Once again, it’s been far too long since I updated this, but better late than never!

I’m just about coming to the end of my time at Atlassian, which means it’s time to do a bit of travelling! I’ve actually organized everything (finally!), so my itinerary looks a bit like this:

  • Melbourne for four days.
  • Townsville for three days visiting Josh (couldn’t come to Australia and not visit, even if it is all the way up in Queensland!)
  • Cairns for a week, doing a five-day diving course on the reef that will get me qualified to dive anywhere.
  • Alice Springs for four days, during which time I’m going to do a three-day trek out to Uluru and back.
  • Then back to Sydney!

Which is all looking pretty awesome, but find the experience of spending that much money all at once a bit traumatic…

Other stuff that’s happened since last time:

  • I gave my post about variance in Scala at one of the Sydney ScalaSyd meetups, which was well-received. I keep meeting people who know Dad, though, which is a bit weird.
  • I sang in the Opera House again, this time doing Sibelius’ early work, Kullervo. It’s an interesting piece, but ultimately, just not as compelling as Sibelius can be. There are some excellent moments, but it really feels overlong. It’s the first time I’ve sung in Finnish, though, and it’s quite interesting. The vowels aren’t too hard, but double consonants are extremly important, and that made me think a lot more about how we actually produce the “double consonant” effect as singers, which was useful.
  • At work we released the first version of our visualization tool that we’ve been working on. It’s been very interesting for me, I’ve got to work both in Scala and in Javascript, with a smattering of HTML/CSS. I doubt my Javascript is especially beautiful, but I’m very glad for the experience. Also, d3 is really very good for making extremely pretty graphs.
    • It’s actually very gratifying working in Javascript. In the endless wars over what kind of type-system we ought to use, I heard someone say, “Dynamically typed languages give fast positive feedback, but slow negative feedback, whereas statically typed languages do the reverse.” I think this is on the money. In Javascript you can get something that does something very fast, but when it comes time to track down a mistake you made it can be a nightmare. Whereas writing in Scala, you spend a fair amount of time wrangling with the compiler to get anything working, but once you do you rarely get the bugs that you spend so long hunting in Javascript.
  • I’ve been playing lots of boardgames. There’s board-games cafe here that has literally everything. I go in on Sundays for “ridiculously long games”. Got to play Twilight Imperium, which was… draining. But I’m getting to play a vast variety of things, which is good, because it’s a much cheaper way to find out if they’re good than buying them!

That’s pretty much it. I may post more often when I’m travelling depending how bored I get.