Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I’m going to use some weekend time to migrate every online service account I have that uses my GMail off it, so I can completely get rid of GMail. I’m trying to move off big tech platforms to the extent I realistically can, and since I’ve already used Fastmail as my primary email provider for several years, killing my Google account is a low-hanging fruit.
Less techy, I’m repotting one of my bonsai into a large training pot to let it grow a thicker trunk. The tree is a Fukien-tea I’ve tended for about a year; I have an idea for a nicer shape for it that I can carry out if I can thicken the trunk a bit. Since trunk thickness is determined almost entirely by the vascular activity demanded by the foliage, this usually means refraining from pruning one branch and letting it grow big no matter how ridiculous it looks, and then cutting it off before it reaches a size where the scar would become too unsightly. Mine has some good candidate branches where the scar can be hidden by foliage.
Last, I’ve managed to work up some motivation to resume an old hobby project of mine: A VM for a fictional “retro-ish” computer - basically my shot at answering “what if my Amiga had been a Lisp Machine” (or building an emulator for the computer I should have had in 1992). I might start that in the weekend; I’m currently pondering how the memory (GC and allocation) should work. I have a neat bitmap-based GC algorithm I made about 20 years ago that I might want to try to take out for one last spin.
I’ve come around to the realization that programming has always been one of the most fun activities in my life, and even if AI can (somewhat) program for me, it can’t have fun for me. This is an obvious “duh” thing that I’ve rationally known all along, but it’s only recently my hindbrain has been slowly coming around to understanding it too.
If anyone is going to FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend, I’ll be presenting at the Ada dev room Sunday morning.
I’m also trying to work on a playing card library (unrelated to the Ada presentation)
I wanted to assist your talk, but I’m giving mine in the javascript devroom at 9h00 and I dont think I’ll be able to get to the ada room in time haha.
This one? https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5056-get-started-with-ada-in-2-minutes-or-less-/ I’ll try to swing by :)
That’s the one!
As will I, although it’s >ouchie< early…
FOSDEM! My 13th physically. No talk and no organization this year, just watching talks and chilling with friends from all over the world.
https://fosdem.org/2025/ :)
FOSDEM!
Any other crustaceans attending are very welcome to come and say hi. My handle on Gmail, Hotmail, and $WORK are the same as on here.
I (re)started (for the 13th time) yet another new (though this one isn’t) coding project: a 2D game engine in C based on SDL, with a home made ECS, Lua scripting, Nuklear for the debug GUI, …
Last week, I started working on a small RPG in Game Maker using those CC0 assets : https://kevins-moms-house.itch.io/ Got the character movement and basic enemy AI (using Behavior Trees) done, so this weekend I’ll add a scripting system (aka: when $X happen, trigger $Y, like unlocking a door when all enemies are gone).
If I have time, I’ll also continue my VM project.
Maybe I love coding too much, which is why I keep starting new projects and never finish a single one.
My experience is that writing a game engine is a lot more fun than writing a game, ’cause when you write a game you have to deal with all the grotty ugly parts where there is no great solution, just empirical lists of Things That Feel Good To Humans.
That’s why I use Game Maker or Unity when I want to make actual games. Because if I make it in C/C++, I end up making a game engine instead.
Oooh, Game Maker! Never got around to learning that one but it looks fun. Cheering you on!
I actually started my programming journey at 9 years old (21 years ago, feels old) on Game Maker 5 (or 6?). Long before Opera and Yoyogames, when it was developed in Delphi by Mark Overmars, a university teacher.
GML (the scripting language) was a nice (very very) small subset of C (without pointers, structs, functions, …), but it evolved to become a very weird language (function / struct / scope semantics are unlike any other language). BUT the next LTS (coming this year) will have the new runtime (GMRT) with proper Javascript support (and C# is in the roadmap as well).
Game Maker has always been a nice engine for 2D games, and it’s IMHO a solid competitor to Unity and Godot in that field. With the future integration of C#, even more so.
Working through Iverson’s Elementary Functions, which builds math (until pre-Calculus?) with APL notation! I expect a cozy flânerie.
Bday celebration with fam, walk with friends, coax emacs to do my bidding
A couple weeks ago I said I was learning ebiten and ebitenui out of sheer stubbornness. Well, it went better than expected, and now I’m making my first serious attempt at a (non-HTML) GUI app since I was in school 20 years ago.
It’s not exactly the way to bang out an app really quickly, you have to do quite a bit of work yourself, but in a way it’s really enjoyable. I understand how things are getting on the screen, I have frame-by-frame control of rendering, and I’m able to scale and scroll a waterfall at 30fps on a Raspberry Pi without a hiccup, which makes me happy.
I feel like the HTML-isation of GUIs has really ruined the desktop experience for a lot of apps. I know people complain about this a lot, but you can see why it’s happened. Writing a desktop app which works across operating systems (and graphics cards, and window systems, and the rest) is a massive pain. It’s all well and good running it on a rpi but when you try and port it somewhere else you realise why people just opt for the low-friction, path of least resistance.
I know some effort has been made to shift this in the Rust space, but there’s really nothing mature enough yet.
Do you have a repo you can link for what you’re working on?
I do, and you’re welcome to take a gander at the code, but do note that A) I’m learning as I go so some of it is absolute crap, and B) you can’t actually do anything with it unless you have the hardware it talks to. You’ll only be able to see the radio selection menu, which I haven’t even tried to style in a non-ugly manner :)
Still learning Vulkan, and considering writing an article about what frustrates me in Rust and whether Zig has an answer to it.
As someone with a very small amount of experience in both Rust and Zig, I’d love to read that article!
I’ll share it probably on r/Zig and r/rust — I know self-posting is not well viewed here. If you’re reading those subs on Reddit, you should see it!
It’s fine as long as it’s not most of your community contributions, and not spammy content.
I’d say you’re fine for another post if you continue commenting like you have, but someone might think otherwise because of the green username. Either way it’s not instant ban worthy especially with Zig/Rust content ;)
Yeah that makes sense, but I guess I prefer other to post my things if they think it’s worth it. I find it more legit, in some way. :)
Learning how to write a BLE client for the ESP32 using the ESP IDF.
As with several others here, FOSDEM - but remotely, since I wasn’t able to travel there in person this time. Which for me means waking up at 4 AM local time to catch the talks I want to watch, haha.
Turns out I’m going to be out demonstrating for the constitutional order and against the rise of fascism.
So cool to see this many FOSDEM attendees. Haven’t been there since pandemic. Would love to start going again. Maybe next year.
Have fun folks.
Catching up on school work. I’m behind on the VHDL course. It’s not even all that difficult I’ve just had trouble with executive function.
Wonder why schools teach VHDL instead of Verilog? Or you can choose either to implement your project?
Because I’m in Europe. VHDL is way more common here.
That’s funny, I always heard it was the other way around!
Since VHDL is used so much in U.S. government/defense work, many universities prefer to teach VHDL here in the U.S so that students can more easily get those jobs. I was under the impression that (System)Verilog was more widely taught elsewhere, where this “university to defense contracting” pipeline wasn’t as much of an influence.
FWIW the three European universities I’m familiar with through open source silicon (Cambridge, ETHZ, and Bologna) mostly use (System)Verliog, but I don’t know what they teach students.
(System)Verilog seems to be the most common choice for open source silicon. NEORV32 is the only open source core I have in my little list that’s written in VHDL; the others are all Verilog, SystemVerilog, and Chisel.
All the big industrial companies here use VHDL, as far as I can tell.
I’m heading home from a work trip and planning out an AI project for work that’ll use many of the subtle features of Tigris. I’ll stream writing it. Should be fun!
Upgrading to a larger room in xir apartment, continuing xir personal finance clean-up (including exploration of an open source financial management tool), and stopping there! Saving some time on the weekend to recover from all that work.
Progressing on my final year projects. Proving semantic preservation of rewrites in Rocq for the Capla language. Specifically, loop tiling is my end goal. I think I’ve realized I might have to assume some loop independence property that I cannot prove yet.
Prepping for a big house cleanup/renovation, ideally.
Snowboarding! My happy place. ~10 minutes left in my last meeting of the week, then I’ll be heading out there. Tahoe’s finally getting snow for basically the first time this season <3
Snowboarding as well, but on the other coast.
Being outdoors, in museums and with friends.
Worked way too many hours this week, so the only reasonable solution is to hang with loved ones and friends.
Recording synthesizers maybe? my partner recently got a soma terra, and we’ve yet to record anything with it yet, it sounds absolutely wild.
I’m also going through bob nystrom’s “crafting interpreters” textbook, and am about half way through implementing the tree walking interpreter in rust, which has been fun.
Finishing a note on untested.sonnet.io (no strong schedule this time, just writing for fun), then adding one small UI fix to the site. Done, in this exact order so I don’t get distracted by code.
Then messing about in the kitchen, I learned that Portuguese grelos is the same as the Neapolitan friarielli and there’s a guy on my street seeking literal heaps of it.
Playing Disco Elysium while the food is getting ready. Becoming a magnesium based life form.
Recently started Disco Elysium, fantastic game. Surprised by the lack of disco.
More praline experiments:)
Trying to build a web site