What are you doing this week?
13 points by caius
13 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.
Work: More lowlevel protocol fiddling, and also some security-related things.
Play: Practicing my pencil and ink skills. Here is a drawing I did yesterday, a sunset reflected in the hull of Sputnik 1. I so want to get back into programming my own things, but I still can't shake the feeling that it's all pointless now.
But mostly trying to keep my mind occupied (which drawing is apparently pretty good for). My mental health is not getting better, I'm utterly terrified about the future, and I don't know what to do beyond what I'm doing now.
Getting over the flu, apparently! My medic gave me three days off work. I hope to feel a little better tomorrow so I can spend some quality time with Crafting Interpreters.
At work I am working on a generative AI feature that was dreamed up by my boss so he can go for a promotion but I don’t think there is any user demand for it. It certainly hasn’t been validated in any way. Feature for no one. Oh well, I pushed back as much as I could.
Yep same, doing the random dirty work nonsense that my boss requested as he's going for a promotion this year too. Even though I have no bandwidth for it, as he didn't reduce the workload from actual important stuff.
Moving with all its small annoyances and Rubying :)
Good luck! Moving rates in the Top 10 Things I Like Least. I usually need two weeks after completion to recenter myself! Not to mention stretching out the unpacking for weeks.
At work I'm upgrading some of our dependencies and third party libraries. At some point we'll move from .Net Framework to .Net Core, and I'm trying to clean things up a bit and get all of our projects on the same page for that eventual move.
Outside of work I'm trying to get back into running without injuring my knee again. I'm also going to move my desktop's main Debian partition over to its NVME drive, and use the current drive as extra storage, basically swapping their roles.
https://codeinput.com - Tools for PR-Git workflows Currently experimenting with semantic diffs for the merge conflicts editor: https://codeinput.com/products/merge-conflicts/demo
You can try by installing the GitHub App which will detect PRs who have a merge conflict and create a workspace for them.
Work is a pretty typical week nothing special.
Home: hanging with family, playing Lies of P DLC (so effing good), doing some CAD/3D printing to celebrate our AMS being finally fixed (in the most frustratingly stupid manner possible). Seeing my dad off for a 3 month trip.
Recovering from strep throat and mouth ulcers. Can't eat solids yet but at least the fever is gone. I've been writing Ocaml when my brain feels up for it.
This week, I'm teaching my younger brother how to code. He's lived a life completely unrelated to computers until now. Actually, I've been teaching him for a few weeks. My brother majored in philosophy and, as you might expect, had a tough time finding a job. So, I decided to teach him how to code, even though LLMs are starting to take jobs from software engineers.
Personally, I think the best way to start programming is to get immediate feedback through visible, tangible results. That's why I'm focusing on JavaScript and React. To supplement the computational thinking that this approach might lack, I'm having him solve at least five problems a day on coding challenge sites like LeetCode.
So far, it seems to be going smoothly. But sometimes I find myself at a loss for how to explain concepts that have become so second nature to me that I've forgotten how I first understood them myself. Still, I think it's helping me too. It's forcing me to re-understand concepts I already knew, but in a much clearer way.
Installing Linux (probably arch tbh) on my work machine this weekend as I got the greenlight from my boss, which is great. Wont have to keep fumbling around in windows anymore doing the wrong keybinds all the time.
Add auto-battler gameplay to my Chinese character spell game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4218330/WordJoy/
Started repairing my OP-1. Realized I need the UI daughter board that's no longer in stock anywhere. Yay.
Coming back to work :(
I'm currently struggling a bit because we have a project that requires a very complex development setup. One of our components requires Kubernetes and it's big enough that it pushes nice laptops dangerously.
So at the moment I support a local Kind environment but also spilling parts of the environment to AWS.
Until now we've managed with a somewhat byzantine networking setup with reverse proxies, but it's beginning to be too troublesome, so I've been trying to make it work with Telepresence. But it's tough to make it work under both Kind and remote AWS.
I'm somewhat surprised by the lack of options to run complex development environments on Kubernetes- either I'm missing something really really basic and I could set up something simpler, or things are... quite primitive.
I don't know what options you've evaluated but I've found coder based stuff to be enjoyable for dev environments.
My work dev stuff is based off that and it works pretty well with devcontainer and git repos. Access to the environment is handled by both web ides and ssh access so everything from emacs to remote vs code is pretty smooth.
Hah, we're actually building a product based on Coder.
I've actually considered if we should dogfood. But then most of our team are Neovim users (and I use Emacs). Is the experience with the terminal so good? It sounded like a hassle and I fear latency.
(Sometimes I also consider just getting some beefy VMs to run our workstations there...)
Actually I use emacs within our coder based environment also. There's apparently two of us! Tramp mode including chained ssh + docker works. As does just emacs over ssh. We have some a custom client daemon that updates .ssh/config. So scp and everything works fine.
I don't really notice latency problems. I'm in Utah and the instances are in AWS us-west-2.
Interesting. We're in a bit of a rush right now, but I always defend dogfooding as one of the best ways to help deliver great products, so I'll put that on my list.
Making sure I get time to code every day. Can't get better at it if I'm only ever talking and planning and aligning.
I know that feeling all to well. If you're able, you can shoe-horn coding into that planning and aligning :)
Lots of Nixtamal fixups/feature (done: lock with newlines, add to VCS ignore on setup, mini GC roots to mitigate losing fetches both when garbage collecting + rebasing, exit codes; doing: trying to figure out if I can do patches so you can patch up Nixpkgs with a patch file). I promise the site is around the corner too as I have a feature comparison chart & the prose written, but no CSS styling yet.
