What are you doing this week?

I've had a lot of little things piling up at work, so once I was well enough to go back to work I started on that pile precisely to give myself the satisfaction of actually seeing some things finish.

I don't have many trinket itches at home - at least not programming ones. When I was reorganizing my book collection after putting up a new bookcase (also DIY-made by my cousin's husband and myself - though he did all the actually difficult work, I just did some little grunt tasks), I realized that it'd be really fun to learn traditional bookbinding and give a re-skin to some of my particularly valued paperbacks. Also I've been tinkering with modding my trackball.

I think, after reflecting on it a bit, that what is probably most right for me is to take on a large (but possibly dubiously useful) project that can be decomposed reasonably neatly to a number of smaller tasks.

Once I regain the ability to feel at least a bit of excitement, that is probably what I will do.

I've done it before too, but this time I put in the extra effort of also destroying all the backups (at least the ones I could remember).

I really fell into a deep, dark hole.

(footnote, just in case: I am not trying to solicit free therapy from internet strangers. I pay an actual therapist for that.)

You can SSH into the device and install a package manager to install third party programs. This guide mentions that system updates will wipe the system partition and leave the data partition (mounted to /home) untouched, but after an upgrade you should only have to run a command to reenable the package manager.

I saw a guide about compiling and testing software for the reMarkable that mentioned you have to SSH into the tablet, stop the system UI (which seems to be a systemd unit) run your program, and when it's done restart the UI. I would imagine that there's a launcher program that lets you do this without SSH after you're done testing, but I haven't looked that far yet.

I don’t know where you are with learning tree sitter, but I’ve been trying to learn it on the side and recently enjoyed the post Let’s create a tree sitter grammar that gets into the messy and useful parts pretty quickly and explains them well.

I'm switching the doc values format of the search indexing library I'm working on from using sorted arrays of ints (like lucene does) to using sparse bit vectors, and doing some linear algebra tricks to choose token ids that maximize the average lengths of runs of zeros (so minimizing the number of runs, thereby minimizing the encoded size). To summarize, maximizing run lengths is maximizing correlation between neighboring bits, which you can do by generating the token-token co-occurrence matrix of a representative sample of data, multiplying by the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue, and sorting by the result.

Monday has been a day off here, so I used my long weekend to get outside and admire some autumn foliage.

Work has been hectic until last week between onboarding a new hire in my team and giving a talk at a local meetup, so I'm looking forward to getting back into a more relaxed shipping rhythm. After a lot of diversion, I'm hoping to get back to developer tooling, my original role.

Continued work on my multilingual python, using vibe coding, renamed it to 'Beyond Babel' and reading 'The search for the perfect language' by Umberto Eco, first published in Italian in 1993, that is a very interesting book, where I learned that Umberto Eco wanted to call his book 'Beyond Babel', but that title was already used by an earlier book from the same century. I plan to read more about the series that book came from, that draws a picture about what was and is Europe in the 1990s.

Work is in the home stretch of the busiest part of the year. Also assisting in keeping teammates' projects on track, or accounting for them not being on track, despite the swiss cheese of availability due to Nov & Dec vacations (itself a yearly phenomenon) .

Outside of work, I've been fixing up some years-old outdoor furniture and fixtures I made from wood. Only thing left is to re-paint, which I'll do gradually over the week when it isn't raining.

I moved my personal website from GitHub pages to self hosting on Saturday, so I'm planning to focus on smoothing the edges of remotely updating the website now that everything is in house. Also, getting ready for advent of code with some Euler project.

Wrestling huggingface datasets (the library) to do some large-ish scale inference.

Mostly wrestling my assumptions about it of course.

Working on a personal blog in Typst. I have the styling done-ish. Now I'm left with hosting it somewhere (most likely grebedoc.dev), and then writing the first blog post about the whole experience.

$WORK: investigate about a weird issue causing the frontend to break when proxied

also, thinking about integrating a preliminary audio player in Feeder app, and otw learn some basic kotlin/android

My guess is family stuff will tank productivity most of the week. I think a good context-switchy thing for me to do on those days is chipping away at finding methods that should be private but are public in a huge project of mine and make them private. I might also chip away at adding tutorials/code-examples to a website for a coding project. This feels like good context-switchy work. Next week I can return to stuff that requires me to stay deep for long blocks of time.

A week’s vacation which I desperately need, fixing the dishwasher, and continuing on my novel. Just passed 165k words and the end is in sight.

Looking at parsing C headers with a funny vendor dialect to generate headers in a different dialect of C for FFI. Trying to find a C parser that works well for this is pretty annoying though, especially with the vendor dialect problem.

I'm part of a small maker community (https://themakery.cc) and I wrote a small script to take all the links that we post on Discord, curate them, put them in a nice newsletter format, and send it out to whoever is interested. I've really enjoyed working on this for a few hours, and it looks great too.

Trying to figure out (again) how to reliably implement contextual bandits in production with or without Vowpal Wabbit.

$work: Landed a change I’ve been working on sporadically for the past few months last week, so very relieved that it’s finally done.

~$work: Eating pie &c, and thinking about what language I want to do Advent of Code in. I’m thinking (in terms of new languages) either Ruby, OCaml, or Haskell, or (old reliable) Rust. But using a language I already know is boring, so I don’t want to fall back on it. I’ll probably end up doing so, alas.