Nice! Let us know when it is up and running. Would love to give it a go. I would like to get an engine running well enough to beat myself at some point, which shouldn’t be too hard!
Waiting for an authorization to work letter so I can start at my new job. They’re sending me an M1 mac mini for the meantime and I will probably be seeing how broken my workflow is with it.
Thank you! I’m not sure if all programmer positions are like this, but I didn’t really look for this job, so I’m guessing I won’t be having trouble finding different ones in the future ^^
I’ve got to record my Emacsconf talk. I started yesterday, and am having massive problems with ffmpeg on Linux. Right now, it’s running my machine out of memory in 90 seconds. :(
That certainly would make sense! I was trying to record desktop video + webcam + microphone at the same time, to three output files. When I switched to webcam + microphone, it was fine. And desktop video by itself was fine.
As a note for anyone else reading this, it ended up being far easier to take screenshots of the fullscreen presentation, and assemble them into a video using Openshot Video Editor. It actually makes it pretty easy to have the transitions be exactly when you want them to be.
Unfortunately, I do have a part of it that’s more of a live demo, so I still need to screen-record that, but if I only do that without recording the webcam and microphone, it’s fine. Plus, I want to edit in the webcam video in the lower right.
If I want to do it again, I’ll look into how I can simplify the real-time encoding, reduce the CPU usage.
Work: Hope to finish a couple of blog posts, file some issues and get started with new project.
Reading: Started Tracks by K.M. Tolan, finding it good so far. The writing is difficult to follow for me, but it is well written.
Internet switch off update: About three weeks back, I started building a habit of switching off internet completely for few hours during work days. It felt refreshing to start with, but finding it difficult to keep up the habit, especially when I need to be researching online. Still, the few hours I do manage to switch off is a big help in mindless browsing and improved work focus.
Writing some code to convert quantum circuits in one format to another. Maybe writing a blog post if I muster the motivation/time investment. Reading some of Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin.
Tronna is back on lockdown, so my wife and I splurged on desks and monitors for building our basement out as a home office (we’d been working from her empty downtown office). We got our garage gym finally set up so we’ll both be trying to head out there four or five times this week.
I’m also going to move from Linux + ZFS for my home server to …. Freebsd + ZFS. Why? Listen, those yaks are not going to shave themselves, man.
Finally, I’ll be working on my blog series about the Advent of Code and Haskell (I was inspired by crustacean jcb).
Working on implementing an agent-based physarum (slime mold) model in Julia. I’m working hard to polish some simple explanatory animations for the eventual blog write up. It’s honestly super fun to implement emergent systems, also keeps my PL knowledge up to snuff.
Im spending my week playing video games (Destiny 2, and just started Horizon Zero Dawn), and continuing to learn Rust. Ive been working on a suite of command line tools for working with the Destiny 2 API. Hoping to do initial release this week.
Going to be taking a couple days off for Thanksgiving @ home. Will likely be installing swivel seats on the campervan my spouse and I are building out.
Trying to debug some hangs on clustered pytorch on TPUs.
Also rescued an adorable cat and I’m slowly introducing him to the rest of the pet family.
Trying not to despair over the department I work in. The QA engineer assigned to our department left last week, one of our developers in the department is leaving at the end of next week, and my manager is retiring sometime next year. That leaves just me as the sole developer by this time next year (my manager still does programming). And the code we work on is critical to our customer (an oligarchic cell phone company) and brings most of the revenue.
Ouch. That sounds like a tough situation to be in.
I don’t think you should give too much thought about how the company you work for is doing (unless you have significant amount of shares). Focus on your own situation. If it becomes untenable, bail. Bringing in “most of the revenue” shouldn’t be your responsibility, it should be management’s.
I just wanted to second this, because I agree with @gerikson but also because I know that actually leaving in a situation like this is much easier said than done.
Please look after your health first, and keep an eye out for the signs of stress. Hopefully it won’t get to that point for you! But as somebody who has suffered from burnout in the past, I was still hoping it wouldn’t get to that point when I realised I’d already been there for weeks. Once you’re in that hole, there’s nothing to do except stop digging.
In case you need to hear it, people move jobs a lot in the tech world and nobody who matters will be anything but happy for you if you go somewhere that’s better for you.
Outside of work (I have a roughly 2 day workweek this week) - I’m trying to make a “better” terminal by abandoning the idea of emulating ttys.
Better is obviously a loaded word, I’m not trying to support things that actually want a tty like vim at all. Instead I’m trying to make a better terminal for running commands by integrating the terminal and shell to improve upon things like job control, display of stdout/stderr streams (including things impossible in a tty like after the fact filtering and displaying/hiding of specific streams), history, etc.
And in the nitty gritty I’m currently tearing apart the dash shell to make it possible to use it as a library for the above.
Working on a hello-world blog built with Django and Bulma, I’m gonna fix my like/unlike button today. At the moment I’m storing whether or not the user has liked a post as cookie data that contains a list of post ids.
I’ll continue to improve my resume and get applications out in search of a 2021 summer internship - it’s been a stressful hunt so far. I’ll also be trying to get through more of Sedgwicks Algorithms and hopefully get some time to break into a good book and enjoy downtime with my better half during the holiday break.
Advent of code is nigh, so I’m thinking about how I’m going to approach it. Last year I ended up with quite a few pieces of code being reused and just existing as part of one Elixir project. This worked nicely.
This year I’m thinking of going with Python. I’ve been using it for (algorithmic) coding challenges and am feeling familiar enough now.
For work I’m optimising our CI and deployment pipelines to make them faster.
Outside of work I’ve been working on writing a Prometheus exporter for my Google Nest thermostat. They changed the API available for it earlier in the year (and started charging $5 for access to it), so none of the existing exporters work anymore, hence I have to write a new one.
Against my will, I am becoming a web programmer. After the company assigned me to rewrite their data grid front end for performance purposes, I got assigned to write a browser extension. (Anybody who has read my opinions on webtech will know how I feel about my life right now.)
My originally-planned NaNoGenMo project ended up being too complicated for my lockdown-addled brain (because I never was any good at geometrical reasoning) so I’m working on a second, substantially easier one. The original plan was to combine maze-generation with dissociated press, making an input text into a multicursal labyrinth where the ‘correct’ solution will allow you to read the complete original text along one wall, while making the wrong turn will produce an initially-coherent continuation that slowly descends into nonsense. The new plan is simply to eliminate proper nouns from a mystery novel, thus making it substantially more mysterious while maintaining the structure.
I’m also continuing to attend a book club for In Search of the Miraculous, one of P. D. Ouspensky’s descriptions of G. I. Gurdjieff’s “fourth way” cult. We’re doing a chapter a week, and just finished chapter 10. I’m trying to balance it out by also reading McLuhan: Hot and Cool, a late-60s collection of reviews of McLuhan’s books along with responses by the man himself.
Company prescribed me (and everyone) a week off. So, can’t complain. Will likely do „irc bot in rust“ nonsense, for fun.
Also, we just got two kittens from the shelter.
I’ve been doing the Rust IRC bot thing myself, definitely good fun!
I’m working on a chess engine with a friend. We’re hoping to hook it up to Lichess’s API so that people can challenge it through the website.
The resources we’ve been using are: The Chess Programming Wiki and the pseudocode of algorithms like Minimax, Alpha–beta pruning.
For chess rules, we’ve used notnil/chess (Golang) and I recommend it.
Lichess is such a wonderful service and inspiration for other community owned projects. I hope it can survive indefinitely.
Nice! Let us know when it is up and running. Would love to give it a go. I would like to get an engine running well enough to beat myself at some point, which shouldn’t be too hard!
It’s not live on lichess yet (aside from occasionally for alpha testing) but the code is open!
https://github.com/healeycodes/andoma
It plays bad chess but makes sensible trades most of the time. It will be fun to strengthen it in the coming weeks :)
Sounds like me then :)
Very cool will check it out
If you look at my latest post on here (or my website via profile) I’ve published a blog post about it with all the resources I used!
Waiting for an authorization to work letter so I can start at my new job. They’re sending me an M1 mac mini for the meantime and I will probably be seeing how broken my workflow is with it.
Work:
Home:
Started my new job, gotta figure life out and learn to live alone :)
Congratulations on the new job!
Thank you! I’m not sure if all programmer positions are like this, but I didn’t really look for this job, so I’m guessing I won’t be having trouble finding different ones in the future ^^
I’ve got to record my Emacsconf talk. I started yesterday, and am having massive problems with ffmpeg on Linux. Right now, it’s running my machine out of memory in 90 seconds. :(
Depending on your machine, real-time encoding might be the bottle-neck?
That certainly would make sense! I was trying to record desktop video + webcam + microphone at the same time, to three output files. When I switched to webcam + microphone, it was fine. And desktop video by itself was fine.
As a note for anyone else reading this, it ended up being far easier to take screenshots of the fullscreen presentation, and assemble them into a video using Openshot Video Editor. It actually makes it pretty easy to have the transitions be exactly when you want them to be.
Unfortunately, I do have a part of it that’s more of a live demo, so I still need to screen-record that, but if I only do that without recording the webcam and microphone, it’s fine. Plus, I want to edit in the webcam video in the lower right.
If I want to do it again, I’ll look into how I can simplify the real-time encoding, reduce the CPU usage.
Taking the week off and staying the fuck away from computers.
That sounds wonderful.
Work: Hope to finish a couple of blog posts, file some issues and get started with new project.
Reading: Started Tracks by K.M. Tolan, finding it good so far. The writing is difficult to follow for me, but it is well written.
Internet switch off update: About three weeks back, I started building a habit of switching off internet completely for few hours during work days. It felt refreshing to start with, but finding it difficult to keep up the habit, especially when I need to be researching online. Still, the few hours I do manage to switch off is a big help in mindless browsing and improved work focus.
Writing some code to convert quantum circuits in one format to another. Maybe writing a blog post if I muster the motivation/time investment. Reading some of Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin.
When not working:
Try to decide if I care about Advent of Code this year… Might be a Factor or F# attempt…
Tronna is back on lockdown, so my wife and I splurged on desks and monitors for building our basement out as a home office (we’d been working from her empty downtown office). We got our garage gym finally set up so we’ll both be trying to head out there four or five times this week.
I’m also going to move from Linux + ZFS for my home server to …. Freebsd + ZFS. Why? Listen, those yaks are not going to shave themselves, man.
Finally, I’ll be working on my blog series about the Advent of Code and Haskell (I was inspired by crustacean jcb).
Job hunting on the work-ish side
Just got a piano and began to learn to play it. Giving hand to translate a book about regex in French. I will take it easy this week.
Working on implementing an agent-based physarum (slime mold) model in Julia. I’m working hard to polish some simple explanatory animations for the eventual blog write up. It’s honestly super fun to implement emergent systems, also keeps my PL knowledge up to snuff.
Also eating lots of turkey :)
Im spending my week playing video games (Destiny 2, and just started Horizon Zero Dawn), and continuing to learn Rust. Ive been working on a suite of command line tools for working with the Destiny 2 API. Hoping to do initial release this week.
Going to be taking a couple days off for Thanksgiving @ home. Will likely be installing swivel seats on the campervan my spouse and I are building out.
Trying to debug some hangs on clustered pytorch on TPUs.
Also rescued an adorable cat and I’m slowly introducing him to the rest of the pet family.
Trying to get one good hardware test done before American Turkey Day. Then sleeping until 2021. (I wish.)
Trying not to despair over the department I work in. The QA engineer assigned to our department left last week, one of our developers in the department is leaving at the end of next week, and my manager is retiring sometime next year. That leaves just me as the sole developer by this time next year (my manager still does programming). And the code we work on is critical to our customer (an oligarchic cell phone company) and brings most of the revenue.
Ouch. That sounds like a tough situation to be in.
I don’t think you should give too much thought about how the company you work for is doing (unless you have significant amount of shares). Focus on your own situation. If it becomes untenable, bail. Bringing in “most of the revenue” shouldn’t be your responsibility, it should be management’s.
I just wanted to second this, because I agree with @gerikson but also because I know that actually leaving in a situation like this is much easier said than done.
Please look after your health first, and keep an eye out for the signs of stress. Hopefully it won’t get to that point for you! But as somebody who has suffered from burnout in the past, I was still hoping it wouldn’t get to that point when I realised I’d already been there for weeks. Once you’re in that hole, there’s nothing to do except stop digging.
In case you need to hear it, people move jobs a lot in the tech world and nobody who matters will be anything but happy for you if you go somewhere that’s better for you.
Best of luck, whatever happens.
Outside of work (I have a roughly 2 day workweek this week) - I’m trying to make a “better” terminal by abandoning the idea of emulating ttys.
Better is obviously a loaded word, I’m not trying to support things that actually want a tty like vim at all. Instead I’m trying to make a better terminal for running commands by integrating the terminal and shell to improve upon things like job control, display of stdout/stderr streams (including things impossible in a tty like after the fact filtering and displaying/hiding of specific streams), history, etc.
And in the nitty gritty I’m currently tearing apart the dash shell to make it possible to use it as a library for the above.
Mostly debugging a failure to update arp cache after a floating ip failover event.
Yesterday I deployed a change to allow the main sales page to be served 100% from Varnish cache for most visitors.
Who knew I’d add “discover that four and a half million tiny log files makes your server not happy” in a completely unrelated issue.
Setting up a Drupal 8/9 project on gitlabci and integrating renovate not.
Working on a hello-world blog built with Django and Bulma, I’m gonna fix my like/unlike button today. At the moment I’m storing whether or not the user has liked a post as cookie data that contains a list of post ids.
I’ll continue to improve my resume and get applications out in search of a 2021 summer internship - it’s been a stressful hunt so far. I’ll also be trying to get through more of Sedgwicks Algorithms and hopefully get some time to break into a good book and enjoy downtime with my better half during the holiday break.
Advent of code is nigh, so I’m thinking about how I’m going to approach it. Last year I ended up with quite a few pieces of code being reused and just existing as part of one Elixir project. This worked nicely.
This year I’m thinking of going with Python. I’ve been using it for (algorithmic) coding challenges and am feeling familiar enough now.
Being irritated at FedEx’s incompetence and STILL not playing my PS5.
Bookmarking things in Pinboard and closing tabs in the meantime.
For work I’m optimising our CI and deployment pipelines to make them faster.
Outside of work I’ve been working on writing a Prometheus exporter for my Google Nest thermostat. They changed the API available for it earlier in the year (and started charging $5 for access to it), so none of the existing exporters work anymore, hence I have to write a new one.
Against my will, I am becoming a web programmer. After the company assigned me to rewrite their data grid front end for performance purposes, I got assigned to write a browser extension. (Anybody who has read my opinions on webtech will know how I feel about my life right now.)
My originally-planned NaNoGenMo project ended up being too complicated for my lockdown-addled brain (because I never was any good at geometrical reasoning) so I’m working on a second, substantially easier one. The original plan was to combine maze-generation with dissociated press, making an input text into a multicursal labyrinth where the ‘correct’ solution will allow you to read the complete original text along one wall, while making the wrong turn will produce an initially-coherent continuation that slowly descends into nonsense. The new plan is simply to eliminate proper nouns from a mystery novel, thus making it substantially more mysterious while maintaining the structure.
I’m also continuing to attend a book club for In Search of the Miraculous, one of P. D. Ouspensky’s descriptions of G. I. Gurdjieff’s “fourth way” cult. We’re doing a chapter a week, and just finished chapter 10. I’m trying to balance it out by also reading McLuhan: Hot and Cool, a late-60s collection of reviews of McLuhan’s books along with responses by the man himself.
I am writing tuf-on-a-plane, a minimal, Pythonic TUF client. Contributors welcome!