Monthly review: May 2014

Posted: - Modified: | monthly, review

I wrote that in May, I'd like to:

  • ☑ Learn how to write extensions for E1
  • ☑ Develop “How to Read Emacs Lisp” into a proper course, with objectives, modules, exercises and other useful things
  • ☑ Add compost and herbs to our garden

I hadn't realized how busy May was in terms of Emacs chats and other good things until I put this review together. That's one of the advantages of reviews. You get to see the accumulation of little things. Oh, and I paid myself too.

Thanks to some help from the vendor, I made a lot of progress on my consulting project for E1. I'm rusty at J2EE, but I'm doing okay.

The weather was nice and warm in May, so I did a lot of biking and gardening. I added tire liners and patched a few holes in my tires, so that should result in fewer flats. We planted herbs and vegetables, added lots of compost (both free and purchased from Home Depot), and started turning our compost heap regularly. I discovered that yes, I do actually enjoy watching grass grow. Learning slowly, but getting there.

This month, I focused on helping the Emacs community. I've been experimenting with delivering an e-mail-based course on reading Emacs Lisp, and that's going well. I've also been paying Emacs geeks to help me with transcripts of chats, videos, and other resources. I'd like to eventually build http://emacslife.com into a useful resource that complements the Emacs Wiki and Emacs-related blogs.

I also dusted off Quantified Awesome's unit tests and brought it back up to 100% coverage, at least as reported by simplecov. Eventually I want to upgrade it to Rails 4. I've been learning Clojure too. I've completed all the elementary problems on 4clojure.com and am now working my way through the easy ones. Lots of things to try out!

In June, I'd like to:

  • Deliver a chunk of functionality for project E1
  • Polish and publish the Emacs Lisp beginner course, possibly on a self-serve platform
  • Take it easy because of project F2

Here's what I blogged about:

Sketches:

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