I’m in Malaysia for a couple of weeks (Penang to be precise, my wife’s home island). It has been years since my last visit and this is the first time travelling here with the kids. It is also the first time I’ve had two weeks off of work in at least 5 years, so I’m only slowly used to getting used to having a reasonable amount of free time.
My usual inclination is to try to either read a novel (something I rarely budget time for) or learn something new, programming-wise. A lot of projects I want to work on require more than a token amount of Javascript. Back in the apparently bad old days, I would write Javascript and include jQuery. There is substantial pressure to not do that now. I’ve spent the last few years tracking and trying to selectively dive into various facets of Javascript and Framework maturation, but the ROI has been pretty poor. Javascript isn’t my job and all such learning costs precious free time. Having tools, libraries, and transpiled languages fall from favor remarkably quickly puts a real damper on my enthusiasm to learn the next hottest Javascript thing.
That said, Javascript is still an important part of the apps I want to write, and I do have a couple weeks. So my choice this time in Southeast Asia: Elm.