In most of the country, folks believe that the summer begins sometime in May, while the “official start” in late June seems to lag the weather. But here in New England, the expectations line up with the reality; June can be a cold and rainy month, but July and August and even September can beckon with our only great weather, big bright skies, long days that only end reluctantly after long purple sunsets, giving way to the summer stars above swimming the Milky Way, and the ones below sparked by fireflies dancing in the trees.
I never stop appreciating it, even though hot weather is my less favorite extreme, but also because y’all stop having big tournaments and I can give it a rest for a little while. May and June tend to be consumed with the national tournaments, and this year was no exception, but I did make progress with the rewrite here and there, both in the coding and the conceptual. A fun challenge of rejoining the world of modern stacks from the ancient clay tablets and cuneiform I was writing software in before, is that the stack changes about as fast as my own code does. They keep updating, and sometimes improving it — and sometimes not. It can feel a bit like having to build a sandcastle on a shaky moving train. But later this summer the Nationals distractions die down again.
This summer I head out on my traditional walkabout, in another typically nonsense wild arctic place. Newfoundland is a big place with only a small coating of people, boasting two national parks, stunning coastlines, and absolutely terrible cell phone service coverage. I’m not worried about the GPS, because it appears they have three roads. This time of year I enjoy scrambling and walking to far off places, and pretending that I’m an unemployed lobster fisher who doesn’t know how to type. And then I have a few weeks of seclusion and summer vibes where I can maybe, just maybe, roll out a beta front interface that y’all can see, play with, and yes — break.
In final news, I did write a monthly Tabroom update but somehow it didn’t get out. I don’t know what happened other than the normal header of “National Tournaments Absorbing Attention.” But something about the process of sending them also seems to be taking undue work and effort on others’ part, which I do not want to create. I’ll be figuring out what’s wrong there and trying to unclog the plumbing so they’re more regular next year.
For now, au Canada.