I’ve spent a lot of time the last 3 years watching Umberto Eco’s sign’s of Ur-Facism manifest, and manifest, and manifest. I’ve seen a lot of things that I was raised to believe wouldn’t couldn’t happen here happen in sequence, with frightening speed. Out-of-control (willfully so) police beating and gassing people in the street, night after night after night. Destruction of public schools, along with requiring states fund religious schools. A Justice Department hell-bent on revenge for the President. Open xenophobia, brazen racism by members of congress. I thought we left that behind when Strom Thurmond finally died.

TLDR;

I learned a bunch about rendering fonts and I thought it would be interesting to read about them from a programmer’s perspective. I gained a ton of empathy for type design and type-setting developers, as they work with a dizzying variety of screen resolutions, font styles, and a wide variety of device speeds to produce type that looks as good as it possibly can under harsh conditions.

Background

I’ve been working on a project involving a two-color e-ink screen. I’m drawing on the screen and that involves drawing text. The project is written in Go. There are common font-rendering librares like Cairo, which are written in C. I find compiling against C libraries like using cgo difficult and complex, so I was really interested in a Go-only solution.

I got an email from an old co-worker the other day:

I was thinking about you and how you are a person I see as not being particularly embroiled in office politics, but also as having a lot of influence and knowing how and where to leverage it. I was curious if you had any words of advice for how you got to that place.

Of course I was happy to hear that I come off this way, and as I thought about how to reply, I found myself writing an essay.

We went through layoffs at work recently. Like a lot of companies, the belt is tightening, and the bathtub drain is getting blugged. I’m lucky to have not been laid off. Lucky again - this is the third “surprise” layoff where I’ve kept my job. I’m batting 1.000 but I know my number has to come up sometime.

I graduated from college in 2009, 9 months into the Great Financial Crisis. I was lucky to get into a good graduate school on a stipend that paid my rent, and even luckier to be leaving undergraduate without student debt. I was lucky that when I needed to quit graduate school I could find a government job.

We all use dozens of pieces of software a day - email clients, web browser, email clients inside web browsers. Cameras and chat, digital art tools and spreadsheets. We switch between them dozens of times, and when we really get into a task, when can sometimes achieve a state of flow, a state of satisfying and effective effort that lets us accomplish more than we thought and enjoy it all the way.