What are you doing this week?
16 points by caius
16 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 got completely fed up with the direction of tech and cold quit just over a week ago. Last week was just recuperating from years of whatever the fork that was, this week I'm starting to look at what a next career might be while also getting some embargoed blog posts cleaned up I can finally post. I'm not really coding anything of import, though, and that's been very pleasant.
Wow. I don't have these kinds of balls. Hat tip for being ballzie. Best of luck on your next arc.
Any thoughts on where it might be? I'm always intrigued on what former programmer/tech people pivot to.
Tech was originally supposed to be the "temporary" career, so I've got some ideas, but I need to start by figuring out how feasible they are when I've got a family and an established community instead of a lone dude fresh out of college in my 20s. All of them are way more about people, way less about tech.
Buckle up. I did this back in May and haven't found anything better yet, which became more stressful, though in different ways, to be honest.
I poured everything into Uruky and that grew well over this period, but it's at 10-15% of the revenue we'd need. I've started focusing on other products recently, but very few people (and businesses) care enough to pay for well-built non-AI products that are privacy-focused.
I envy your ability to cold quit. I am also fairly burnt out, but don’t have the financial runway to quit.
Best of luck to you!
I am also fairly burnt out, but don’t have the financial runway to quit.
I am sorry. To be very transparent, I spent years getting to where I could "just quit", but every single time I hit a goal of "I need to get at least $X amount of runway," I'd find some excuse why that still wasn't enough. I ended up torturing myself with jobs I didn't like and making sacrifices for work long after I honestly should've quit.
I know I'm extremely fortunate that I can do what I'm doing, but this is also kind of the reverse joke of overnight successes taking a decade: I was successful for a decade so I could be an overnight quitter.
(The fact that I genuinely enjoy computing and programming made this a lot harder; I basically got slow-boiled as tech stopping being punk, scrum became normal, the industry collectively opted for predictability over innovation/that innovation that did happen ended up being entirely about holding eyeballs, etc. For a lot of that, because of my seniority and careful choices, I almost got to pretend things hadn't changed. I just eventually hit a point where I couldn't pretend anymore. Probably a blog post in there when I've had a chance to convalesce a bit.)
Taking a full day off (5:45 AM - 10:30 PM) to run the polling place for my local elections. Also threw together a very simple website to support my project where kids vote just outside the actual election (voting for what kind of party to throw in the park 2 weeks later).
In theory I'm supposed to be writing a design document for work, describing some alternate approaches for storing certain data, but time is scarce and I'm concerned I won't have it written up in time because I'm taking time off to run elections and because my boss is assigning me additional work writing up my end-of-year evaluation (I am poor and slow at writing self-evaluations).
Thanks for your service! This is awesome.
I have to say, I love living in Washington where we can all just mail it in. I'm not even sure where I would go to vote in person anymore. I do not miss those days. I love having an hour to read the voters pamphlet, do other research, and hammer out my votes right at the kitchen table with my wife.
Like last week: In between jobs. Detachment agency offered my resume to a customer, they wanted me but did not have a vacancy. I quit my job but customer was late creating the pro forma vacancy and the subsequent requisitions and accounts, so I'm being paid to do nothing right now. Last week was Bioshock: Infinite and my yard, this week I think I'll take on some home improvement, and I want to build some sort of notification system so I can get my code to ping me on whatever device I happen to have on me. Open to suggestions!
I'm exploring some newer hobbies more deeply while my partner is away for the week.
Soldering & SBC electronics. I didn't have an electronics class in college 20+ years ago unlike some of my friends who went to schools with a robotics program or an EE class requirement. So, I'm brushing up on soldering skills that I've (re)learned a few times but never developed to the point they'd stick. Having used naught but a 20W basic soldering iron I bought the last day of business for my local Radio Shack ~10 years ago, I thought I was doing OK but struggled. Then friends at Code & Supply's Build Night let me use their more, uh, professional quality and safety tools, e.g. an exhaust fan, silicon mat for contrast, magnifying glasses, 0.5 mm solder instead of 1 mm solder, and things go so much better. So, having an income, I invested in these myself. It all arrived over the weekend, including some practice board projects. My first practical project is already "in production" : a soil moisture monitor powered by a Seeed Studio ESP32-C6. I've got a few more of those for some other projects. I picked up a LoRa module for one! I'm starting to eye some robotics work but am probably a ways off of building something meaningful there. Small, inexpensive project recommendations welcome.
Baking. Tonight, I'll be enjoying a cheesesteak on a hoagie roll I made and froze a couple of weeks ago. I've got yet another variation of a Dutch oven no-knead basic bread rising while I work this morning. I'll add the final harvest of my rosemary plant to it and may add some lavender as well. I've discovered fireweed honey so that's going in it, too.
And, of course, punching the keys on a Rust webapp I work on maybe about two hours per week. I just got through some basics on the User model and will start on real user authentication soon, I think.
Dutch oven no-knead breads are some of my favorites! They're super easy and turn out so good.
My wife was recently diagnosed celiac, so, you know, great excuse to start experimenting with gluten-free ingredients. I’m really hoping I can figure out a recipe for Dutch oven no-knead breads sans gluten; it’s one of my favourite kinds of at-home loaves. That one feels like a 300-level experiment though.
Is the right season though! Nothing quite like the smell of fresh baked bread on a crisp autumn morning.
Best of luck. We pretty much gave up on home baking when my son was diagnosed coeliac. We weren’t able to make breads we liked. Do tell if you’re able to make something work!
Breads are hard, but I do a lot of gluten-free baking of desserts and I can assure you that not everything is as hard as bread! Cookies, brownies, cakes and pies all turn out nearly as good gluten free.
I'd especially recommend pies with Oreo crusts. Gluten-free Oreos are basically identical to regular Oreos.
Ooooooo that's solid intel on the Oreos!
Yeah, the first time I successfully made a GF angel food cake for a birthday party gave me a lot of confidence that this was possible.
I appreciate it and was actually thinking of starting to blog about it (cooklog?!). Haven’t tried bread yet but successfully made homemade pasta this weekend that was a hit. She’s not the first in her family to be diagnosed, she’s in fact the second-last… only her brother remains and he’s going to get the bloodwork done. I mention that because we took the pasta leftovers to a family dinner last night and the reaction was literally gasp-worthy. So that’s cool! It’s also disappointing because that recipe was really just 1:1 + eggs + a bit of oil + a significant amount of swearing to get the first roll-out to happen without shredding, and if that’s kicking the pants out of the commercial gluten-free pasta they’re used to… that’s embarrassing for the commercial GF pasta industry!
I think one of my philosophies going into it though is that I’m not going to try to… I’m not sure the best way to put it… I’m not trying to make clones of gluten foods, I’m trying to figure out gluten-free recipes that are spiritually similar but delicious in their own right, if that makes sense? The pasta was a bit of an exception, the only real difference between it and the pasta I used to make with, say, semolina, was that the colour was a little different and I couldn’t roll it as thin as I usually would (it would just tear if it got too thin).
For the bread I’m hoping that cornmeal, buckwheat, and/or almond flour can help bring interestingness to it that we’re almost certainly going to lose in the crumb… but who knows, maybe the right combination of psyllium, xanthan gum, or maybe… agar or something can help with the light fluffy crumb that I love without having it turn grainy and fragile.
Am also on the hunt for specialty malts like malted millet, malted rice, and malted buckwheat to try to do the same thing with beer (plus maybe some amylase extract to get the starch->sugar conversion rolling). I don’t expect it to be the same as, and I’m not trying to mimic, malted-barley-based beer but rather figure out a malted-then-fermented drink that’s an amazing drink, not an “amazing gluten-free beer”. Talking about that got people pretty excited around the table last night; they’ve mostly landed on wine, mead, and cider, which are all great drinks but not really “you can have a couple of these throughout the day at the lake” kind of drinks :)
I think one of my philosophies going into it though is that I’m not going to try to… I’m not sure the best way to put it… I’m not trying to make clones of gluten foods, I’m trying to figure out gluten-free recipes that are spiritually similar but delicious in their own right, if that makes sense?
I have this same beef with vegan recipes. If making a dish Lenten-friendly requires eleven obscure substances I've never heard of, maybe I should just accept that that dish is not Lenten. (And for Lenten food, the discipline of giving up certain foods is even more the point than for vegan food.)
That is very much where my motivation came from. I'll take tofu over plant-based "bacon" any day of the week, or a rich lentil-bean-and-rice stew over a plant-based "hamburger". I'm not opposed to using additives to play with texture or mouthfeel by any means (xanthan gum, soy lecithin, and maltodextrin come to mind), but I'd rather do that to make the food more interesting rather than trying to make it emulate something it's not.
Work and WoW Forever release. I feel like WoW forever came at a time where a lot of people are struggling with the shifting sands of life and it reminds them of simpler times. At least it seems to me like a way to disconnect from whatever insane shit is happening in the world right now. So I'll be doing that.
Mutual aid work: Making tent-safe heaters for my unhoused neighbors. Helping a neighbor whose husband was taken by ICE make a GoFundMe to pay her bills until she and her kids can join him in Mexico.
Fun stuff: Vintage Story
Paid work: Making a Capacitor JS app for one client, adding some fields to the headless CMS for another client's static site, and (as always) invoices and admin.
Swept up in layoffs. So I'm doing things around the house while I talk to recruiters and apply to jobs. Fiddling with some toy programs in Clojure/ClojureScript because I can.
So much register allocation work, ive been redoing my bytecode backend and have found multiple issues thusfar, its really not trivial for me to understand; but ill get there
I spent the last 1.5 months researching a subject from quantum optics to give a presentation about it for a course I'm taking at university. I gave that presentation today, so now I have got a lot more time on my hand again. On the other hand, it's now time to catch up on subjects I have been neglecting for the better part of this semester, as I was mostly focusing on the presentation.
I have a framework that I'd like to get some momentum on re: extracting some dependencies and making them optional.
Other than that, I hope to pair with folks on various things: Foobara in particular, but I'm also planning to pair on garnet.js and Lobste.rs stuff this week.
I'll also spend a bit of time helping some folks learn about how method lookup and some other concepts work in Ruby.
I am working on deploying an EMQX broker using Podman. And getting checked out in a new airplane. I will enjoy the latter more.
Went to a biomedical conference to scope things out and figure out if it's a good venue to set up a vendor booth next year for MouseHouse (it is!)
Was a little lost after I got back though. It is overwhelming seeing the competitors in person and walking up to their booths and talking to their sales people. I'm kinda nervous to sit at a booth and sell something I made.
I need to make a better demo/trial experience for MouseHouse, which there is none of right now. I spent the morning designing what that might look like, and now I get to go back to my favorite thing - coding it up!
Been working some more to reduce my dependence on big tech by setting up my home server, got Vaultwarden setup via Tailscale. Also been creating some iOS apps to replace some that I’ve been using that got paywalled / bad UX / take too much of my personal data.
This week I'll be posting in the weekly thread as a form of accountability vis-a-vis progress on my pet language and because I need to start writing about it but haven't really figured out what to say or how just yet.
I recently got continuations, coroutines and fibers working, which was bafflingly easy[1], so I think I'll see if I can actually make use of fibers elsewhere. Probably decoupling the parser from its input port (you'll feed it bytes instead, and it'll yield if it can't pinch out a token yet, probably; I'm sure I've learnt this same decoupling lesson a dozen times before). This should reduce the number of special input port wrapper types (pure r7rs (the host language) is a little miserly with what you can do with them).
[1] It's just a set of (mutable location, value) pairs with a special "swap" bytecode instruction that does what you might expect and returns a new set. It's otherwise generic but in this case keeps track of the program counter and call stack. The current continuation is just the current value of each; for (symmetric) coroutines the call stack is empty and the program counter points at the start of the given function; and (asymmetric) fibers are like coroutines but they also hold a "current fiber" location for yielding, which is neatly swapped alongside everything else, plus a "current error" for errors like in Janet fibers. I was a little surprised that it worked the first time it did, to be honest.
Recovering from a Peru trip for work. Was fun but my god I'm exhausted.
Coming back to wrestle some chaos for the dev team I manage. We'll see how I do at that.
At home, enjoying time with the kids and deciding what side project/hobby i want to put my time into:
Just started hacking on Firefox for the first time :)
I'll be improving one of the network protocol implementations behind the built-in VPN. Lots to learn and very smart folks to work with. I'm ramping up right now, so it will take a while before I start sending patches, but I'm having plenty of fun already.
I need to put together some income. Everyone's telling me coding agents are everywhere, but I can't afford them like apparently every other person alive can.
Continue working on my automated testing guide for Rails developers.
And continue polishing AI testing playbook based on that guide, I am planning to start selling the playbook in few weeks.
Hopefully finishing the repair job on one HP-41CV. I bought 3 broken, tested all the boards, all working. Looking to sell 2 after, a bit beneath market price, to cover the cost of the one I wanted for programmable RPN fun. These are super cool calculators with custom chips for math from the 80s. I'm thinking I might write an emulator, since the system itself practically has no peripherals (just a screen). Likelihood of it is low but hey I can daydream... I'd rather do some fun programs on it first!