Weeknote 29: A Lingering Symptom of Depression

• My post-COVID depression got so bad in May that I’ve had to take a long break from work. In this free time, I’ve been reading, messing around with new frontend tech, and figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. I’m planning to go back to work in September, by which time I hope to have all the answers to life that I’m looking for.
• While I’m no longer struggling with my mental health as much as I was three months ago, I’ve still been feeling drowsy and lethargic to the point that it’s impossible to be productive. According to my doctor, this is a lingering symptom of depression. She has put me on medication that helps me stay more alert throughout the day, which is probably the reason I’m able to write this note without falling asleep.
• When I wasn’t paying attention, React 18 was released with support for concurrent rendering. There’s ample documentation on how to use the new concurrent features, but almost none on how the features work under the hood. My goal this week is to try and understand how these features are built. If I have the energy, I might even write about them.
• There have been new developments in the continuing saga of my ill-considered purchase of a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. When I last wrote about it, I mentioned that I’d given it to my parents. It has now found its way back into my hands after I discovered that it had been collecting dust in the bottom drawer of their bedside table for three months. I’ve decided to keep it to use as my secondary computer.
• The ThinkPad makes for a pretty good writing environment. In fact, I’m writing this post on the ThinkPad in Microsoft Word. It may be blasphemous to admit this in programming circles, but I enjoy using Word for writing prose. Traditional word processors put me in the mood for writing in a way that more specialized tools like Scrivener do not (and don’t even get me started on Markdown). I still have to convert all of my writing into Markdown before I can post it to my blog, but that’s what Pandoc is for.
• I now work out of a WeWork here in Bangalore. While I have a comfortable home office, working by myself all the time gets lonely. I can’t say I enjoy the environment at WeWork very much, but it’s a small price to pay for a bit of social interaction a few times a week.

Currently playing: Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Currently reading: How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren