I start my job this week. My first real adult job. So mostly bootcamp stuff at work. And I’ll be working more on my parser tutorial.

I’ve been working on a regex compiler that produces a java class file that matches just that regex: https://github.com/hyperpape/BytecodeStringMatching. I have the skeleton done, so I’ll be trying to

1. write a nice API
2. extend the syntax it supports
3. start performance testing it
4. add some optimizations

Preparing my first patches for rustc.

Also working on an Icelandic dictionary web app/service, combining the data sets of ISLEX and BÍN with a nice, fast UI. ISLEX is a dictionary with example sentences in several nordic languages, and BÍN has inflection tables.

Neither of them are very good with misspelled/transliterated words, so I’m working on fuzzy matching so that Thjodskra matches Þjóðskrá, and so on. Having it all in one, easier to use tool will be nice, I think.

Current status: https://media.giphy.com/media/dF7d5Fn8Cbt9m/giphy.gif

Heading to Poland 🇵🇱 for a week’s holiday/exploration. Not taking a laptop, super looking forward to it. Starting out in Warsaw this time, then after a couple of days hiring a car and driving down to Krakow for a long weekend. Not been to Warsaw before, so that’s super exciting to explore. Looking forward to seeing other places on the way down the country too, and then it’ll be my second visit to Krakow so get to explore it a bit more.

Making as much chocolate as I can in prep for strangeloop.

Started learning Chinese (characters/pinyin) again. It only took the better part of a decade to realize that I should just learn a helluvalot of vocabulary. I’ll also be reading through The Rust Programming Language and diddling on Yousician for piano, which has been pretty great.

Regarding learning languages - has anyone had success with learning vocabulary for multiple languages at once?

I’m continuing work on NewBusinessMonitor.

I didn’t manage to roll out the letter-sending feature. Basically my users want to click on companies they want to advertise to, and for NewBusinessMonitor to automatically print, envelope, and send their sales letters to those companies. I’m still working on this, and hopefully it’ll be ready for everyone this week.

Tech: Haskell, Elm, PostgreSQL, Redis, NixOps/AWS.

I recently deployed Drone as my self-hosted CI solution, so I’m working on a blog post about how I arrived there, and also on a few plugins for it, to automate/simplify some of the things I need it to do.

I am continuing work on my personal website. I have most of the security stuff done (still a couple more to go). It is meant to serve as a replacement for all the social media I have left behind as kind of a public profile, but also to serve as a portfolio of my work. Next up: project pages! I’ll be able to have some information about many of my personal projects without people needing to leave my domain.

I also started a small organization aiming for easing accessibility in open-source software, the PDF Accessibility Initiative. Still very early days (exploring what’s available—spoiler: not much), but any and all help is welcome! The goals are to, eventually, be able to test a PDF for accessibility standards compliance, possibly provide libraries that help document authoring software (e.g., LaTeX) to generate accessible documents, and to provide a tool that will allow taking a non-accessible PDF and correct it; all from open-source/libre software.

There are several other personal projects that are finally getting close to getting back on my radar. Namely, my pastebin (which my personal website is serving as a staging ground for).

I working on Newscafe (news.sub.cafe). It includes links from the front page of Lobsters too. I will try to improve quality of news this week. Ideas about how to achieve that are welcomed.

More or less the same things as last week still: paper/code-reading for some kind of ML-related research project with GANs, fiddling with my software environment, and preparing some courses. Looking for suggestions for programming-languages textbooks or course materials if anyone has opinions about things that work particularly well (or badly). I won’t copy/paste the course’s requirements/constraints here, but see the last bullet point of the link above.

Besides that, people seem to have bought into my preference to reorganize our weekly research-group meetings at work into a monthly group meeting, with research seminars covering one specific topic/project in the in-between weeks. So I’m putting that together. We’ve grown to about 12 people in the group and so learning about what everyone is doing by just briefly weekly updates doesn’t really scale. It also provides a more official place for visitors to give us some kind of intro to what they do, which was previously mainly through chatting over lunch (not always a bad way of doing it, but sometimes something more organized with a proejctor is useful).

Still working on the compression library (go) for the custom Kubernetes sidecar, been struggling with a nasty bug related to how messages are read. Finally managed to make the debugger works (for some reason the binary built with the default go wrapper for zstd had all debug symbols missing).

After that is done, I will start working on an also interesting proxy for downsampling InfluxDB metrics (for long-term storage). Hopefully, I will be able to write a small POC this week.

I picked up kernel development again. I scrapped most of the code I had from the kernel and replaced it with some cleaner code. (Thanks to https://os.phil-opp.com/) Target this time is to include WebAssembly support, there is nebulet but I want a bit more…

I am implementing a basic event store on top of Postgres with some kind of log per table partitioning scheme. Ideally, it would leverage the Timescale postgres extension, but cloud providers don’t yet support the extension natively, so I won’t get that optimization yet. This also includes a gRPC frontend and a client API will be designed/optimized for simplifying building read models. Only a couple days in progress and does not handle pushed changes yet.

There are like a million ways to implement these stores (and I believe I evaluated most of the OSS solutions out there), but I wanted to try out something simple and learn what I need to optimize for.

• For $COMPANY
  • I just released Mallard (https://lobste.rs/s/8j91ok/mallard_mysql_migration_tool)
  • Continuing to work on a much more powerful query builder for Bamboo v6
• For $CLIENT1
  • Still working on the move to Bamboo models.
  • Putting the final touches on a tool to sync db data between environments (with data munging for e.g. user information)
  • Trying to upgrade Sendy.. maybe the new version supports + in addresses?
• For $CLIENT2
  • Either nothing, or continuing to track a bug with connections being held open by mydumper
• For $HOME
  • The crazy octopus ceiling light fixture arrived so probably some wiring for that, and ideally some of the hidden cove lighting at the same time too.
  • Possibly digging a long damn trench for a storm water drainage pipe.

At work I’m still doing bug triage.

Outside of work I’m working on some auxiliary projects related to my ISBN scanner book database project.

I gave up (for now) on writing my own barcode scanner and created a Common Lisp wrapper for ZBar. I had to make a few changes to CommonCV (the CL bindings to OpenCV), but I’m now able to scan barcodes from OpenCV images. Scanning from high quality PNG images works great, but I’m having problems with focus, lighting, and resolution when I try scanning from a webcam. I may have to figure something out with gphoto2 and a real camera, but we’ll see.

I’ve submitted a pull request for my CommonCV changes, and later this week I’m going to remove the CommonCV dependency from the ZBar wrapper, clean up the code a little bit, add a couple of unit tests, and get it added to QuickLisp.

I finished 44CON last week but we’re extending our CTF for another week. It’s a blockchain heist ARG based on a soldering token we built. Sign up at the CTF if you want to join in, and start here. There’s still about $6k in crypto left to win, although that figure might be different by the end of the week ;)

I wrote up an introduction to custom elements for Elm developers, and I’m experimenting with a tool that would help with UI development in Elm.

This week I forked Lobste.rs and am having the time of my life playing with it.

While I understand this only becomes useful past a certain activity critical mass, it’s mind-blowing (to me, as an amateur dev) how advanced the codebase is and how many fine-tuning options it offers. Example:

# let a hot story linger for this many seconds

HOTNESS_WINDOW = 60 * 60 * 22

Im working on:

• isso-php my port of isso from Python to PHP so I can extend and use it on my blog
• Draughts a port of draughts.js from JavaScript to PHP so I can write a federated draughts server for mastodon.
• Tapestry my static site generator, if I find time I will be working on version two which brings intelligent content compilation via the generation of a content dependency graph.

wrote some nim code, really enjoyed it, and the performance matched C code. Just need to finish it off then get back to more err != nil go code.

I’m still continuing to learn Vue.js at home and so far it’s going great. Never learned a JS framework so I thought it would be more difficult but so far, everything is really fun. I can’t wait to dive more in this and finally get some real work done on my game project (https://github.com/banane-io/PDB).

I need to write the tests for my back-end services and not sure which “style” I’ll do since I’ve not written test with Spring boot yet. Don’t know if I’ll do unit tests or try to go with more integrated tests right away.

Reworking one of my websites to be static, and trying to make my blog sites coder nicer, even if it doesn’t matter for performance or anything, mostly just learning

https://github.com/techieAgnostic/rf

https://github.com/techieAgnostic/protocol-seven

On my personal time, I’m working on shipping a personal website to gather several blog posts I’ve scattered around in Medium recently.

I want to discover some static website generator as I’ve never used one before, trying to avoid Wordpress like the plague.

I’m also planning to deploy it through a docker-based method I’ve standardized around recently, that gives me auto-ssl and configures nginx proxy automatically.

I am going to release a big internal change to the Merit web wallet and Desktop Wallet this week that should improve transaction and transaction history performance by a lot. We are moving a lot of processing client-side vs going through our server. I’m helping get this release out the door.

Most of my other work will be engaging with the community on Discord and Telegram. We also have a bitcointalk annoucement that participate daily in.

Thinking about how to do imports in Pikelet! I recently merged support for universe ‘shifting’ in Pikelet too, but I’m still not happy with my documentation on it. My technical writing still needs some practice before it meets my own expectations…

I’m learning how to be a “developer evangelist”/developer outreach person. It’s a role we’ve been looking to fill at Wallaroo Labs and never did, so I’m transitioning over into the role. The fun part about being at a startup is doing things that are scary and new to you because, it needs to get done and you are the best person to do it.

In search of the great Optimized Search, I’m looking again at implementing ElasticSearch. It’s what errbody does, it seems. I just don’t like moving parts.

For Work:

• Designing and testing Identity Management Reporting Functionality using Microsoft Identity Manager and System Center Service Manager Data Warehousing (phew!).
• Writing a Web Portal so users can update their own details in the Active Directory

For Personal:

• Building a Raspberry Pi Infrared Red relay box so I can control my PS4 with a normal IR remote (Netflix via a PS4 controller sucks). Also plan to add commands to control Hue lights etc.
• Fixing my sunset-to-midnight Huescript for my outside Hue lights as it’s stopped working.
• Doing some more coding on my personal website backend - http://www.Jaruzel.com