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All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson Overall Review: Exhilarating and punchy, All Tomorrow’s Parties is another excellent cyberpunk book from William Gibson. It’s fast-paced and immensely fun, filled with techno-jargon and dystopian near-future scenarios that still hold up 25 years later. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys dense, action-packed science fiction, especially if you like the cyberpunk genre or any of Gibson’s other work. Synopsis: In a futuristic cyberpunk setting, three people are trying to navigate a looming technological event. Laney is a man with uncanny data abilities who is plugged into cyberspace from a homeless encampment in Tokyo. Chevette is a scrappy young woman from a large self-governing slum on the Bay Bridge. Rydell is a disgraced former cop sent to San Francisco on a mysterious mission. Together they must navigate the strange world around them as they are swept up in the power struggles of cyberspace. ...

Atomic Habits by James Clear Overall Review: A fantastic self-help book providing pragmatic strategies for building positive habits and quitting negative ones. It’s enjoyable to read and practical to follow. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve themselves. Synopsis: James Clear shares four straightforward strategies to help build habits: 1) make the trigger for the habit obvious 2) make it desirable to perform the habit 3) make the habit easy to perform 4) make the habit enjoyable. He gives easy-to-implement tactics for following each strategy and shares scientific evidence as well as personal anecdotes to reinforce them. ...

View the code Twenty years ago, my family bought the domain duchastel.com (our family’s last name). Initially my family used it to host some bios but it hasn’t been updated in years. I’m thankful to them for buying and holding onto that domain though, as it now gives me an opportunity to build and manage my own website. Goals I had a few high-level goals which motivated me to build this website: ...

View the code View the website for computing solutions This year I participated in the Advent of Code for the third year in a row. I wrote my solutions in Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) like I did in 2021, but this time using with the Javascript compiler and Jetpack Compose to render a website written in Kotlin. I shared some thoughts on Kotlin Multiplatform last year. My thoughts mostly haven’t changed. The ecosystem appears to be maturing, which is good. There’s still a ways to go before it’s at a point where I think it will be ready for broad adoption but I’m excited for KMP to continue to evolve. ...

View the code This year (or should I say last year now), I wanted to use Advent of Code as an excuse to try something new. I thought of using Rust since my coworkers are using it on their teams and it seems like a cool language, but I decided instead to use Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) since I’m more familiar with Kotlin and wanted to try out the Multiplatform compilers. Maybe I’ll do Rust next year. ...

As the first post for this website I thought it would be cool to reflect on some software projects I did in high school and college. None are particularly spectacular, but my philosophy is that the things you do in your free time don’t have to be spectacular. I had fun doing them, and I also enjoy the opportunity to write some thoughts down on them in retrospect. Advent of Code 2020 View the code ...