What are you doing this week?
10 points by caius
10 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
I've been thinking about writing my own site in some Lisp dialect, something like this story but to a more extreme degree (using code to generate HTML, but also CSS, JS, feeds...).
I'm stuck at picking which one though. I'll probably end up making my own, we don't have enough Lisp dialects after all.
I wholeheartedly support making your own Lisp dialect, though it will definitely not help make your site exist.
That just sounds like lack of commitment (I may or may not have built my own compiler for games, and never built any games afterward)
Commitment to what, is the question.
I'm a lot happier when I build something for fun and can put it down because it's a low-stakes toy, than when I am yak-shaving something three layers deep and need to fix this codegen bug because I have an idea for a blog post burning in my brain.
Honestly, for something as bog-standard as HTML templating, whatever Lisp you write probably won't be a significant improvement over a lib written in Clojure or Fennel or Janet or whatever else you want.
I'm also the type who, when trying to do some game development, decides to switch to game engine development halfway through, instead. In the long term, this meant I never finished anything. Gamejams mostly fixed that.
What helped me cut the knot on what to do with my site, is trying to ask myself the honest question: what do I really want? Tinker with languages, libraries and frameworks? Or have a place where I can show, write, and create stuff in general?
After properly formulating this question, I immediately felt that the right answer was the latter. So I imposed a rule: if I can work on something meaningful that really enriches my site, like a new blog post, or an extra section, that should get priority over tinkering with formation and feature 4 out of 5 times. I don't always stick to that rule, but it has surely helped keep me away from most rabbit holes.
So, I ask you: do you want a website, or just a fun lisp project? If you can answer this, I'm sure you'll have no problem deciding to also write a lisp or not :)
do you want a website, or just a fun lisp project?
Why not both? :)
I understand your point though. It's really easy to get lost in this fractal development pattern. Start something, then start writing a library to help implement that something, then end up writing tools to write libraries...
Me too. I plan to use my lisp to build my own static site generator. The article you cited is a huge inspiration.
The creator of the language should also become its first user...
I used Parenscript for JS, Spinneret for HTML, and cl-css for CSS. Spinneret had a fair number of dependencies, so I might have chosen CL-WHO today—except I think it didn’t correctly support emoji (edit: no, that might have been cl-json). More info: https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/13l/devlog/541420/spring-lisp-game-jam-entry
I also made a prototype static site generator in CL (with my own HTML library, due to the issues above. Probably not what you want, but maybe had some ideas for you to think about: https://log.schemescape.com/posts/static-site-generators/lisp-ssg.html
Disclaimer: I now use C+Lua for my SSG.
Bashing my head against the AI scraper bots hammering a small wiki (rationalwiki.org) into uselessness. They've worked out the user-agent trick, after only five months lol.
It's really easy to cripple a MediaWiki - you hammer the expensive and largely uncacheable paths starting /w/ .
Same pattern as before - individual IPs in a botnet, no more than two or three hits a week from any given IP - so IP blocking doesn't work. The only data we have is each individual request.
Anubis isn't suitable cos we don't want to require javascript. I understand non-JS Anubis is possible.
Does iocaine actually mitigate the load of these assholes? Or does it just send them chasing wild geese? The latter response doesn't solve the problem we have.
Anyway, awful.systems is trying some stuff live so when that's up I'll see if I can adapt whatever we end up with on that one.
in between that, accepting that pivot-to-ai.com but mostly its youtube is what I have for a job right now - the tech market is turbo fucked right now, especially as I'm 58 and my LinkedIn is full of AI-hating - and taking that a bit more seriously as a small business. I figure a coupla years for the bubble to finish dying. I could be wrong. But it turns out there's a market for telling people "no, you're not crazy, it's that stupid." Finally ordered the business cards yesterday. I wonder if there's actually suitable recommended software for HMRC Making Tax Digital yet.
I like rationalwiki, thank you for helping maintain it. Anubis might be useful as a stopgap to get you some breathing room for a real solution, if nothing else. iiuc non-JS Anubis exists but is WIP, but might be at a stage where they're looking for people to try it out for real. Anubis is also fairly smart about letting through weird user-agents like text-only browsers. (We'll see how long that lasts.)
I want to try out one of the spam-generators myself; my understanding is it mitigates the load because the bots don't try to crawl everything in parallel, so once they start chasing wild geese they tend to stay there. If I get around to trying it out myself then we'll see what the results are like.
Playing around with MeshCore, a Part 15 (no license required) mesh networking effort using LoRa. I have a few people in my vicinity who are willing to host nodes, and with the new 910.525 MHz, 62.5 kHz bandwidth, SF7, CR5 preset in the US, I'm able to cut through the horrendous cell site interference around here with just a cheap band pass filter. My hope is that I can get my whole town wired up without too much difficulty. MeshCore has a neat feature for OTA updates, not via LoRa (that would take forever!) but by 2.4 GHz WiFi. So, even if nodes are on people's roofs or whatever, I can drive around with a 2.4 GHz directional antenna and update them from the street.
It's been a while since I did any radio stuff, despite being a licensed ham for... wow, over half my life now. It's really neat to watch people get so excited about picking up far away nodes when atmospheric conditions conspire to their favor, just like we do on HF.
Nice! I just started tinkering with Meshtastic despite having zero experience with radio communications other than setting up wi-fi on my devices and tuning an FM radio. My reception is terrible since I'm in an apartment with no LOS to anyone, but there's a small, active community in my area which is neat. LoRa is very cool, and it's fun to learn about different aspects of RF comms. I might even be inspired enough to get a ham radio license.
It looks like MeshCore can be flashed to a lot of the same devices! Noting it mentally. :)
Hopefully ripping out a few thousand lines of code from our client SDKs after deprecating an old service at work :-)
On a personal level I'm mostly going to continue chipping away at my reading goal, started reading The Maze Runner today.
Trying to write a cross-plarform task management CalDAV client using Tauri + Rust.
I achieved some success, however dealing with CalDAV and iCalendar's syntax is a huge pain.
Self-hosting a small feed aggregator (FreshRSS). I had no idea popular reader apps like NetNewsWire natively support FreshRSS. I'd like to take control of my own news feed again.
Thinking about building a small web application for sharing audio files with clients. Something simple and fast, maybe written in Go?
Trying to learn how to use emacs, magit and forge is on the agenda this week. I need a better way to do code reviews, i've been using OctoNvim in neovim, and it's OK, but still feels awkward (but not as awkward as the PR review GUI in github still feels).
Going to collate some resources on 2d graphics, played with SDL2, vello, WGPU over the weekend and realized i'm missing some fundamental understanding about how things like textures work. I've got an OK understanding of 2d vector type drawing through playing with vello and some of the other linebender crates, but on the whole I feel like i'm missing a lot of general understanding in order to be able to build anything on top of it all.
Other than that, general day to day work stuff.
Trying to learn how to use emacs
I really like Doom Emacs and, if you are a vim user, you'll feel quite at home and will find a self-documenting and discoverable interface. I guess the bad thing about Doom Emacs being "so good" (IMHO) is that you won't actually "learn Emacs" because everything works out of the box with minimal configuration :)
A few stressful deadlines at $WORK before the end of the week. On Thursday I'm going to a concert. I don't have anything planned for the weekend and next week I'll be flying to Japan and disconnecting from work for 3 weeks. Can't wait for this week to be over.
Looking into self-hosting gitlab for work, 'cause my boss doesn't trust their regulations-compliant product to actually be any good. Yayyyyyy.
Working a game demo in Odin with raylib
That’s a fantastic combo. What’s the game about?
Top-down 2d shooter, in which you build spaceships from parts. After you finish a mission the spaceship is teared down and you build a new spaceship from the parts from the old spaceship.
Oh that’s a pretty cool dynamic! Do you get to pick up parts from other ships too?
Do you get to pick up parts from other ships too?
Maybe? My initial idea was that first you'd get the basic parts from a hub/shop, and then over the course of the game those parts will be upgraded or could get destroyed.
This mechanism is inspired by the game Mewgenics (releases in 2026, but I saw some pre-release gameplay recently on youtube, and it looks really fun!)
Working on a session persistence tool using zig. Attach/detach for terminal PTYs while preserving native scrollback and modern terminal features
I really need to find the time to draft my talk for BazelCon... especially because it will require corporate review and those things take time and are always frustrating.
Distributed Tracing on WASM/Cloudflare Workers. In particular, for linking execution between workers/queues/durable objects.
planning to upgrade the ssd in an older x1 carbon and perhaps also planning to build a small nas