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.
Just tryin to keep going. very hard period in my life at the moment
Claws crossed. Empathizing as someone who's just been through such a period (and is still far from the end of it).
Going to CodeBEAM Europe! Incredibly hyped for the Gleam talks, but almost every talk looks like a banger. I've only learned about people using BEAM from online stuff and $work(we're an Elixir shop) and so it'll be nice to see what other people are experiencing. Also my very first conference!
Besides that hopefully play some more Ace Attorney.
Playing with Zig! I'm implementing the mine sweeper game from scratch to get a better feeling of the language. Will probably write a blog post based on the experience.
I hope you share your experience at some point. I've lurked around the edges of zig for a while, did a couple of tutorials 2 or so years ago, and keep wanting to find a good reason to play with this. I'm spinning up some work on Nordic's NRF5191 at the moment and diving into Zephyr again after a 2+ week hiatus. I wish I could try me some Zig in this space, but when I spoke about Rust/Zephyr in this space with the Nordic Rep, he said he's seen almost no activity. So good old (macro heavy) C for now I guess.
Finalizing the release of the C plugin API for MapLibre Native. The screenshots in the newsletter give a good idea what it can do. https://maplibre.org/news/2026-10-01-maplibre-newsletter-september-2026
Pretty happy with this plugin API, because it will allow people to vibe code extensions while it keeps the base library somewhat stable. Not everything can be done as a plugin, however. For example, we have an open PR that adds 'globe mode'. https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-native/pull/4533
This will eventually need to land in main. But I am thinking of creating a 'next' branch where new (LLM driven) contributions can marinate a bit before they make it into the mainline. We have some pretty serious users so we cannot affort vibe coding our way to instability.
I follow, with no small amusement, a curious play as it unfolds in Aragoste, a fictitious modest town of medieval Italy, where the Mayor, the Clerk, and the Captain of the Guard (whose mighty army numbers scarce fifty souls, each more soldier in name than deed) labour most earnestly to keep the peace between two quarrelsome houses, eager to draw swords over a matter so trifling that even the court fool might blush to speak of it.
And thus the tragedy unfolds, though with less romance and more folly! Lets see how it goes...
Gearing up to start a new hiring plan. Trying to figure out what approach to do for technical assessment, since this is the first time I'm going to have to evaluate candidates since LLMs got good at writing code. I'm not anticipating it to be a huge problem, but will require some effort and tweaking as I try out a few ideas. Overall, very excited to start interviewing candidates again, though; love the process of building a team out.
Aside from that, taking my first 2 days off since starting my job in April (which I started with 0 days between jobs); spending all that time with my family.
I recently gave notice at work without another job lined up and need a project to fill my work days. My mental "motivation -> work -> reward" loop is completely shot, so it needs to be something that regularly feels rewarding in order to build that back. It's been a while since I felt interested in tech.
Maybe I'll finally learn OpenGL or Vulkan. Might also dig up my mdbook clone for the Djot markup language which gives me joy. Otherwise, doing some art and exercise away from the computer should help my brain.
SDL3's GPU API is tons of fun, it's very much "vulkan but with most of the obvious decisions made for you".
As someone who worked around with OpenGL 20 years ago... why not WebGPU? When I've toyed with playing in that space again, I figured WebGPU would make the most sense. But I'm totally naive here. Honestly curious.
Some of the most fun tinkering code I've done has been with OpenGL in Common Lisp. I don't know if Lisp is your thing, but being able to reload a drawing function and see the change just happen immediately was just magically fun.
"Catching up on sleep". Ha ha. Probably not going to happen. Not til you're empty nesters. And then, you're tired for new reasons. 56 year old father of 4. Just enjoy the sleepy journey. :D
Converting Hackage (Haskell package db) to use narrower queries that could be implemented in SQL: https://github.com/haskell/hackage-server/pull/1532
I have this sticker printer that I use to print out labels for my kid's food every day. It's kind of a hassle because it need to print KIDSNAME_DATE_DRINK/BREAKFAST/SNACK/LUNCH every night, using an app on my phone, during family time, when I'm actively trying to avoid use of my phone.
The printer speaks bluetooth and I found a library for communicating with the printer. I proved out I could use the library to call the printer from my laptop, so now i'd like to automate the printing.
If I can get that working, I'd love to export the program to a one-button machine that does the printing so I don't have to get out my laptop. Like one of those old amazon buttons that got repurposed for this and that.
Making a logo for our teahouse so we can work on other branding-related things while we talk with some interior designers. I moved somewhere nice, small when remote work was feasible & programmers had leverage & demand, but now I’d rather do this with less opportunity at big money than have to move back to the US. This was supposed to be my early retirement thing to do, but I guess I need to gear up to make it more aggressive as a way to make some income.
Been playing with Factor again recently with the 0.102 release & it’s really fun to program again while learning/debugging. It keeps me excited even when the prospect of programming seems pretty dead financially (since that inevitably needs to be the primary marker we have to care about in this economy).
For school, try to finally feel caught up after missing a few days for a wedding last week.
For home, prepare the house for guests for an escape room party, watch the new Avatar, and keep playing through Dimhaven.
I've been on and off hacking around the firmware of a Casio XJ-F100W projector to try and get the latency down from 2 frames -> 1 frame, and also try to get some gaming specific features added in. The end goal is to make it a good MiSTer display to accept arbitrary refresh rates without duplicating / dropping frames.
The Casio XJ series are surprisingly good laser / LED hybrid DLP projectors you can get cheap second hand.
I'm trying to design a custom shelf to fit underneath the weirdly angled roof in the attic. For this I'm learning some FreeCAD.
I've already had 2 attempts at getting started with FreeCAD in my life that ended in frustration but I think this time I'm slowly getting the hang of it. The software itself has also improved I think, it used to outright crash on me but today it's stable. The learning curve is still quite steep though.
At work: Porting infrastructure stuff to DSCv3 assuming I can get some space between code reviews and meetings.
At home: IDK, taking it easy, probably. Feeling a bit of burnout. Might scan some film or play around with my cricut.
More job applications! Also hoping to draft an application for an artists residency. Warehouse job applications in the meantime, though even BJ's turned us down for a couple positions.
Outside of that: Reading a play for book club, attending another hiring hall (claws crossed), and scrounge up what side gigs or other income we can in the meantime. Offers of or referrals to contract work would be a huge help.
Curious. Are you a long time BSD guy? Or just jumping in? I've always been in the "maybe someday I should dabble with one of the BSDs, but Linux is great/good enough", so, later.
Linux is complicated now days, Linus is doubling down on vibecoding (no shame, substitute whatever non perjorative term is appropriate), and I just want simpler things. So I'm particularly keen on what the jump in/to BSD looks like for people now days.
No, I've been using linux since 1998, but never really had a go at BSD before. I also read it's like the old linux (simple, readable and predictable), just like you're saying, and I've been meaning to try it but never got around before.
Many things planned, let's see how many I can actually act upon!
It’s a while now I’ve been trying to write an application for my friends and me, probably I will keep going and limiting AI usage just to keep in shape and then music, writing playing and mixing!
Rewriting the VM for Ekto---my little, typed, embeddable language that's a mixture of Koka, Lua, and Erlang.
One key thesis of Ekto is that algebraic effects are a good type formalism for talking about host-client interop in embedded scripting languages. I'm taking huge inspiration from Koka here and had been steadfastly committed to supporting multishot resumptions.
These are cool, they let you directly encode things like backtracking parsers or probabilistic programming as an effect. They're also very uncool because they make resource management a total headache. A resumption captures "the rest of the program" up until where the effect is handled and, more or less, that entire thing needs to be, in Rust terms, Clone at least.
There are ways around this, but they're all pretty unsatisfying. After chatting with some folks at Systems Distributed a few months ago I'd finally convinced myself to try just dropping multishot and using an effect system closer to OCaml 5: it's a runtime error to use a continuation twice.
That's really unsatisfying in it's own way. I feel like I'm still mourning this a bit. At the same time, single shot resumptions using a segmented stack are pretty nice and benefit a ton from an interpreted bytecode VM. I'm coming around to it being the right tradeoff. But, again, mourning a bit.
Running the fourth instance of Ottawa Systems with my co-organizers.
This one has been a little more stressful due to last minute venue and speaker things, but I am hoping for a good result. Doing computers but offline seems healthy.
Work: project planning! We are finally doing a big version 3 of a business critical service that we have been itching to do for years now.
Personal: Working on sound fx and music for a game I signed on to. Also hopefully finish the slides to my talk about magement/leadership on technical teams for the local developer meetup in my city.