What are you doing this week?
18 points by caius
18 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'll continue investigating what lies at the intersection of Uxn and Lisp Machines. I'm not following a straightforward path so the notes are unorganized, rambly and drafty. They may even be inconsistent in places as I've evolved or explored other paths.
I'm trying to build a personal computing stack inspired by the two named things (decker is also an inspiration) and I'm investigating the foundations as well as checking if I want something under what I'm currently exploring. I started building the low level language on top of a tiny VM with 6 opcodes to explore that area but that is not yet in the notes.
Apart from that I'll continue reading Thinking Forth.
... And work I guess
Something of a similar spirit was my last personal project before depression and anxiety ate up my capacity to do personal projects. My animating idea, in a sentence, was "What if my Amiga had been a Lisp Machine?"
(I think I might finally be getting well enough to start nerding a bit on it again.)
I'll continue to work on Hister as much as I can. I plan to add new extractors and optimize the indexer storage usage by moving out HTML/favicon content from the index and storing them in an efficient compressed way. Also, I'd like to find relevant communities to share the project with and attract potential users/contributors. I'd appreciate suggestions about privacy/self-hosting communities who'd find Hister useful.
Oh, that's a really cool project. I know I had imagined having a local index of crawled pages, but it's fantastic seeing someone working on such a promising version of it.
The local lido is finally open again (and a 5 minute bike ride from my house) so I think I'll be doing some laps this week after sending the kids off to school.
I cracked my wanikani slump and I think I should be able to get a level done in around 8 days now. Which would mean it'd take me 4 months from now to get to level 40. From that point I can register and start studying for N2 and I'll finally be done with this. Freedom!
Other than that just cracking lots of nuts as part of the work of engineering leadership in platform. I very rarely get time to open my laptop outside of work hours.
I recently launched a database of studio equipment 19IN, and will be improving monitoring and observability this week which seems like a massive money sink if you're not careful.
Will also be applying to jobs. I spent a bit of time not working a full time job and it seems like a terrible time to try to get back into it.
Finish setting up Guix System on my main machine and learn Emacs while I'm at it. Maybe bring my homelab back up after months of moving around distros.
I just got a little yellow macbook neo and I'm having a great time on it already. I'll be continuing to get it set up during the week this week.
In addition to that I decided to try and learn Go. There was a thread a bit ago asking what your go-to project was for learning a new language, and I am using a couple ideas from that thread for a first project: a dice roller / interpreter. I'll have it handle simple math expressions involving dice rolls such as 3d6 + d4 etc. That should give me a good intro to the language and probably a nice brush up on some other things.
Learning Go has been one of my favorite things I've done in recent years. I recommend "Writing an Interpreter in Go" by Thorsten Ball if you're into that sort of thing.
Well, during this past weekend, I put in some work on redoubtful, a Linux-only agent sandbox. My hypothesis is that Linux user namespaces can be used to make really low-friction sandboxes with good ergonomics. This isn't actually ready for anyone but me to use, but it's currently doing a good job sandboxing Qwen3.6 27B + pi.dev. Of course, this is self-hosted, and I'm letting Qwen do simple coding tasks. I haven't sandboxed a full Claude Code yet, but I'll get to that.
Next weekend, I'll probably work on finishing a basic credential-injection proxy. Yeah, yeah, there are already a bunch of these things, but I think that there's still space here to do something nice.
This project is also an attempt to discover better patterns for working with agents. And one thing I have noticed is that once I get off the beaten path, Opus 4.7 runs up tech debt fast, at ugly interest rates. Even though I make a point of doing careful code review, neither Claude nor I notice quickly enough when the architecture starts to get muddy in subtle ways. And unwinding this often takes a couple of days.
Good refactoring depends on insight, and the rate of insight generation is down. I'm actually starting to appreciate Qwen's 27B, because it will do simple refactorings and implementations, but there's less temptation to delegate deeper understanding. My pure Qwen runs tend to have binary outcomes: Either the model goes off track quickly, or it does a basically good job that requires a small amount of tweaking in review. Whereas Opus 4.7 has a third state: "Huh, Opus figured out a bunch of details for me, and it all looks decent in review. But tech debt is piling up, and my understanding is gradually getting shallower."
Right now, it feels like the maintenance of deeper understanding, and the insights it creates, is one of the biggest challenges with frontier models.
Interesting, I was about to ask what the advantage over bubblewrap is, but I see you're using it under the hood but are adding network filtering and credential proxying. That is indeed what I am currently missing from the simple bubblewrap script I am using.
I will keep configuring my new m920q based NixOS NAS. Currently working on a nice monitoring setup for it. Been loads of fun learning ZFS on a proper array. Moved from Unraid, and was really caught off guard by the huge speed improvement to RaidZ2
Switching from my Thinkpad with NixOS to a Macbook Air therefore configuring it for the first days. When this worked well I can hopefully continue to work on my org-mode calendar app
Need to get E&O insurance, write up policies, prepare contracts, get a website up and running. Less coding than I would like, but soon to start consulting freelance.
All my networking hardware is arriving on Wednesday, so I'll be spending at least some time setting up my new 10Gb network. The contractor pulled fibre, and so now it's just getting the gear, setting up OPNsense et al.
Did you have a contractor pulling fiber to your premise, or inside of it? I've always wanted to have a fiber backbone in my home, but never wanted to deal with opening all the walls and chasing wires up between floors.
Work: on Friday I submitted my first PR for a 20% project I started on last month, so I'll be reading the response and implementing the requested changes. Also building out a budget reporting script I wrote a while ago and adding some features to a patching system.
Home: continuing to cycle. I got a new bike (cannondale caad10) and it's a little too aggressive for my current ability: my lower back hurts after 15 minutes of riding, whereas on my Univega I can ride for hours with no pain. I've learned this is due to weak core and back muscles, so I am endeavoring to do some core and back exercises.
Tonight is pre-calc tutoring with a very smart friend. I'm excited for that.
Also I am working through Kubernetes in Action: 2nd edition. Pretty good fun so far.
I mentioned an indoor climbing tracker last time, I released it shortly afterwards and my gym organised a small contest around it so I got a hundred users for a while.
After three months I still have some users and I've been adding features such as punctual contests, a permanent per-gym leaderboard and "versus" mode, stats, and charts.
It's only in French and there's only my local gym in it but it's there: C-Morpho.
In parallel I have been putting more work into my Half-Life WASM implementation and in my modding tools. I ditched writing troff manpages by hand and a went for asciidoc, if it's good enough for git, it's good enough for my small niche CLI. I should have done that earlier.
Now that I no longer have a job I can spend more time in my garden, touch grass, and breathe a bit.
I have several interviews early this week and then I'm getting one of two surgeries for the year. I'm a bit anxious about being in recovery while still looking for a job but I'm hopeful that I'll be at a point where I can do some remote interviews within a week of recovery.
Applying for a billion jobs, using LLMs to build out a Kubernetes environment on OCI, and building one out myself to see how long either takes and the quality of each.
Rolling out a backend overhaul of our irrigation history offerings. Hanging with my kiddos that visiting from out of town. Working on our bathroom remodel (floors, ceiling fan, and shower pan this week). And looking for a good conference to set my sites on.
Since GitHub is down every few days now, I've decided to give Forgejo a go. Ironically, I used to self-host my git repositories with Gitea way back in the day, but moved to GitHub when they made private repos free. I'm also taking the opportunity to migrate everything over to Forgejo Actions from my dockerised Concourse set-up.
Initial impressions are very good. It was almost trivial to set up on NixOS. I need to figure out what to do with GitHub (do I just archive everything? do I use it as a mirror?) but I think I'll be sticking with Forgejo.
I know that, in principle, a company that employs SREs can run a more reliable service than me doing it in my spare time. But, in practice, single-user self-hosted things are close to 100% reliable as the load is almost negligible and the only downtime is when I need to restart something for an update.