Unexpectations

Hi Friends,

It's been an unexpected week, is really the only way I feel like describing it. On Tuesday we were supposed to fly to Vancouver and spend a week there on vacation, exploring the city and maybe taking a day trip each to Whistler and Victoria Island. On our Lyft ride over to the airport, two hours before our flight was scheduled to take off, we got a text from the airline letting us know the flight was cancelled.

We went to the airport anyway, assuming they would be able to get us on another flight maybe later in the day. But we had no such luck. The earliest we would be able to fly to Vancouver would be Friday, and since they told us they would not be able to correspondingly adjust our return trip, we would end up only spending three days in Canada.

We decided that wasn't worth it, and cancelled the flight.

I was really looking forward to going to Vancouver. I've never been, and I love exploring new cities. Not only that but it's been two years since I've been out of the country, and I was looking forward to getting away, even if it was just to Canada 😜

Fortunately the week is turning out to be relaxing and fun anyway. We are spending the holiday break with my parents in upstate New York. And because we aren't traveling anywhere, we get to spend the week playing and lounging around with our dog. Major bonus 🐶

Last week I was taken off the waiting list and given access to the Arc browser, a new web browser from The Browser Company. I'm still getting the hang of it and haven't taken advantage of all it's features yet, notably Easels and the Library. But interestingly enough I haven't felt any reason to switch back to Chrome.

My review so far is Arc is quite good. It feels as good as Chrome from a user experience perspective, and probably a bit better. It's aesthetically more pleasing, and has first-class "get out of your way" functionality built right in. Hitting Cmd-s toggles the sidebar display, giving you complete fullscreen of the current tab.

I like the default support for Spaces, too. If you have different contexts or projects that you work on, you can easily separate tabs for each of them.

I'm looking forward to the continued development of the project. I think it has a lot of potential.

Another project that caught my eye recently is the Zed editor. I also got taken off the waitlist and given access to that a couple months ago, but haven't really taken it for a spin yet since I'm not writing a lot/any code in my free time lately.

The main reason I was interested in Zed is the emphasis the team behind it places on performance. My editor of choice for the last ~6 years has been Emacs, which outcompetes most other editors across most dimensions. But the one thing Emacs doesn't have is blazing fast responsiveness. The Zed team is bringing back the 100ms interaction response benchmark, and has even written their own GUI framework in Rust to accomplish this at scale as they build out the tool.

Whenever my next personal coding project comes around, I'll take Zed for a real test drive and report back with some more updates at that point.

Soundtrack

Some tunes I've been listening to this week, mostly throwbacks that resurfaced for one reason or another.

• Lost Ones, Ms. Lauryn Hill
• Dog Days Are Over, Florence + The Machine
• Intro, The xx

Stay safe, and see you next week ❤️