For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers.

I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobody wanted to buy it, so at the beginning of March, I ran a one-month pre-sale on Kickstarter. I structured the project so that if I didn’t hit $5k in pre-orders, the project would be canceled, and I’d walk away with nothing.

Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages.

I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.

Highlights

• I launched my first Kickstarter project and found Kickstarter surprisingly painless.
• I’m kind of on track to reach my Kickstarter goal, but I’ll need to get creative in raising the last 2/3rds.
• I’m soliciting suggestions for fun services to run on my 4x ARM CPU / 24 GB cloud server.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

I enjoy finding ways to exercise my rights as a consumer and push back against corporate abuse, so this was right up my alley.

The book was eye-opening and made me infuriated with how corrupt the medical system is in the US and how much it extracts wealth by fleecing the middle class.

I finally found a solution that makes VS Code work consistently with Zig, so I’m sharing my setup in the hope that it saves someone else a headache.

Before I landed on a working solution, I kept running into issues with Zig version mismatches or VS Code completely failing to recognize Zig semantics and failing over to naive autocomplete.