lately - 20251214

phone, rust, and AES

as of a week or two ago, i realized how much of my time was being consumed by my phone. as a result, i went ahead and removed twitter, instagram, and youtube off of my phone's homepage (i can't fully delete them as i manage my band's instagram and need youtube for 2FA). it's been better, but some days i've definitely fallen back into the habit of mindlessly scrolling. despite that, i managed to halve my screen time to 2.5 hours a day. i'm hoping to get to less than that by the end of the month.

anyway, doing that has opened up my time *a lot*, for better or for worse. i'm back to playing games a few times a week (hades 2 GOTY), but have also been starting a lot of new endeavors (both programming and musical projects).

right now, i'm learning Rust through The Book and Rust By Example. i'm learning a lot! i'm about halfway through right now and some new concepts are a bit challenging, but i have high hopes for myself while learning the basics over the next week. it is an interesting, albeit strict, language. i decided to go about learning it because of an interview i had. one of the engineers told me the company had wanted to begin using Rust in their tech stack, and asked if i'd be interested in learning it. while i didn't get the offer, that conversation, in combination with how i've seen Rust become more widespread over the past few years (ie. a lot of codebases are now being refactored/written in Rust, such as (just recently!) Tor) piqued my interest enough to see what was up with the language, and it's definitely been an interesting journey so far.

outside of programming though, i just had my last show of the year with my band, RESONIST. it went a lot better for me than our first show! we're working on a lot more originals now which makes me happy. we're a post-rock band and almost all of our members take influence from different genres. we were actually formed by the audio engineering society at my university, which is how i got more involved with the org (that, and designing the t-shirt for the 2026 year).