What are you doing this week?
17 points by caius
17 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've started learning Rust, because like 80% of the CLI tools I use are written in it, so it could be a nice way to contribute more to OSS projects. I plan to continue with The Rust Book the next few days and see what I can do. Before I just never had a real use-case for it except Hello World!
Rust in the wild always seems a lot more complicated then what I expect it to be, but maybe that is because I'm so unfamiliar with it.
Continuing to learn formal modelling in TLA+ because it (formal modelling) seems to be the future. Glory be to ~hwayne.
Spamming my CV at UK companies because after 4 months of not working my 5 months of savings are drying up. It's very hard to get responses for remote roles with my CV, probably because I haven't done anything of note. I do try and apply to US roles too but have a 0% response rate even though I'm a US citizen. If anyone with experience with these kinds of things wants to donate a couple minutes of time to looking at my CV I would gladly appreciate a DM - I've had a couple offers from the kind users here but never taken them up out of embarrassment and it's here I swallow my pride and present it in markdown format for analysis: https://bpa.st/WBTBUDLDCJ76CZJ3FJ4CGZZG74
Why does your resume list "Company A", "Company B" instead of giving the actual company names? That's not something I am used to seeing on the resumes I get (US based).
Because I can probably be doxed if one were to try but I wouldn't like to make it too easy
Your resume looks fine. Try to use recruiters to place you. They are at least working real roles. Also the word is that the job market mostly sucks in the US and UK.
The other thing to do is to work your network. This means pretty much everyone you’ve ever worked with with whom there was any mutual respect, including fellow engineers, executives, hr people, whoever. You want to ask if their companies are hiring OR if they have a specific problem that you can solve. You need to tell them what that thing is that you’re the guy to solve.
After talking to a couple recruiters I've realized that my lack of Kubernetes is preventing me from getting more lucrative jobs, so I need to learn K8s. I don't know how, though. For languages I usually read a book and then build something, but unless something has changed since I tried to learn Kubernetes in 2023, the books are all pretty bad and instantly outdated.
If anyone has insight into self-teaching Kubernetes I'd love to hear it. I struggle to learn from videos so written guides would be preferable.
I've been meaning to check this out for a while: https://labs.iximiuz.com/
Good reminder, I started their course Kubernetes the (very) Hard Way a while ago. Should finish that.
I needed to brush up on Kubernetes in order to communicate with some of my teammates more constructively so I picked up Kubernetes In Action, Second Edition. I read the "MEAP" (early access preview) edition, but it was completed & published in March 2026 so it shouldn't be that terribly out of date.
I wouldn't call it the best technical book I've ever read, but it's a relatively dry topic presented well. N.B. that it hasn't resulted in me single-handedly managing the entire cluster, but I feel like it's given me decent foundations to talk to people who do.
What level of knowing kubernetes are we talking here? If you just need to deploy stuff on kubernetes use the kubernetes built into docker and deploy stuff onto that. Now you’re an expert.
I finally registered an LLC so I can do some software consulting on the side (and hopefully full-time eventually). Got the email set up, invoicing sorted out, and have a customer lined up! I'm hoping to structure things so I spend ~50% of my time doing standard hourly/project-based client work, and the other ~50% on indie product development. Next thing that's burning a hole in my to-do list is to get the website up and running, and start "promoting" myself (ugh).
Keep on reading "Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)", by Sebastian Rashcka. Else, trying to find work still, and starting to feel really uneasy after 6 months on the battlefield. First time ever in my career that it's taking this long...anyway, anyone's hiring? :-)
A bunch of things with builds.sr.ht
cargo publish when a tag is pushed: https://git.sr.ht/~chinmay/run0edit/tree/a00d26867b216a71e50bd0ea0c08ffe038a63b1d/item/.build.yml#L28 - I want to change this to just have the token in ~/.cargo/credentials.toml
All of this would have been significantly harder if builds.sr.ht didn't have ad-hoc manifests+SSHing into failed builds, these alone are killer features of sourcehut
Working on my Elm/Unison inspired language targeting Common Lisp. That led me to yakshave into implementing persistent data structures for Common Lisp with proper transients so they can be used in the language runtime. That led me to yakshave into implementing a CL version of a Hegel client library to test those properly.
At work I'm fixing a few regressions that the QA team found so we can get a release out. After that I'm doing a small refactor in our Catia translator that should make a few code paths easier to follow, and fix a few bugs with how we handle supplemental geometry in that translator.
Outside of work I'm looking at Mahogany, the Wayland replacement for StumpWM. It builds and runs, but it looks like no keyboard shortcuts are registered, so nothing runs. Once I get that settled and get Emacs running inside of it I'll be in better shape.
I'm continuing to review my knowledge of physics to identify and fill in gaps. In particular, I've realized many of my mental models were shoddily built without a solid understanding of the core axioms on which they rely.
oooh, which field of physics?
I'm still working my way through EM but I'd like to learn about the fundamentals of fusion.
Migrating the majority of my homelab infrastructure off a very old server and a Synology to a more power efficient modern NUC and Ubiquiti UNAS-8. All the data has been moved, so it's just services.
Also lamenting the fact that Nextcloud is still what most people seem to recommend, despite it being hard to deploy (if you don't use docker, it's a standard PHP app), has a ton of features many users don't need (I really just need file browsing, management, and maybe file sync), and takes a lot of work to set it up properly with SSO like OIDC.
I started implementing one a while back as a way to learn claude, but there are a surprisingly large number of edge cases, and while I made it pretty far with claude (and judicious use of "no, do it this other way"), I think I need to start over and actually write it myself.
I was going to take time off and unwind, but now I'm on a bender working on adding some Technorati-esque chronological "conversational" backlink viewer features to the site viewer instead. @.@
Why am I like this?
Sorta unrelated but I like your thoughts in your "AI makes you boring" article. In college, I had a biology professor who ended the semester with some words of advice, "whatever you do in life, first of all try and be an interesting person." Those words have stuck with me, through career and job changes, and it's something still worth pursuing.
anyway just wanted to say I appreciated your article.
Life: playing with meshcore and meeting Berlin hacker friends IRL while the family is out of town
Some interesting tasks at work, mostly around domain modeling which is a welcome break from a slurry of support tickets for the past couple of weeks.
Privately, working on a presentation and reading The Trusted Advisor - feels like I finally found a book that explains what I intuitively felt about working with clients.
I finished the Forth iambic paddle driver (not worth a write-up), so I think software-wise, I'm taking a little break to do other things around the house. The next software project that needs finishing is my adjustable floating point lib in gbforth, so I can then finish another long-awaited project, to hopefully be in time for the next gbjam :)
Two week crunch for this project at work. I am managing the project and my team to stay focused on the work, and trying to handle any code related issues or requests (outside the project) on their behalf. Crazy how once you set a deadline for something everything gets in its way.
Around 8 years ago I wrote a tiny game engine for curses-based games while working through parts of Game Programming Patterns, wrote barebones versions of pong and a roguelike with it as a PoC, and this week I decided to pick it back up again and see how far I can take a roguelike...
Not the kind of project I had on my bingo card for 2026, but here we are.
Back to working on Voiden - will be working on shipping a CLI runner this week.
Also am thinking how I can make the multiple requests feature better .