1. 11

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!

  1. 6

    Playing my second chess game in the Swiss Team Championship, which are my first officially rated games ever. The first one was a success, I hope to keep it up!

    Edit: Here’s the first one, if you are interested.

    1. 2

      Continuing to pick at https://lobste.rs/s/tcqonu/what_are_you_doing_this_week#c_qsb6s2. I didn’t make much word-count headway during the week, but I have been mulling it a lot.

      I have started a post that is roughly on the naming problem at the intersection of DRY/abstracting, which I’m hoping will prove to be my way into the knot :)

      1. 2

        I am going to try to move my game projects C code into C++ as a learning opportunity. I will try to use minimal amount of C++ and go for “C with classes” approach at first, then iterate on that.

        I will also be streaming the thing to my friends heh. Will be interesting!

        1. 3

          I will try to use minimal amount of C++ and go for “C with classes” approach at first, then iterate on that.

          I would really strongly advise against doing this. I’ve seen projects do this and they usually end up with the worst of both worlds. I’ve written code like this when I started learning C++ and it was unmaintainable, buggy, garbage - much worse than the C version, which was far worse than a modern C++ equivalent.

          If you’re moving a C codebase to C++, I’d suggest that you focus on a few things:

          • Move memory management to smart pointers.
          • Move other resource ownership to RAII.
          • Use templated collection types instead of raw C arrays or C macro-driven lists / trees / hash tables.
          • Make your interfaces explicitly use r-value references anywhere that implies an ownership transfer.
          • Add constructors to your structs that guarantee complete initialisation.
          • Replace #ifdef with if constexpr or template parameters wherever possible.
          1. 1

            Oh good to know, thanks for the advice!

        2. 2

          Last weekend in Greece, flying home late on Sunday. Currently motor sailing down from Anti-Paxos to the Lefkas Canal, intending on being around Meganisi for the next 48 hours until we drop the boat off.

          1. 1

            Started feeling wrist pain while working for the first time at the beginning of this week – it’s certainly my fault, I’d developed the habit of using my laptop in bed with pretty poor posture. But I’ll be looking into more ergonomic setups, and will try to take a stab at Talon to see how feasible it might be to replace a lot of my keyboard/mouse use with voice commands.

            1. 1

              I can’t recommend a split keyboard enough. I was at the point where my wrists were killing me at the end of a work day - I swapped out the Model M for a Kinesis and now I am in much less pain.

              1. 1

                Which Kinesis? I’ve tried the ergodox, but really struggled with it. The initial hit in typing speed as pretty catastrophic.

                1. 2

                  I have the Freestyle Edge RGB with the tent kit; I’d been on a Model M for my entire life up until that so I wasn’t ready to go full on ortholinear - I actually bought it expecting that I’d hate it and sell it within a couple months. The adaptation period was definitely a thing, and I’m still not as fast as I was on buckling springs, and I don’t think I’ll ever figure out Home/End/etc on this thing without looking at them, but not being in pain at the end of the day really outweighs all of that.

            2. 1

              Working on adding true cursor-based pagination to https://indieweb.org/Koype. Then gonna see if I can fix my site’s archives to actually show things on a per-hour, -day and -week basis.

              1. 1

                Taking my kid on their first hike with the scouts - trying to decide if I really need to run out and grab a whistle beforehand or not.

                1. 1

                  Lots of hiking! Also working on a writeup of some struct deserialization I made easier with Zig metaprogramming these last couple of weeks.

                  If I have time I’ll also try to get some sprites rendering in my Zig rewrite of Reckless Drivin’. I’ve just been implementing object movement and animation functions, but until yesterday I hadn’t integrated SDL yet. Now that I have a window open it would be nice to get something drawn. Nearly two years on this project and I still have nothing to show except for hexdumps :)

                  1. 3

                    I played Reckless Drivin’ a lot when I was younger! I think I still have the game on my old iBook G4. Good luck on reimplementing it, I’d love to be able to play it on more modern systems!

                    1. 1

                      I have fond memories of playing it on my dad’s PowerBook G4. Thank you, I’ll be sure to keep sharing updates as I make progress in the rewrite!

                    2. 2

                      Care to share your zig projects? I’d just like to see some Zig idioms.

                      1. 3

                        For sure! The one I mentioned above is https://github.com/natecraddock/open-reckless-drivin, a reimplementation of an old Macintosh game. Another is https://github.com/natecraddock/zf/ which is my replacement for fzf/fzy. Both are unfinished but should show some decent examples of Zig code.

                        If I’m pleased enough with my writeup, I think I’ll share it on lobste.rs sometime next week. I think that would be an even better example of Zig idioms.

                    3. 1

                      I’ll be working on my blog. I’ve wanted to start one for the longest time now since I want to give back to the community and not only that but I think it’s good for my future employers to see how/what I think. I’m thinking that I’ll just use Jekyll with GitHub Pages/Netlify. Any tips & tricks on how I should do things better (tech wise and/or content wise) are welcome!

                      1. 2

                        It’s good to have “content” or at least outlines for future content ready to go. That way you can have 2 or 3 posts “lined” up and won’t feel such pressure to continue.

                        “Blogging” encompassed a bunch of stuff , from basically being the online face of a company (a more chatty press release), to “building a personal brand”, to keeping an online diary or tech notes, to simple venting.

                        GH Pages is great for a “here’s what I do coding-wise” blog.

                        1. 1

                          I see, thank you for the feedback. I’ve got a couple of article ideas already I just have to write them. I was thinking that my blog will be a personal brand but the ideas in it will not be venting but just presenting my work, research or just my observations about some life topic. I don’t want to limit myself to just a tech blog. Do you think that this is a wise choice - to mix up content like that or should I stick to one topic e.g. tech. If I do this it’ll be with the intention to feel more close and personal not just another blog.

                          1. 1

                            I honestly don’t know. If you want it to be a “go-to” point for employers, you might want to limit discussions about, say, drug legislation or mental health. It’s a tough line to walk but if you exercise some common sense you should be fine.

                            1. 2

                              Yeah I didn’t mention this but I’m not going to discuss the common controvercial and sensitive topics. I’ll have variety but such topics won’t be suitable for what I want to create.

                              1. 1

                                Cool! Good luck with your blog!

                                1. 2

                                  Thank you!

                      2. 1

                        Taxes! Gonna read up on whatever I can about the tax laws. I’ve felt hiring accountants is not the best ROI as none of the ones I’ve talked to are invested in doing a good job and keep missing large sums of money that I have to fix myself anyway. Also recording Schubert’s Serenade for a local music festival. First ever public performance.

                        1. 1

                          Going to do some marketing for the app Graph Galaxy, it has been developed for years but didn’t have chance to let more people know it.