C hicago in the spring-summer-fall has perfect weather. We don't have mountains or high altitude, but we do have the lake, which is decent-sized, and a few rivers. But there's always something going on, tons of good people to meet, music, culture, and it's very walkable in many parts. Rarely driving is a requirement for me. If I ever have to drive more than once or twice in a week, then it's not a place I could live. It does, however, massively limit where I can pick to live, but ok.

I miss blogging, its low traffic and slower pace. Social media have been great in some ways, and obviously calamitous in others. One need not pick just one. This still has a place, I think.

Recently, I've open-sourced a Swift package called Physical, for making calculations with physical quantities easy enough that people just might use it. I gave an inaugural talk on it at 360|iDev (see below). There are thousands of "units of measurement" systems for hundreds of languages, all with plusses and minuses, and this is me throwing my hat in the ring to nudge the state of programming toward having such things built-in to languages from the get-go, or at least in the standard library. That said, it gives me a freedom to play and experiment, as I don't have to deal with the decisions a larger company or community would make. If you are interested in knowing more about it, or interested in using or contributing to it, please drop me a line and say hi. It's always more fun to program with others, and it would be great to expand its usefulness to areas beyond my own competence.

Separately, I'm working on version 4 of my Zorak keyboard layout. I'm taking a hard look at keys I don't really use, and others that I do use that could stand to move up in rank (i.e., using less modifier keys to gain access to them). I think it has some really unique features that go beyond least-travel statistics. The default layout (with no modifiers) is very well honed and optimized (despite having two = keys).

Lastly, this year witnessed the last year for the great 360|iDev conference. John Wilker has always been a great organizer of high quality people and put on the highest quality conference around. I'm very glad that I was able to speak this year (the video will be publicly available soon). 360|iDev was the first indie Mac conference I ever spoke at, thanks to the encouragement of my friend Joe Pezzillo (we gave a talk together, then I felt comfortable enough to try doing it on my own — thanks Joe!). Since that time, John has accepted about a dozen talks from me over the years, and it was always a great time. Going to 360 was like going to camp, and I loved seeing all my friends each year. The number of great people I met there seems uncountable. It will be sorely missed.