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 overthrown my government yesterday after 14 years of autocratic rule, so today I'm taking it super slow and catching up on sleep and rest.
It feels surreal waking up in a free and democratic country again, I'm going to savor the feeling for a little while until it becomes a new normal again.
Happy for you, neighbours, we did the same this April.
I'm going to savor the feeling for a little while until it becomes a new normal again.
The initial rush passes quickly, but if your new gov will be at least as competent as ours, the average mood will stabilize at a much higher level.
You guys were one of our main inspirations, thank you for showing us it's possible!
Trust me, the new government is more than eager to start getting things done, and there's still a lot to do, but we'll get there. I guess you have an idea of what the atmosphere is like right now over here, and it's spectacular.
On with the show.
For once, last night, reading the regional media sparked joy. Even the staunchest cynics among my friends couldn't hide a glimpse of optimism. Congrats, dear neighbours; we're rooting for you! Best of luck with what's ahead!
I don't know, I keep having these thoughts for what I initially expect to be small projects but then I think about the full complexity and become a bit overwhelmed so I preemptively give up. As I sat here staring at my screen I did have some new inspiration about how I should approach this problem though.
Quitting tech for a while. Last week of work this week and then Ill be traveling for an extended period of time.
Job hunt and hiring hall! Wish us luck.
Also, Halloween! We have a costume to put together from scratch so aaaaaa, it's gonna be a rush!
Finishing up new building a new test environment; changing how we arrange our Machine Catalogs to better support Machine Profiles in order to provide more reliability in the face of decreased capacity in Azure.
I am hearing back about a promotion this week. The hiring manager said they are "preparing a position for me" and that I'd hear about it this week. Sounds like a good sign, but the last 2 times there have been "good signs" about promotions at this job I have gotten completely fucked. Still, fingers crossed.
Just wrapped up a blog post. Next I don't know. Still kinda recovering from the flu I had last week.
Actually... not a whole lot. We've kinda sorted out all the big life things for the moment and are in a holding pattern until we can Do More Things next week. So, I'm mostly catching up on work, hacking on Garnet, and finishing a second playthrough of Metaphor: Refantazio.
I'm trying to figure out if LLM-assisted side-projects are something I could enjoy. I'm starting with a toy operating system. My intention is to understand every line of code, but let the LLM generate most of it (at least in the beginning). After each prompting round I take the time to refactor the generated code into something that makes sense to me, which forces me to develop a mental model, and sometimes involves tweaking things in the code by hand (I'm grateful that RustRover has excellent refactoring tools, as usual in Jetbrains IDEs).
At times it feels kind of pointless and motivation disappears, but today I flashed the tiny kernel onto a usb drive, booted my laptop from the usb stick, and reached the "shell" (which merely echoes back whatever you type in). It was great! Maybe this will be the driver to finally advance in Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Maybe I'll end up with a machine-specific OS that can only run on this laptop, drivers and all. We'll see.
FWIW as someone who uses AI quite a bit and read this book cover to cover, I’d avoid the temptation to use AI to write any of the code, and limit it to unsticking you from concepts you have tried thinking about for at least 30 mins. I’ve tried the approach you’re suggesting for personal projects and, at least for me, it simply doesn’t stick. Before AI I went through Writing an OS in Rust by Philipp Oppermann around the same time as reading the book and that was very helpful.
I have a NUCLEO STM32H753ZI arriving tonight, as well as an IMU. Starting a small project! The nucleo is exciting because it has on-board crypto features.
Idly trying to add driver support that I need for my laptop to smoothly run NetBSD.
...not that I hope I'll be successful, since I started with the Wi-Fi driver which is probably the hardest nut to crack 😅 Still fun though!
I am telling AI to rewrite code using AutoMapper (which is terrible because it circumvents the type system) to use manual conversions from wire objects to objects with enforced nullability rules (which you have to explicitly turn on in C#). We had hoped that we could outsource the initial development of this code base and save on costs, but now it seems like the code isn't very correct, in that was e.g. using AutoMapper to circumvent the type system.
So in my last week of work at this company, I thought I should do some clean up (like this) instead of making new features that I won't have time to validate in production.
Please hire me for your company! I can do everything.
I worked on 3 different C# projects, one used AutoMapper. Never liked it. Almost every simple service pulls in AutoMapper because "that's the way it's done".
Crunch, crunch, crunch, it's been like that for a while. I guess the upside is that right now I have the safest job in the world. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, or maybe it's a train.
I've been playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, picked up a save from last year. Some RPGs are just too big for their own good.
Oh, and I'm around 20 lines into implementing a SECD machine in C++. Maybe I'll manage to add a little to that.
Making some Android apps to help with therapy
Oh? Intrigued.
It will be mainly model-based reflections and 12-step programmes, the former is already done with its companion app, I'm just refining it and creating an Android app for my already-existing 12 step webapp which has done my health and sanity a lot of good so far
I made a writeup about some of the model-based tools here: https://blog.zm.is/understanding-motivation-with-somatic-incentives/
Shepherding various little optimizations around iteration in
This is a multi-week project, in the sense that the actual work is relatively straightforward but getting things cleaned up and following up on landing it always takes involves a lot of waiting for reviews and etc. That's OK though. Chasing little optimizations in tools you use can be pretty rewarding!
(This was prompted by my finally deciding to follow up an idea I had many years ago, although once I started actually getting into the code there were other things that came up that resulted in the above PRs, and it turns out V8 is already working a form of this (presumably independently) as described in e.g. this commit message.)
Working on my Vulkan renderer (see https://blog.ielliott.io/tags/graphics). Eventually I want it to be a portfolio piece for getting a job in/around computer graphics. But right now I'm still sorting out the basics.
I have Amazon Lumberyard Bistro rendering. The past couple of days I've been working on some performance fixes after enabling MSAA.