What are you doing this week?
14 points by caius
14 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.
Continuing to read a bit of Effective Rust which is very good.
Messing around on Advent of Code with Uiua on my own pace. Noodling around on day 2 at the moment.
Keep learning about collision detection for my hobby 2D game. It's a wider and more interesting topic than I had anticipated...
Depending on what you’re doing, collision resolution might be an even trickier problem! (At least that was my experience.)
Besides $dayjob, Crafting Interpreters was gifted to me and I am going through it. Massively impressed with the quality of the content and how complex themes are explained in a very clear language. The challenges are sometimes side-questy, which is something I personally like. The drawings are cute too.
It's great book; sometime I try to imagine how great it would be to get one when I started with computers in 90s. Just imagine having this as a kid with your first PC.
Playing my first fretless bass! (I got the semi-acoustic one, so I can play even when it's electric outage in Kyiv. It's interesting, how war is changing usual things and what becomes valuable after continuous bombing. Music is still valuable for sure). Also looking for interesting beginners music sheets, courses etc. It reminds me of my "first date" with piano.
$WORK-wise my partner in work got some virus, so pulling some of "his" stuff to do myself, documenting everything I do etc. Hopefully it will get us to the Christmas safely. Alas no time for AoC and this kind of fun.
Definitely get and keep a tuner beside you while you practice especially if your fingerboard isn't lined.
Intonation wise, fretless electric is harder than upright bass because appropriate left-hand technique on upright will at least get you in the neighborhood.
I've played fretless bass for over 20 years and can play in tune to the point where people don't realize I'm playing fretless unless I purposefully do a slide.
If you are looking for fretless players to imitate, check out Jaco Pastorius, Sean Malone, and Pino Palladino.
Fretless is a whole different beast. Don't hear it much other than in Jazz, but recently I listened to the album Changeling by Changeling. They use fretless guitars and basses. It's metal but might interest you.
Totally different for sure! I like jazzy side, but there's also Mick Karn of Japan who did crazy stuff.
Congratulations! One of the first things I realized when I switched from fretted to fretless was that practice takes a lot more mental bandwidth - I could sit with my fretted and noodle around or practice scales while eg. watching TV, but absolutely not with the fretless; it requires my full attention. Initially I found this frustrating, but eventually I came to greatly appreciate it - playing fretless and dedicating my full attention to it turned out to be both somewhat "meditative" and a great help in keeping a working attention span.
(I haven't been able to play well for a few years due to a nerve injury. I miss it so much!)
Preparing a release of Isograph (https://isograph.dev). Just landed language server changes that surface errors, include autofixes (e.g. if you select a field that doesn't exist, an autofix to create that field.) Great stuff! The DevEx is finally very close to what I've always wanted to achieve.
Recording another podcast episode and putting the login/passporting auth syatem together for my new language runtime. And cooking lots of soudough :)
Mostly, sleeping :P
I'm going to try and update an long dormant open-source project of mine. It's a payments connector (?) (think dj-stripe) using the company's relatively recently published API. Their previously existing JS SDK (on which the project was originally based on) is for all intents and purposes, broken. I'm hoping to display a nifty "demo" page for it by the end of the week.
In a moment of weakness I accepted the iOS Vista «upgrade» yesterday. I’ll spend some time trying to revert that. If anyone has experience with that, please let me know!
Work: Implementing an internal protocol with very tight timing constraints and very spartan hardware requirements. Of all the types of programming task in both my professional and enthusiast life, this sort of thing has always been what I enjoyed the most.
Personal: Slowly, gradually recovering from major depression and panic anxiety. I try to take life slow enough that I can still work, because my experience is that prolonged time off work makes everything worse. I take my meds, I talk to my therapist, I read books (currently halfway through a Danish translation of Hartmut Rosa's "When Monsters Roar and Angels Sing: A small sociology of heavy metal"), I draw with pencil and paper, I tend my little indoor bonsai garden. Soon, all my trees will go into life support under artificial light; the only species that can be kept indoor are tropical ones that don't do well in the natural lighting (or lack thereof) of the Nordic winter.
I'm just drawing for myself, and I'm avoiding posting anything where anyone other than family or close friends can see it. I really don't want another round of "you're an idiot if you don't have AI draw for you" or being spammed with AI imitations of things I've made - this was how I lost the motivation to keep doing pixel art. I don't really have the mental resilience to do that again at the moment. Maybe Later, as the rich kids say.
I don't feel like doing AoC at all this year, so I won't. I do want to do a personal programming project again (I dearly miss langdev-just-for-fun), but I get depressed, demotivated and despondent whenever I read about recent tech developments, and I have a hard time dragging myself over that hill. I deleted all my older personal project code last year, so I can't just dust off something old and get going again. I know my feelings about this (particularly in an enthusiast/personal-project context) are absurd, but I feel them anyway. I'm not sure how to get over that hill.
I'll continue working on my home computer project. This week in progress:
Getting distracted.
I should be finishing off the last small piece of that paid project (maybe you know how it is). Instead I’m making things for my ambitious replacement personal website which is to feature lots of pure-CSS 3D and lots of handwriting.
I should be getting something out there to begin with and building incrementally from there. Instead I’m polishing implementation details of my lightweight markup language (which is surprisingly important to my website plans) so its HTML or XML output can be optimal, while other key parts remain unimplemented.
I should be making the 3D space and finishing the initial elements like books with page turning and then unbreaking normal web things like find-in-page with a smidgeon of JS. But last night I was thinking about what elements I might add later, you know, and bam! all of a sudden I’m reading pipe organ synthesis literature again and porting bits of Aeolus to Rust to better understand how it works… I miss my Kawai DX1900 drawbar organ that I left behind when moving to India last year to marry.
I’m scared to contemplate what deeper rabbit hole might distract me from my organ!
$WORK: some admin work and filling in the backlog documentation that I have been postponing for too long. Also looking into a sensible, maintainable way to get ansible dependencies (roles, variables, facts, ...) into a sensible structure with my colleagues.
$PERSONAL: The I've-lost-count-time that I'm gonna take a look at my website. Visited some blogs etc that inspired me to do some changes. Aside from that, trying to keep a healthy sport schedule on track.
I just finished my MS! Time to pack up and move, and hopefully find the time to do AoC.
giving a compiler construction test. wish me luck.
I just got Nixtamal to a very alpha phase & am looking to put together a small landing page for it before trying to tag a beta.
Nice. I got reviews & merges too to get Darcs + Pijul to support mirrors in the upstream fetchers.
Second week in a row of weekend duty and the work is starting to get heavy; I'll try to keep reading Database Internals and, if I have any energy left, I'll go to the mountains!
On the prompting of another comment, I'm going to try and put together a portfolio of technical/documentation writing in effort to try and market myself to tiny dev teams. The hope is it results in a bit of reasonably paced gig work to supplement my day job.
Watering plants, learning more from https://learnxinyminutes.com/, completing my fully vibecoded compiler called C67 that can compile my own unusual programming language directly to machine code (this is an exception and an experiment, none of my other repos are vibecoded), creating and buying Christmas presents, updating Arch Linux packages, spending time with friends and family and working.
What sort of Christmas presents are you creating? Just curious, I love knowing about what others make!
A tiny weather station with photos of the kids, so that when it's raining, there's an image of them holding an umbrella, when it's snowing there's an image of them in winter clothing etc.
I bought several WaveShare ESP32 C6 Touch LCD 1.47 devices and spent 3 Sundays programming, flashing and tweaking them. The hardest part was the network setup and making everything super easy, so that everyone in the family can enjoy them. If nothing is set up, they just cycle the images every 10 seconds, but if the little display is tapped, a message asking users to hold down the WPS button on their router for 5 seconds appears. If the device gets Wi-Fi, it finds the geographical location by IP and then downloads the current weather, and the weather for the next 3 days. If that worked out, users can swipe between one screen with just the right background image + temperature, one screen with just the background image, one screen with the date, clock, week number, background image and temperature and one screen with the 3-day forecast.
We don't have a 3D-printer, so I'm currently contemplating what a suitable case or backplate (perhaps made out of wood) could be, to make it easy to hang on the wall.
At day-work it's a soft freeze until 18th and a very hard one until 6th jan. So gotta do other stuff. Like
Can you explain the difference between a soft freeze and hard freeze? Is that a different level of furlough?
Under soft freeze we can wrap up ongoing work, maybe make preventive and corrective changes. Under hard it's only immediate security or availability threats.
Is this a labor freeze (to cut opex) or just a development freeze? I am only asking this because I know some folks who are getting furloughed for a couple weeks and curious if this is another anecdote of the shaky economy.
Changes in production freeze. A no-deploy Friday extended over whole Christmastide and then some. I work for mobile telephony providers.
Everyone still gets paid, accrues bonus etc.
Figuring out how to find an interesting job after a pretty long sabbatical time off while working on my main side project, gotta write a blogpost about it and finding it harder than I thought, probably because I lost the habit to write posts.
Setting up soju IRC bouncer to connect to libera.chat without having to rely on IRCCloud for it, also update Ansible playbooks to play nice with up-to-date Debian Trixie boxes (apparently quite a few things changed from Bullseye).
I'm also tempted to resurrect an old side project which I abandoned long ago but still think has potential.
Tinkering at home to tidy up all the cables hanging from TV / Playstation / router / switches / Sonos speakers, possibly hiding most of them without destroying anything in the process.
Learning some Haskell at a very slow pace, just out of curiosity.
I made a patch to support infinite precision in JSON numerals but it seems like the PureScript community is so small, there is nobody around to review it, even though it seems to be one of the most popular JSON libraries... :(
I bought some "Grime Dice", https://singingbanana.com/dice/article.htm
I'm going to try to do a monte carlo simulation to get some intuition about how they compare.
I spent the past week driving from Mississippi to San Diego, so I've got to get back up to speed on my day job. I'd been working on debugging some weird issues with extended tracing that seem? to be resolved this morning, and I've seen a lot of code pushed for the project I was working on prior to the road trip. I've also been working on a personal note taking app and I'd really love for it to be in a usable spot before the new year.
Outside of work, I'm spending the next couple of weeks in an Airbnb a block from the beach until our lease starts out here. I've been really slacking on the fitness front and I'm hoping the beautiful location makes it easier to dive into some fun cardio.