What are you doing this weekend?
19 points by caius
19 points by caius
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Protesting ICE murdering Nicole Good here in Minneapolis.
Hanging out with my kids :)
How numerous & old are the kids? What do you get up to?
Two kids, 8 and 2 years old. Sports games for the eldest and probably something like “tackle dad” or “make a big mess” for the little one. My weekends are the most exhausting yet most fulfilling.
Remember spending ages just stacking toilet rolls and pushing them over with my kid at that age. And rolling him up like a burrito in his duvet! Simple & pure joy. Good memories!
The second weekend of the new year unfortunately means accounting for me. Rolling over the books, getting together tax documents, all that fun stuff. If the time and opportunity presents itself, my top-priority side-project is a simulation of a 13th century abbey. That project is still very much in the design phase for now.
Simulate it in software? Or something IRL like LARPing?
Simulate in software. I'm an amateur medieval history enthusiast. Looking into the minutiae to get a detailed simulation is probably 2/3rd of the fun for me. This project is rather ambitious, but I think it will make a cool art project when it's done.
Worrying terribly about the future.
Trying to keep myself from going mad from aforementioned by practicing drawing with coloured pencils. Currently, I'm trying to draw a manta ray (because manta rays are cool).
Edit: I have now drawn a manta ray. Coloured pencils and black ink; caveat: I never claimed to be actually any good at this.
Wow, that’s both cool and pretty darn good. Nice work!
I used to draw a lot when I was a kid, but at some point I realized, "Holy shit - I'm a middle-aged man and I can barely draw a stick figure now". I found this quite embarrassing (not because there's anything wrong with kids being better at stuff than adults, but because I figured 13-year-old me would be terribly embarrassed if he saw the quality of 45-year-old me's drawings). So I started practicing again a few months ago, and this is where I'm at now. This is the third thing I did with coloured pencils as an adult (and prior to that, I don't think I've used them since I was about 7-8 years old).
It was sort of fascinating to experience that as I started actually practicing again, it's like a whole bunch of dormant brain connections just came back online, some 30 years after they last got actual use.
Here is one I did of my pet lizard's face. (Just graphite pencils; no colour.)
I went to bed yesterday thinking about resuming work on the ML-like language I was writing while reading Crafting Interpreters. I stopped because I was getting a bit frustrated with C; I know the language but I haven't used it much, so I don't have a good feel for what is good or bad code and how the project should be structured, so I keep running into bugs and small annoyances...
I was thinking I might just write the bytecode compiler in a language I know better like Rust or OCaml and only leave the interpreter and runtime in C. The grand plan is to self-host the compiler (not the interpreter) anyway and Rust/OCaml are much closer to what I'd like the language to look like, so I think this'll help me speed things up. And even if I decide to also rewrite the compiler in C at some point, I think it'll be easier once I've figured the logic out. So in short, I think I'll be working a bit on that.
Hopefully filming a short video of myself playing Jazz and send it to my teacher. I’ve fallen in with a jazz-loving crowd and want to learn enough to join in.
Also probably of checking out a Latin jazz duo playing at a local venue.
Finally bask in the glorious feeling of having published my single blog post for the year in week 2 already 😆
Coding my first Svelte project. After reading the docs, countless blogs and watching many YT videos on it, it's time to build something! This is so different from what I used to do when I started learning programming some 30 years ago, where I would just jump to coding and explored at will. Too bad I'm not that adventurous anymore and want to start with a solid foundation before the first line of code. Sucks a great deal of fun from the process.
Spent the whole week being sick so doing absolutely as little as possible while waiting for my resting heart rate to come back to where it's supposed to be.
Noodling a bit more on my new Hugo blog when I have the time and energy.
Is one’s resting heart rate higher when one is sick, or lower?
This year's FIRST Robotics Competition season starts with the game being revealed on Saturday at noon. Should be a good one!
Spending time with family and continuing a little game jam I got going on as a creative outlet.
Finishing traceboot's new rendering output (HTML+SVG instead of JSON for Perfetto), updating the documentation with new screenshots, and making it available in a webpage through webassembly (that last part may or may not work out).
Preparing my presentation for "Lazy Linearity for a Core Functional Language" for POPL26 next week ;)
Working a bit on a tilde server. The quick idea is a shared Linux box where everyone is an admin. I want to set up a small community with friends and friends of friends. The server is set up with configuration as code, so everyone should be able to install whatever they want on it. (I also provide some support to deploying a local VM for testing.)
I just replaced gitweb with cgit, as one of the few things in my first milestone is to make it "self contained", so it should be possible to host the server configuration on the server itself.
Writing an rss feed reader. This is my nth attempt at this, and previously I tried doing a full-blown app, but now I decided to implement a program that will fetch the feeds and collect them into json. Then I will render this json using typst and put it on my blog. I will probably run this program with cron once per day either on a raspberry pi or on digitalocean/hetzner.
Heading down to stay with a friend near London for most of the week. Due to maintenance, weather and the insane prices of train tickets in the UK, it’s no worse for me to fly to Belfast for the day, then fly into London City than just get on the train (or what should be a train, but is a bus replacement service.) Somewhat batshit day of travel, but I’ve not been to Belfast for a while and have never flown into London City so looking forward to that.
I'm helping my sister move IF she's packed and in my city by tomorrow evening.
On Sunday, I'm livestreaming on Twitch.
Vibe engineering a terraform provider for TrueNAS. I had been deploying to my homelab using Ansible which I’ve come to despise. The upside is that I’ve gotten quite familiar with the TrueNAS midclt CLI
I’ve picked up hacking on EndBASIC again after playing with AI agents to generate games for it and seeing them hit dead ends due to missing features.
If time permits, I’ll continue working on a long-overdue optimization to the VM: assigning numerical indexes to variables at compilation time instead of using a hash map at runtim for variable lookups. (I just finished implementing this for VM upcalls.)
Extending my MySQL vs PostgreSQL performance comparison to include MariaDB and then to run it on a virtual machine in the cloud, instead of my local one; then I would try to do the same live on the video for my YouTube channel :) Playing with Claude Code to learn various stuff and discover its limits as well
