What's it all about, Alfie?

A few days ago, I read about the new JetBrains Mono font that they had created for their IDEs, and it looks interesting with the increased hight of the lower-case letters, and the easily readable "1lI" combination... so I decided to give it a whirl on my editor, and in Xcode.

I have to say I like how Sublime Text and Xcode handles all the weights of the font, and the ligatures for common expressions makes it a lot easier to read the code - as if I'd written it on a chalkboard. Very nice indeed

I'm not sure how it'll play out, but it's pretty nice so far, and I'll play with it for a bit and see what I think. So far... nice. 🙂

I'm all packed up and ready to head to O'Hare for my flight to Seattle. The Shop is having some off-site meetings, so I'm going to fly out today, have two full days of meetings and activities, and then a day there to visit with the teams in Seattle that I typically only get to see on Hangouts, and then fly back on Thursday. It's not bad at all... but the flight will be long, and I'll need to find my happy place and just relax for the 4+ hrs in the small seat.

For this trip, I put all my IMAP email accounts on my iPad so that I could take it with me for notes and essential emails, and it's not a lot more to carry in my bag. Yeah, I'll have to take it out at the security checkpoint, but that's worth it to be able to take everything it holds with me. I really think it'll work out well.

I've plotted the route to the O'Hare economy lot into my car, and should be able to just get things loaded up, and on the road. Just need to stay calm for the flight... 🙂

This morning I finally finished Advent of Code 2019. Most days weren't too bad - I think the ones that really caused me to work extra were Day 18 and Day 20 - both of which were the pathing problems that I had failed to really master in years past. Good or bad, I decided not to give up on these, and figured out how to solve these this year.

Dijkstra's Algorithm is interesting, but I really didn't see how to implement it in Clojure until I was walking home one day - and it hit me: the recursion really made it all so much easier. And that really helped me as I hammered on these problems this year to really get a solid understanding of how to work with Dijkstra's. I'm very glad I stuck with this.

Then when I had that understood, I ran into Day 20 where it wasn't the right approach, but I needed to understand a simple Breadth-First Search on the maze. This is much different than Dijkstra's in that it's a simple looping construct, and only finds the one shortest path - but that's OK... that's all that was asked for. But it's fast. Very.

I'm really glad that this year I didn't stop when the problems seemed to be too tough for me. I'm a better coder because of the new knowledge. 🙂

Well... another year has arrived, and interestingly enough, I was awake when it arrived in Naperville. Not that I had stayed awake, but that I woke up in the night and saw the time, and then heard to festivities outside. It made me smile.

Tomorrow starts another year at The Shop, and there's plenty that's going on there, and I'm sure there will be lots and lots of things that will occupy my time. There's a big engineering meeting in Seattle in a week or so, and that will travel which isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's being away from home, and I do enjoy home.

I do hope that this year is a little more peaceful...