Jobs
I recently started work at Qantas, focusing on backend systems written in Clojure! It’s an interesting change from the Golang work I did at Google for the Kubernetes community (primarily on Prow, the Kubernetes-native CI system). I expect to learn lots of new things and continue to grow as an engineer.
The opportunity at Qantas presents a unique proposition to me because I’ve somehow managed to avoid getting familiar with Java and the JVM so far in my career. I’ve been doing some Clojure exercises on Exercism for a few weeks now and am getting the hang of the language. And I’ve been liking it so far — it feels like Haskell without all of the mind-bending GHC extensions, plus a great library/ecosystem story (seamless JVM interop). Oh and I actually prefer Lisp syntax over Haskell syntax (I’ll choose Lisp macros over Template Haskell, every time).
Blog
I have some other blog post items in the backlog, so I plan on getting around to them in due time. I’ve just cleaned out some of the bitrot that’s been plaguing this site’s codebase for a while, so things are in working order again.
Git
I must mention that a few months back the Git community interviewed me for their
Developer Spotlight! Sadly I haven’t been involved much with Git as of late (due
to moving countries, and also battling a nasty cold), but I do hope to upstream
the 50+ patches I still have locally for improving the parser for the
git-interpret-trailers subcommand. You could say that those patches helped me
understand how to work with the Git mailing list (as well as getting used to
writing C again).
I also started using Notmuch again inside Emacs to communicate with the mailing list. I should write a short post about it.
Australia
I’m now in Australia! How exciting! I fell in love with the country when I first visited it in 2019, and now I feel very lucky to call Australia home. I’m slowly getting used to the accent, and I do wonder if I’ll ever pick it up myself.
The weather has been a bit wild (we had a cold snap with sub-zero temperatures in the first couple weeks of winter), but I really can’t complain because it’s still quite nice compared to Seattle’s cold and wet climate.
Cheers!
