Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-30

I’ve been riding the Nyquil wave with some sort of flu, which has kind of put a crimp in getting in anything done. Guess I won’t be able to take the LPI exam until I can stay awake for longer than an hour.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-29

Finally got around to playing with Flexbox Froggy and CSS Garden, a fun way to learn about CSS Flexbox and Gridbox. CSS has come a huge way since it was first introduced, and since I seem to use it once every 3-4 years each time I’m amazed at the jump in functionality.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-27

Been a good day for laptop upkeep, now that my brain’s been hit a bit sideways by the LPI stuff yesterday. I purchased the LPI course voucher (I think). The purchase could be way simpler, needed to create 3 different accounts (2 with LPI, 1 with Pearson), and I’m still not really sure after shelling out the cash if I’m ready to take the test now. It really shouldn’t be so hard, and that LPI requires 2 different accounts tells me their backend is probably a shitshow.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-26

Did a final sprint getting my LPI cert coursework done. Of course, spending 8 hours straight going through it has kind of turned my brain to mush. Just need to book the exam and call this a day (at least until re-certification rolls around). Cool links The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines De-facto Closed Source
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-25

Is 2019 the year I finally grok Lisp? Man, I hope so. I feel like a lot of it is getting the built-in functions in my head, so it might make sense to do a function-a-day kind of thing. I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp, which has been good so far, but I’m thinking if I get stranded I might jump in on Peter Siebel’s Practical Common Lisp. I’ve found that I need some footing in “real” applications to appreciate the more nuanced stuff.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-23

Good to finally have some vacation time to wind down and get some project time. Of course, the first few days I’m usually just going through checklists of work that’s been delayed until I’ve got some free time. At least I’ve managed to sneak in a few bike rides while the weather is nice.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-20

Still cleaning up daveops.net from the move to Markdown yesterday. There’s a lot of stale markup moving from engine to engine, and for the time it takes to clean it up adequately. Pandoc butchers a lot of code markup, so I really do think this will be the last one knock on wood. If not, the next iteration will be pulling the pages out piecemeal from the old site as I need it, so that I can clean them up as I go.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-19

Brought my Commodore 64 into work again this year. There’s something satisfying watching someone fresh out of university trying to figure out BASIC from experimentation and trying to do a simple fizzbuzz. I’m migrating daveops.net to a hybrid GitHub Pages/Hugo site. For the most up-to-date files, head.daveops.net will use GitHub Pages to generate the latest stuff, and the apex will present a nicer looking version of it that’s deployed when I remember (or bother to setup a git hook).
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-18

Another morning where I sip my coffee and realize there’s more problems in the world than I have time to fix. CO2 emissions, browser monopoly, political and economic injustice - every once in a while I stare into space and wonder if there’s a single action I could do that would solve those problems with a decisive ’thud.’ But alas, nothing comes to mind, so I’ll just keep chipping away with my little projects.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-17

Sorting out HSTS preloading on my websites today. I’d started the work a while back, but got distracted midway and didn’t finish. I’m a little surprised there’s not more verification in the process that the site is ready for preloading, such as a TXT record at the domain level. I imagine they want most folks’ TLS journey to be one-way.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-16

A little sore from the first Calgary Roughnecks game of the season, so taking it easy and sharpening up my to-do lists today. Making a good list is half the battle of getting any big project done, and anyone who’s seen my lists knows they’re large, ambitious, and slightly terrifying. Cool links NES v3 The Hewlett Packard Archive Spectre and the end of langsec
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-15

Going through the LPI training has been a nice case of ‘old dog, new tricks.’ I learned a bunch of my Linux know-how piecemeal over the years, but nothing that ever resembled an actual training course. It’s mostly been learning about new command line flags that I somehow missed over the years, but handy nevertheless. I’m likely due for a read-through of all the man pages again. I did this maybe 7 or 8 years ago, but I’ve matured a ton as a developer since then, and no doubt there are things in there that made little sense to me then, but would be clear to me now.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-14

Not really sure why, but woke up at 3:30AM highly motivated to copy the old “Computer Nerdery” archives from TinyLetter. The link rot was far less than I expected, but the process of moving the few articles over gave me some thoughts to chew over.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-13

As with the charm of low-road architecture, I do love writing those little scripts that make for frictionless creativity/productivity. This is the first Hugo diary entry made by simply typing in dev-diary at the shell, with everything taken care of automatically. It doesn’t seem major, but removing all the micro-friction to writing makes a huge difference of “thinking about writing” versus “actually writing something.” Of course, now that the friction is gone, it’s just a matter of actually finding those little snippets of time that will allow me to write ;-)

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-12

Work continues on the CoffeeOutside bot. Not going to have it done for tonight, but should be in action for next week. Every time I pick up Go, it’s the uncanny valley of “it feels like C, but…” I will say that it’s great working in a ‘batteries included’ environment again. I understand the trade-offs in maintenance upstream, but from a developer productivity view, it’s nice not having to read through grungy third-party code hoping it’ll fit the bill.