Month: December 2023

Shane and I were busy this past summer May – August co-hosting our interns Andrew and Pedro, who worked hard on implementing more calendar systems in ICU4X. In the icu::calendar crate, they added the modules chinese, dangi (Korean), hebrew, islamic (includes civil, observational, tabular, and Umm-al-Qura), persian, and roc (Taiwan). The summer required us all learning a lot about calendar systems, and how dates and times are just smaller units of the larger calendar systems. Humans created those calendar systems to precisely calculate the mathematically messy phenomena we use to orient our lives: the spin of the Earth, the orbit of the moon, and the orbit of Earth. It turns out there is one book that authoritatively catalogs all human calendar systems. The following are short videos giving an introduction to what makes calendars interesting, and a properly working version of the code for the Calendrical Calculations book.

The Face/Interface 2023 event was interesting. I wasn’t there for the first iteration in 2017, but I still felt entertained to spend this second iteration with internationalization people I know & got to meet. It felt like 90% of the event was about fonts and typography, and only the remaining 10% was for keyboards/input methods, but nonetheless, I got to learn quite a few things about the field. More importantly, it was a chance to meet people in a related discipline who also care about better supporting languages/scripts/people around the world who need it the most, even though it requires volunteer effort in their free time to achieve. Making connections with people was one of the best things I have taken away from the event, including people to collaborate with on interesting followup work that can help even more people.