What are you doing this week?
22 points by caius
22 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'm organizing a programmer meetup, Chilean style, in Santiago. We are going to have a nice barbecue outdoors (it's summer here!) and I'm expecting about 30 attendees. Looking forward to it :)
Celebrating another revolution of the sun completed. New toys include a new waterproof coat, (new old stock), Wayfarer mk2 sailing dinghy (secondhand but ready to go) and iPad mini (new, so thin! Nano-texture!)
Off to see a live show of the Smith n Sniff podcast, and hopefully getting the Z4 back from having an exhaust blow cut out and new pipes welded in, in time for a trackday at Donnington Park on Friday. Not done a trackday before (taking the Focus estate round the Nurburgring excepted) and quite looking forward to it, but also somewhat nervous.
in time for a trackday at Donnington Park on Friday.
That’s the track where Senna went from 5th to 1st in half a lap finding grip in a completely different lane right? Amazing :-)
I am still contemplating if I am going to take part in the 6H race in Serres circuit in two-three weeks. The problem is that we will race with an Elise and safety-wise is not ideal, especially in rainy conditions. But we have experience, as a team, so we’ll see. Have fun!
That’s the track where Senna went from 5th to 1st in half a lap finding grip in a completely different lane right? Amazing :-)
That’s the one. It’s on the flight path for the East Midlands airport too, so I think can be quite slippy in the wet due to things like fuel vapour that falls out occasionally and lands on the track.
I wrote up a list of all the projects I started this year and turns out I started almost exactly one every month. Didn't finish any of them. For the rest of the year, I am going to focus on polishing and shipping all the ones I still find interesting.
Starting with emmer (a Wayland notification daemon, inspired by Sonner).
I'm on paternity leave so mostly looking after my newborn son. But in the "off hours" (which are at weird hours), I'm working through Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters" and am in the process of implementing the first interpreter (jlox) in Zig (https://codeberg.org/hgrsd/lokz)
Found an index optimization few days ago that largely eliminates pointer chasing, so I've been updating the buffer pool with io_uring to make use of that. Getting io_uring to actually deliver the performance that Patterson, Gimlin et al. suggests is pretty hard in real world scenarios where IOPS go brr is not the only outcome you're looking for.
Next is actually adjusting the index to make use of the async fetching capabilities.
I moved one of my internal tools for my company to emacs/elisp. I live in emacs so it makes sense to replace some webapps only used by me with buffers and completing-read
How is WoW? I haven't played in a very long time (and I'm hesitant to try again, I need to protect myself lol).
So far I'm having a blast. I played from Classic to WotLK and then I dabbled in the other expansions. Forever feels like Classic but with a lot of QoL improvements. It's slow, large and a great excuse to be unproductive (after the last months have given me productivity anxiety).
Going back to tanking dead mines with randoms has been a great experience.
I've been writing and editing documentation for the GoActivityPub library. If anyone has 10m to kill and read through it, I'd appreciate some feedback (and owe you one <3).
Wallowing in existential dread as AI is becoming more and more scary to me.
Also working on my receipt printer project and finally getting a UPS for my home setup
Looking for engineering jobs in Amsterdam area, and maybe spend some time to polish my application launcher.
Dinner with a friend on Wednesday. Going to Cambridge for the Retro Computer Festival 2026 at the Centre for Computing History on Saturday & Sunday.
As my work has continued to push LLMs on me (and my promotion has not materialized nor disappeared yet) I am going to write an MCP server for Citrix. My replacement will surely make use of LLMs and it would be nice if I could simply tell them to point their agents at an MCP server to get good diagnostics / other information.
Got some miniPCIe LTE modems that my workplace was throwing out, so I'm waiting on a SIM card (on a cheap 19 DKK/month PAYG plan) and USB adapter to arrive. First task is to figure out which of them still work, and after that I'm not sure. I don't have anything that urgently needs cellular connectivity.
I'm also going to be moving my home network back to my own router (a N100 or N150—I can't remember—mini PC with 2 NICs and 4 ethernet ports running OpenBSD). After my recent move, it was easier to just use the ISP router until I had some time to clear the space I need under the stairs. I still don't have ethernet everywhere, but my wifi mesh is good enough for most things.
I have another project turning my Marantz PM6005 amplifier into a smart speaker, using an ESP32, a tinkerboard, raspotify, and home assistant. At the moment it communicates over IR, but I plan to hook the ESP32 up to the remote control RCA jack at the rear so it doesn't need line of sight any more (right now the biggest blocker is a literal one, a spanish galgo that likes to stand right between the ESP32 and the IR receiver). I'm not sure whether I'll bother with much of a write up for this, the tinkerboard, raspotify and home assistant stuff is fairly standard, and the ESP32 firmware is mostly vibecoded, so not that interesting to read about. I know many here are skeptical and highly critical of LLMs, but I've been finding them more and more useful. As someone who has struggled with executive function all my life, they've actually allowed me to get projects done that I would have in the past indefinitely postponed.
I finalized porting the compression lib zxc (libzxc.org) to native go with the help of Claude opus 5.5. We had to rewrite a big part of it in AMD64 and ARM64 assembly to reach the C lib speed.
ZXC is a compression format allowing ultra fast decompression (faster than zstd) which might be of interest for game development to provide compact ressources.
The Go package is available here: https://github.com/chmike/zxc-go.
Probably spend too much time reading Lobs and HN articles about “how the world is changing.”
When not distracted with that, I’m playing with some IoT prototypes in the ag space using the Nordic9151. This is my second go at zephyr in a few years, and I’m having a much better experience this time. It’s either the improved stability of the tooling AND/OR the presence of AI tools to make sense of what is otherwise a pretty complex beast (compared to classical bare metal programming). The Nordic chip is pretty impressive.
There’s a cloud side to the efforts I’ll be pursuing as well. I’ve always liked MQTT, but I’m leveraging version 5 in these efforts and rather happy with the results so far. Quite impressed with EMQX (broker) as well as mqttx library in Elixir.
Working on my toy graph-based DSP https://github.com/giann/zsynth Started as afternoon tinkering to better understand signal processing, now i kinda want to bring it to the point where i can design actual synths with it and use it as a VST plugin.
I want to do some minor site touch-ups to the Nixtamal site now that 3.0.0 was released over the weekend. I still like keeping in somewhat homemade looking since it doesn’t make it look like slop even if I would consider it sloppy for my own design work.
I started sketching an anti scraping access convention for Gemini that runs entirely on the server and needs no protocol changes. It would build on client certificates and the existing 6x status codes so OpenPGP key signs an attestation that binds the user TLS client cert to their PGP identity. Server then checks the web of trust from the operator trust roots. A trust path only makes someone eligible. A person still approves first time access so the web of trust mainly keeps the approval queue manageable (hopefully). Approved users get access limited to specific paths that expire quickly. They can renew by signing again without going through approval and revoking the PGP key ends access. Aim is more so accountability and per identity rate limits. It's obviously not perfect prevention since an approved user can still copy content but thats not the concern. Wondering how to distribute third party certifications now that keyservers strip them. The privacy cost of linking certs across capsules is probably going to be seen as a drawback by a lot of people but privacy is not the goal here.
Pursuantly, I'll be generalising my implementation of fibers into one of effects after a lightbulb moment. Fibers share a storage location for the yield target, but if you make that a parameter, you get effects. So it's analogous to a labeled break. I think that's how effects are supposed to work? Seems to be similar to how OCaml does it anyway. Also simultaneously halfway through rewriting the parser (said Sisyphus).