This was my first month after leaving my full-time job. It was great - I’ve spent time taking care of plants, going on runs, seeing friends, and carefully folding laundry into more optimal shapes. I’ve had fun learning some new things, and giving more love to my open source projects - I released Simple Statistics 3, and then Simple Statistics 4, then released Big 3 and documentation.js 4.0.0-rc.0, with rc.1 following soon.

I spent a lot of time pruning and improving my open source footprint: disposing of projects I no longer maintain and modernizing the tools I use to keep maintained libraries fresh: using GreenKeeper for updates, standard-version and commitizen for change management, prettier and lint-staged for style.

I’m really happy with how modernization has been making older projects maintainable, but I’m also estimating a lot of time required to make managing Simple Statistics & documentation.js simpler.

I also wrote about ES6 modules and made an iPhone app and wrote tree layout algorithms in Elm.

I also wasted a lot of time consuming media, like The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, The Daily, and YouTube channels about bonsai: Bjorn Bjornholm and Nigel Saunders. I don’t have any bonsai currently, but I do have a red-leafed Japanese maple (Acer Palmatum) seedling which I might prune as a bonsai over the coming years.

I’ve been reading Nixonland, which I highly recommend. Reading The American President changed my mind about the value of historical books. Like The American President, I read Nixonland on a Kindle, so I didn’t realize that it was ~900 pages until a month in and I was only at 16%. I am a slow reader.

I’ve also been reading How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, which discusses the expanding role of the military in the US. I enjoyed watching a discussion about The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State at the New America Foundation, and listening to Breathers at a house show.