What are you doing this weekend?

It's Easter weekend, which in Sweden means four days off. And since I took Thursday off too, I'm already two days into the weekend. Last time I wrote here I had finalized the bytecode interpreter for my small dynamic FP language Nib. I have since fixed some more or less embarrassing bugs like scope leaking out of local bindings and patterns with negative number literals. And then I moved on to make library loading better since my next task is to fill out the standard library. I never write libraries in a vacuum, all libraries must have a user, so I'm going to implement a small game and use its requirements to drive the standard library implementation. I also played around with using Excalidraw to present the language's features in a concise way. It's not really a replacement for ordinary documentation, but having to use few words did help me distil the important points.

At work, I'm very happy to be back in embedded Linux land after four years of QNX. Nothing against QNX, but my CV needs recent experience with mainstream technology. I don't want to become an itinerant expert in various niche technologies, I want to be able to get assignments close to where I live, and normal tech stacks are way better for that.

In Slay the Spire 2, I'm beating my head against Ascension level 5 with all the characters. I'm getting tired of getting to the Act 3 boss and losing, I may need to learn to play more deliberately and invest some thinking into it.

So I picked up my copy-and-patch JIT project [0] (half-abandoned months ago) after learning about Rust's new experimental rust_preserve_none_cc, and I just built a brainf*ck runtime with it this week. This weekend I will probably try to build something that requires register allocation, and then add some more bits to the copy-and-patch tutorials in the same repo.

[0] https://github.com/gudzpoz/patchouly/

Preparing for my first trip to Japan (which starts this Sunday!). There is almost no plan. The bones of the trip are: a week in Kyoto (with a day trip to naoshima), two days in a ryokan in the mountains, a week in Tokyo.

If anyone has recommendations for obscure but cool things to see or do around Kyoto and Tokyo, I'd appreciate them!

As it is the easter weekend i will be watching my server a bit as i just released the second iteration of my little aoc-inspired coding challenge website (https://easters.dev), but so far it's quite quiet.

I'm configuring postfix+rspamd+dovecot. Everyone but one of my friends told me not to self-host my own mails, but I decided to do it anyway.

I've been setting up my own reproducible virtualized development system. I started a potentially commercial project that will touch the javascript ecosystem, so I wanted to use full virtualization to defend against supply chain attacks. As an added benefit, this will also allow me to run Claude Code dangerously.

So far I have created scripts that encode the following workflow:

1. Set up an SSH key just for the VMs
2. Build a custom Arch Linux ISO with the key
3. Install unattended a base system, set up just the way I like it
4. Seal the system by making the disk images read-only
5. Derive expendable per-project VMs from the base system image
6. Manage VM lifecycle with systemd user scope units
7. Provide an easy way to SSH into VMs by project name

I'm really hoping to finish developing it this weekend so I can start using it by next week.

Going deep into some personal exploration, hopefully hitting up the local farmer's market (assuming they've opened back up) for the first time since the fall, polycule dates (💜) and board games!

I seem to have some free time, so maybe I'll be able to get some planning done on fleeting the country.

The weather looks drizzly but warm, so maybe I'll find a clear time to go on Adventures with the dog as well.

Need to get a server setup for offsite backups and running other things, added a tacit deadline to it so I stand a chance of carving out time to make it happen.

Seeing family, possibly looking at a new (to me) car as well. Sunday morning brings the start of a local(ish) Cars n Coffee for the year, be interesting to see what turns up.

I thought implementing TCP might be a good learning experience to have over Easter holidays. Enjoying it a lot. Learning about Tun/Tap; reading the spec, and now implementing checksum verification of packets.

Took a break from it to clear my head and browse some lobsters. Read this article and now I'm just sad. I will miss programming dearly.

Attending IndieWebClub on Saturday and meeting some friends for lunch on Sunday. After 2 weeks of being cooped up with a flu these are welcome distractions!

I'm learning to write GTK applications with relm4. I jumped between ideas a lot but eventually I settled on something I've been wanting to make for a while: a PDF manager, reader and editor specifically targeted to musicians. Right now I'm mostly getting comfortable with GTK, glib, poppler and Relm4 and defining the data model. I'm not sure I'll settle on Poppler as the renderer but right now it's the easiest to integrate with GTK.

I have an MHF4U math exam tomorrow.