What are you doing this week?
9 points by caius
9 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 heading to Halifax today to give a talk about globally distributed architecture at DevOpsDays Halifax! It should be fun and it’ll be the first time my husband has seen me speak at one of these things.
Good luck! For some reason, my wife seeing me speak at a small conference sparked more pre-talk nerves than speaking in front of an audience 10x the size.
It’s the first week of the semester! I’m teaching PLs and artificial intelligence this semester, both of which are pretty interesting in 2025 imo, but also both hard to teach in a single undergrad intro class with few prerequisites. So I’ve been thinking about that mostly.
Preparing my presentation for Nixcon 2025 which is in a week and a half! I’m used to presenting with an “infodump”-style, cramming as much information as possible in the slides, but given it’s a 25 minute slot I’m trying to make this a bit lighter.
maybe replacing my current site with a new system. We’re almost there. It’ll hopefully be a bit more flexible and allow for more frequent posts, and such. The goal is to make it easier to publish some other back log items and get another in progress project announced and out the door. Exciting times in my free time right now.
Same thing I seem to be doing all the time these days: Be depressed about AI, be very, very tired of having to listen to people telling me how excited they are about soon replacing me with AI. Worrying a lot about how the hell I will manage to eke out a living after I become superfluous, and being depressed that everything that brought me joy and meaning is being automated away.
Taking another break. I took a break the week of the 11th to do some tourism, this week my GF is coming to join me in our second residence and I have taken the week off work.
I am being increasingly annoyed at my email situation, so my brain is bustling with no longer storing my email at GMail and using Migadu, Purelyemail or something like that. And maybe… read my email with mu4e/Emacs? (Also looking for a good Android mail client, if anyone has extraordinary suggestions.)
I haven’t had an android daily driver for a while, so I can’t say I have an extraordinary suggestion. A few years ago, Thunderbird adopted the K-9 mail project, which I always liked. I hear from people that I think tend to have good taste about this kind of thing that the recent Thunderbird builds for android (built on that K-9 base) are starting to get good, so that might be worth trying if you’re looking.
In case you’re collecting data for your mail hosting search: I have only nice things to say about Migadu. Several years back, I registered a new domain for my family, and committed to only sharing that primary address with real people who wanted to send me personal messages. Not services, not businesses (even ones I like), etc. I’ve still got that domain on a grandfathered Google Workspace Free setup, and I haven’t quite pulled the trigger on moving it. But as a consequence of that decision, I’ve set up a few domains that I use for email that’s not actual personal messages. And I’ve been using migadu’s micro plan for those. They’ve been great. And their webmail is actually pretty nice to use. If I needed it, I’d cheerfully move to their mini plan without much thought.
I also use Zoho’s Mail Lite plan for a business. It’s fine. It’s very inexpensive and works reasonably well. I can’t remember an outage in the past 6 years.
+1 for Thunderbird!K9. I use it daily and it gives me no trouble. But then, I don’t really get that much email.
On Migadu’s Pro/Cons page, they say that “Messages might go to Junk”. That’s obviously the case for any email service - no-one can guarantee that a recipient’s spam filter won’t catch your messages - but then why do they list it as a possible “con”? Are their emails less likely to be delivered than, say, smtp2go?
If not, then Migadu looks like exactly what I have been looking for! I gave up hosting my own email a few years ago but it is getting expensive: everyone else charges per mailbox and I’ve got seven family members who each need their own email address now. I thought I’d have to go back to running my own mail server again, which is a hassle I don’t really want, but perhaps Migadu is the solution. I’m a little worried that they might be less reliable senders though, which is what made me give up hosting my own mail in the first place.
I haven’t noted any real deliverability problems from them, but my outbound volume is quite low.
I would characterize listing that as a possible “con” as more consistent with their typical extreme candor than a sign of real likelihood that they’re more likely to bounce than someone like smtp2go or zoho. They are, naturally, more likely to be rejected than google/microsoft/yahoo, but that’s true of everyone who’s not google/microsoft/yahoo.
Thanks, that’s helpful.
I gave up hosting my own email because it just became impossible to reliably deliver mail to some servers, usually corporate ones. I did it for around 20 years before I gave up so I understand email fairly well - I used an established domain name, my server’s IP address wasn’t on any blacklists that I know of, rDNS, SPF and DKIM were all configured correctly, etc. - but some servers would just silently blackhole my emails: no error messages, an apparently successful SMTP delivery, but nothing would reach the user’s mailbox.
I switched to Google Workspace on the grounds that no-one would silently delete email from Google. It has been fine in most respects but it is incredibly expensive now. Fastmail and Proton are no cheaper: everyone charges per mailbox. Fastmail and Proton have “family” plans but they are capped at six people.
I was going to go back to hosting my own mail but relay outgoing mail via smtp2go, in the hope that they would be able to deliver more reliably than I could.
If Migadu is as reliable, then I will be very happy!
I use FairEmail on Android.
It’s open source and I even paid for a license key for the features I wanted, which I could have just hacked in because it’s all open source, but I didn’t. I like the client.
If I read a hundred emails in a go in the client, then the last two emails loop, but otherwise it has been a wonderful bug-free experience.
Continue setting up my beefy server, finish setting up all the application and databases stuff for Katarineko in there to replace my current linux-based server. (I want to play with zfs to create postgres branches for staging).
Continue reading Introduction to Reliable and Secure distributed programming in preparation for my new job at Posthog.
$WORK = building out a new complex component for our component library that I need
$HOME = 2 large organization projects are mid swing for me and my wife. Other than that, wrangling children and prepping for the first ever playtest of my TTRPG system! Excited and worried.
Still disconnecting (mostly) in the highlands of Scotland. Been a wonderful trip so far and hope it continues like this.
After failing to solve a problem in a CTF last week, I’m trying to level up on reverse engineering binaries. My gdb skills have atrophied and I’m looking at https://pwndbg.re/pwndbg/latest/ as a super-gdb and so far it looks pretty good. Binary Ninja was helpful for analysis (kinda stumbled on a few things) and Ghidra looks good too.
These tools are super powerful, but it’ll take me some time to figure them out.
Remembering to check my todo list during the day. 😬
Taking a couple of half days from work, just so I have some time away to decompress. Might do some things, might do nothing. Not sure yet.
I’m working on a simple(ish) SoA vector type for Nova JavaScript engine’s usage: the important parts would be having a memory footprint of 16 bytes (pointer + 2x u32), and being Rust trait based as opposed to relying on macro-magics. To make this work I need the implementor to tell me what fields their struct decomposes into as a tuple, and an internal trait would then do the rest.
Except that I’m having a bit of a hard time combining this approach with lifetime safety for borrowing values or slices out of the SoAVec. My initial intention was simply to have “tuple of references” kind of types derived based on the tuple decompositions, but that runs into an issue because the tuple can itself contain values with lifetimes and the reference lifetime must then not outlive the contents: this makes it at least hard to write the lifetime requirements and would most likely leak them out of the trait API and into the SoAVec API. So, I’ll either have to find an interesting trick or add in some static bounds on the contents which would be a bit sad.
Aside from that, I am feeling a little discouraged or even down from a self-evaluation where I got the feeling that I’ve perhaps not really done any really interesting work in my life.
Oh, and I’m also welcoming a bunch of students into the Nova project to do a coursework in it! That’s exciting! And I should push forward my Rust Reborrow trait language experiment.