Eric Weinstein's Blog

I won't be posting to this blog anymore—new posts will appear on the new site.

It's hard to believe the year's almost over. A ton has happened since last January, so this blog post is mostly to get it all down on (electronic) paper, organize my thoughts, and start prioritizing for the New Year.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2012

I learned to program. I mean really learned. I'd taught myself a bit of JavaScript and Python the year before; I learned some Java in college; at varying points in my childhood I played around with Logo, HTML/CSS, and TI-BASIC. In the last twelve months, I've gone from knowing relatively little to understanding Python and JavaScript (though the latter still manages to surprise me somewhat regularly) and feeling proficient in (though not yet a native speaker of) Ruby and C. I even learned a bit of Haskell!

I started a new job. In late August, I left Random House (where I'd worked for exactly four years) and took a job with Codecademy. While I owe a great deal to RH and I miss the people there, I now get to help teach the world to program. How cool is that?

I published well. I'm enormously grateful to be able to say my poems appeared in The New Yorker, Denver Quarterly, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, and Crazyhorse in 2012. Huge thanks to the editors of those journals/magazines, my teachers, and all the fantastic poets and writers I had the opportunity to work with during my MFA.

I read lots of good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn
Northerners by Seth Abramson
Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer
The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner
The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner
Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Things are Happening by Joshua Beckman
Flies by Michael Dickman
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane
Fancy Beasts by Alex Lemon
The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau
Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner
Litany for the City by Ryan Teitman
Collected Poems by Lynda Hull


Programming

Code Complete (2nd Edition) by Steve McConnell
The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
The Mythical Man-Month (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff

GOALS FOR 2013

Become a better programmer. There's still a ton of stuff I want to learn, both about the technologies and languages I've already picked up and a thousand other things I didn't have the time to tackle in 2012. The big ones:


More about Ruby, particularly metaprogramming in Ruby
More about JavaScript (which will likely involve plowing through the gargantuan JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan)
Twitter Bootstrap
Algorithms and data structures (backfilling some of my missing CS knowledge)
The UNIX operating system, including bash and zsh
More about relational database systems, as well as their alternatives (e.g. MongoDB)
Information security
Functional programming style, likely through Haskell or F♯
Memory management in C and x86 assembly

Have my first full-length book accepted for publication. I have a couple of manuscripts ready and I think they're where I want them to be, so now it's the ongoing game of musical chairs: matching the book to a publisher before the music stops. (If it stops, it stops, & I'll try again in 2014.)

Learn to shave with a straight razor. After thinking about it for a year or two, I finally went out and bought a razor and strop. After watching a billion YouTube videos demonstrating how to do everything from set up and care for the razor itself to actually shaving with it, I'm reasonably sure I can learn not to maim myself with it in a couple of weeks, and actually be pretty adept with it in just a few months.

Learn more about coffee. I started grinding my own coffee this year and learned a lot about drip brewing. Thanks to friends at work who are much more knowledgeable than me, I also learned a fair amount about espresso. In 2013, I'd like to try out some more brewing methods/types of coffee & learn more about what makes a great cup.

Rebuild my website from the ground up with Twitter Bootstrap. I'd like to incorporate this blog into it, too. I'm not sure a full-fledged Rails app is necessary, but I think something more lightweight (like Express or Sinatra) might be a good solution.

Publish more poems. I've been writing up a storm the last week or so, and I'm ready to hit the ground running come January.

Read more good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young
Poems 1962 – 2012 by Louise Glück
The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
The Best American Poetry 2012 edited by Mark Doty
Later Poems Selected and New: 1971 – 2012 by Adrienne Rich
Quick Question by John Ashbery
Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds
Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky


Programming

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson et al. (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler et al.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma et al.
Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen
Introduction to Algorithms (2nd Edition) by Thomas Cormen et al.
Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta et al.
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (2nd Edition) by Jon Erickson
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (2nd Edition) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Regular Expressions Cookbook by Jan Goyvaerts & Steven Levithan
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipovača
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
Pro Git by Scott Chacon
Practical Vim by Drew Neil
Ruby Best Practices by Gregory T. Brown
The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)

Fall Reading, 2012
The Copper Scroll, Joe DonahueThe Network, Jenna OsmanRegular Expressions Cookbook, Jan Goyvaerts and Steven LevithanLiar's Poker, Michael LewisThe Cloud Corporation, Timothy DonnellyThe C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis RitchieRuby Best Practices, Gregory T. BrownDesign Patterns in Ruby, Russ OlsenDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma et al. The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton ChristensenThe Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, Brant Cooper et al.The Modern Poetic Sequence, M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. GallOrdering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, Susan GrimmIntroduction to Algorithms, Thomas Cormen et al.Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben LernerThe Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Gary BlankGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas HofstadterSuggestions welcome!

I'll be guest blogging weekly (every Wednesday) over at the Ploughshares blog from now until April. Check out my first post!

...forthcoming in The Southern Review this spring. Details TK!

In fact, lots of things TK. I've been horribly remiss in my blogging lately; more soon.

troy, when the walls fell

— 09.21.2011, 11:08 PM

The walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.
Achilles’ vengeance canceled out the day.
A man was executed while I slept.

Achilles’ men expected they’d accept
the hollow horse, the camouflaged decay.
Their walls dissolved, Troy’s citizenry wept.

He did not gentle go, and though he kept
beseeching the Achaeans, won no stay.
A man was executed while I slept.

Olympus’ gods were never so inept
as then. Their job’s to know how our hearts weigh.
The walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.

I would have dreamed through all of this, except
the television woke me up to say
a man was executed while I slept.

Measureless, his heart’s weight as he stepped
into that room. As death was underway
our walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.
A man was executed while we slept—

Two quick updates—

• I've recently been named a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. I'm enormously thankful to the individual readers and the Poetry Foundation overall for selecting me as a finalist, and many thanks to those of you who have wished me luck for the final round. Fingers crossed!

• One of my poems will be appearing in a future issue of The New York Quarterly—details TK.