Five Things: November 2020

  • Developing Fabricus which is my upcoming version of Anki-Roam bidirectional sync. It has been working for cloze notes pretty well and I’m currently putting it through its paces on my experimental graph.
  • Expanding my use of Roam’s ∆ feature to more than 40 blocks. All of the blocks are writing and thinking prompts for myself.
  • I had great chats re: spaced repetition/programmable attention/tools for thought with several people I met via Twitter and some other channels. This is something I’m new to and I have learnt a lot from. Hoping to continue having such chats going forward; probably I should try reaching out to people more proactively! If you’re interested in some of the same things I am, let me know and let’s talk!
  • Finished reading two great papers on distributed systems: Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm and Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database. This time, I focused on trying to understand and retain important ideas from the papers by making good flashcards. I probably made ~30 cards per paper and I think my retention of the key points is pretty good!
  • I left my old Happy Hacking Keyboard behind at the office when COVID-19 started, and really missed using it. Just this week I gave in and decided to get a new one. This newer model was released this year, with the main improvement being bluetooth connectivity. It’s expensive for sure, but well worth it for me - typing on these is sublime.