It’s been two years since I have written a “Snowman Dev Update” post. The last one was on July 10, 2022.

In late July 2022, I learned of a teaching job. It was an exciting opportunity, but it required moving just over 1200 miles from where I was in central Florida to update New York within three weeks. I also needed to find a new apartment and, of course, start a new job. Within a few months of the job, however, I learned I would not be re-hired for the next academic year, and I needed to not only find a new job but also leave the state.

Given an eight-month window before I needed to escape New York, I wrote most of my dissertation, having decided to change the topic after moving to New York. Right before I was to leave, I learned of a job back in Florida. I moved across the United States again, started a new job, and graduated with a PhD all back-to-back in August 2023.

Between August 2023 and August 2024, I worked as a postdoctoral scholar doing research on a variety of things, some of which ended up as part of the Twine Reference, Twine Specs, and were part of anew, extended series of videos on Twine 2.6/2.8. I also applied to a large number of places and, as of this writing, have landed in a new, exciting job where I should, hopefully, be staying for many years.

While I did spend a great deal of time working on an improved version of Twine Space since the last Snowman Dev Update, I have, for the most part, completely ignored Snowman work for a very long time.

Over the last week, I’ve been trying to fix that problem.

I have created a short-term milestone of Snowman 2.0.4 and have tried to spend around one hour a day to fix a large number of issues raised over the last year or more of stalled development time. As of this writing, I do not have have a new timetable for Snowman 3.0, which was my focus two years ago. I want to fix the issues with the Snowman 2.X branch before I move to 3.0, but hopefully it can go into testing by the end of 2024.

Once Snowman 2.0.4 gets published, I hope to write a new post with plans with how I will proceed into improving Snowman and its documentation over the coming months.