Coping with the death of a coworker and friend.

Digging further into my wife’s chronic illness.

Hoping the year ends quickly.

EDIT: Cat is okay.

Got some side gig with Santa solving all kinds of whack-o-doodle programming problems for his elves (advent of code)

For the first time in my life I seem to have a stable routine, and I’m really enjoying it. More than younger me who prized novelty and flexibility ever thought I would. To the extent that I’m paranoid about messing it up. So I guess I’m waking up at 7, walking a 3 mile loop, working out while listening to a podcast in the background, cooking lunch (which is at like 10am now?), working for ~3-4 hours at a coffeeshop, then lunch2/dinner and proceeding to work on personal stuff or just goof off with friends.

If the free time allows, finish a small program that should list all the people I follow on the “fediverse” that no longer are active or posting regularly. Just a simple way for keeping the list in check (and also to practice a bit a different programming language).

Other than that… rest and start preparing things for Christmas.

I would say pub drinking, but I’m already drunk.

Finishing out a week in Mexico, then travelling back to the UK Sunday/Monday. Nothing specifically planned and most of my colleagues have left already, so reading, enjoying the sun/sea and bars.

Also spending time being grateful for kind people in the world, and being saddened some of those are no longer with us. (Chris Seaton for one, Jim Weirich another.)

Reading compiler books and trying to create code-generator generator, to go with my lexer generator and parser generator.

Well my typechecker proof of concept for Garnet does all the basic stuff, it seems, so I suppose it’s time to start playing around with ML-style modules and see a) whether I can make them work at all, b) what they look like in practice for both trivial and non-trivial API’s, and c) whether I can make them not terrible.

Nothing At All but playing drums and spending some time with my lady.

Put my back out last week, so getting some enforced rest. Been using the opportunity to lightly hack again on my retro-computing projects. Been doing some Amiga OS4/3 coding, and this weekend I’m going to work on my retro BBS-like system for the 8-bit ZX Spectrum.

Due to some awesome work someone has done on JSSpeccy, it’s now possible to run an emulated Speccy, complete with Spectranet card auto-booting into my TNFS site in a web browser! Will be great fun opening up this odd little corner of the 8-bit world to the wider net.

Anyway, I’ve got the proxy required for the TNFS Protocol to run over wss:// , containerized it and chucked it in k8s with Traefik ingress on my prod cluster with FluxCD (I’m the weirdo who mashed up k8s and zx spectrums) , need to sort the web frontend out and will also have to jump into Spectrum BASIC again to port my message-board to my new Server API in Ruby.

In short, enjoying a fun “for the hell of it” project again!

Working on getting faster at solving ‘leetcode’ style problems, because every company and their uncle are using it in their interview process these days, and when they don’t they tell you “as part of this round you’ll be solving leetcode problems”.

This is mostly just about training myself to iterate FAST, maintain focus, and not get distracted by things like “Oh hey I should refactor this into a method” and the like because it’s all about wallclock turn-around time, at least in this particular discipline.

Plus as a self care project I’m learning how to play piano with Simply Piano and my $100 MIDI keyboard and I’m having a total blast with it! After a couple weeks of practice I can now play Ode to Joy, Jingle Bells, and a bunch of other semi-simplified songs from sheet music :) It’s a hoot.

Finally learning rust. Enjoying the experience so far - delivering a free, full, professional-quality book written by the language creators themselves was an A+ choice.

Doing my first-ever Advent of Code. I completed day 9 of 9 yesterday evening. Have to tackle day 10 and 11 this weekend. I’m writing all the programs in Python first, and then, if I have spare time, writing a Zig version, as well. I did the Zig version for about 5 days so far. I’m also tracking some of my progress via Mastodon here.

I’m writing a small library in Go (for personal use) and I’m working on validation. I was just thinking about how painful this would be to test (because of complicated structs and all the ways they can be invalid) when I came across a recent article about how to manipulate complex structs in table-driven tests more conveniently. So, I’ll be writing some tests in that style.

Seeing Alma.sh inspired me to see how long it would take me to create a prototype of a node-based code editor (similar to Natto) on top of my DIY UI Toolkit. It’s a fun use case as performance is important, and graph data is typically hard to work with – it will probably expose some of the edge cases in DIY UI as well.

Late finish to a learning hackathon with $WORK. The tools took time to get used to, but once it got going, got in the flow and I didn’t want to stop. So probably sleeping in, then spending time with family, mostly.

I probably should start looking for work since being laid-off on Tuesday. However I’m dumbfounded why I would ever work and even invest time into a company ever again at the level that I did and if software companies even appeal to me if I can’t be invested. Might be time to stfu and write my own.

Otherwise biking to a friends house for a board game. And heading to the library to transfer dvds and cds to digital format for archiving.

Building a murphy bed that costs too much in this economy.

I just arrived in Buenos Aires, so I plan to explore a little bit, maybe find a meetup

I got russ, the Rust feedreader, and LunarML, the Stardard ML to JavaScript/Lua compiler, in open merge requests for Nixpkgs awaiting review.

Apparently binge-watching a boatbuilder restoring an old wooden boat. And worrying about the cold weather at my parents’ house, where we’re going to visit for Christmas.