re not exceptionally out of balance, but it’s clear that there’s room to do better. So I should take this as a chance to learn and improve.
Content
I want to become better at producing content also. Write more often, and become increasingly clear. When I do video streams, have a plan and curate the output better. Make it feel like the things I make are recognizable.
I haven’t cared about this much in the past; but I think paying a bit more attention to production quality is another way of improving at communication. And that seems like something worth investing in.
Wrapping Up
And that’s in broad strokes what I was thinking of working on this year. I don’t think they’re spectacular plans. But I feel they’re achievable. And I’m pretty excited to make them happen this year!