What are you doing this week?

Starting my first week as a professional open-source developer! I'm very excited! I started an open-source Python library about 1.5 years ago, worked on it on-and-off since. I applied and got selected late last year for a grant by the NLnet foundation, which has enabled me to quit my job and now work full time on this project - for at least the next 6 months.

The main challenge is going to be solitude: working alone from home. I got some ideas to mitigate that, but feel free to suggest good life hacks there!

Work: Low-level protocol fiddling.

Play: Last year I took up drawing with pencil and paper to do something away from the computer and hopefully get my mind off the depressing state of computer touching. I try to set aside a little time each day for drawing; this week I will start practicing using inks. I'm not good at it, but at least I have reached the point where 13-year-old me would no longer be embarrassed to see how bad I'd gotten at it. Like many people, I liked to draw as a kid, but stopped as an adult. It's been fascinating to see that after over 30 years out of practice, the moment I started actually practicing again, a lot just started coming back spontaneously - I guess drawing isn't quite "use it or lose it".

For my videogame pastime this week I'm playing Back To The Dawn (a couple of days into a Thomas the Fox playthrough).

I'm thinking about getting back into just-for-fun programming language development again, but I'm still struggling with depression and anxiety, and have a hard time staying motivated. Also, I'm drained when I'm done with work - not because work is particularly stressful, just because my energy reserves are low and I'm basically using all of it at work.

I finally wrapped up the setup of my home NAS on FreeBSD. This week I’m thinking through what and how to back up properly, essentially planning my backup strategy.

My work and home laptops back up their data to the NAS, and from there it’s backed up to AWS S3 and Google Drive. This week’s discoveries were rclone and restic tools.

It feels really good to reach the point where all my data is finally in one place and actually safe.

And the last thing will be to set up monitoring on the NAS. But I’m a DevOps engineer, so that part should be simple enough.

Work: Assisting the team in migrating a homegrown agent to LangGraph.

Play: Doing my best to make space to climb again. Life scheduling has got in the way for the last few months. This week, I'm restarting some hangboarding exercises and making sure I get to the gym once. Maybe if I keep saying it out loud, it'll happen.

Onboarding with a new client and recovering from being ill over the festive period. What larks.

Snowed in the UK though, we have actual white stuff on the ground outside. Slight novelty.

I'm scaling up my search indexer from ~1M documents to ~10M (from a dump of english wikipedia) and doing parameter tuning to address issues that brings up

Back to work tomorrow, so will rest as much as I can still. Our lizards are waking up from brumation so I am spending time with them.

First week in a new theme: Year of Hope

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE&pp=ygULdGhlbWVzIGdyZXk%3D

Back to work after a nice long break, and continuing to try to wrap my head around 1ML.

(And babysitting my sick cat, who is hooooooopefully slowly getting better...)

Work: catching up after taking a couple weeks off for the holidays. Personal: Reading "Precalculus The Hard Way" by Seth Braver. I am on a long-term journey to develop my mathematical skillset / intuition, and my most recent foray is in precalculus. I never took precalc in school which has made calculus an intimidating subject, but I am really enjoying this Seth Braver textbook.

I want to try out the rqbit rust BitTorrent library. Just a simple Tauri app to download a music file via BitTorrent, and play it with something like rodio. I'm sure the hard part will be to make the bittorrent protocol work as a seeder. For now, just as a leecher is good enough :)

If anyone has pointers I'll take em!

Work: trying to remember what I was doing a couple of weeks ago involving Kafka

Not-work: Carrying on with a small shark/boids-based game using Bevy. Unfortunately I'm on the UI and polishing stage, which feels a lot more like drudgery and tweaking rather than fun programming challenges.

Working with a designer that hopefully will be able to rewrite a bunch of templates for a service I inherited. We tried upwork and recommendations from others about good designers and nothing panned out. I guess you can have fast, good or cheap and only pick two. This is guy is not fast but man the results are fantastic. I am also going to start working on some new features but the mechanics of how to use them and set them up are puzzling right now. Ive also been overeating for the holidays and want to dial that back a bit.

Translating an old Matlab codebase into C++ and hopefully eventually some other codebases into rust.

Work: picking up after holiday break, some chores and thinking of what kind of environment I’d like to see at work

Play: Getting back to the sporting schedule I try to keep. Aside from a training, I’d like to get a short run and bouldering session somewhere in the weekly routine.

Aside from that I need to take a look at my HASS, since switching to new infrastructure the automations have been a bit wacky.

I've found out how bad is my knee arthritis (pretty bad) and trying to plan ahead what to do next. Programming got lower priority, but there are some after-new-year activities at $work as usual, mostly operational stuff.

In other news, I think I grokked Anki at last (not sure, who matured enough — me, they, or we both) and it works pretty well for programming as well as for music.

Work: I have the first annual review for my PhD this week, so I'll spend most of this week preparing for that.

Play: Planning to do some home organising, and work on some automations (hooked up a few Shelly 1PM mini gen4s to my light switches over the weekend). Likely more than a fair bit of Risk of Rain 2 as well, which I've been pretty addicted to recently.

It’s the first time I have been alone & not having anything I need to do for someone else since October. So I am going to take at least a day off from everyone. But I am still working on building that site since I got sidetracked into making a Ninja generator with Nickel. I also just started reading Thinking Forth which will be my lunchtime treat for a bit since it’s scratching something on the out-of-the-box category.