Strangely enough, I’d started a few dev diaries over 2021, but never got around to publishing them. 2022 is starting out alright, so thought I’d share the latest (after accidentally clobbering the rough draft concatenating all the old diary links into this one, of course).

I set up a Windows 10 machine for the first time (I can’t even remember the last time I did a fresh install of Windows), and the setup experience was somehow more horrible than I remember.

TIL there’s an Arctic Code Vault to hold open-source project code for 1,000 years. It’s a great sentiment, but given humanity’s track record of keeping older machine’s running, I suspect the humans in 1,000 years will have trouble getting the kernel to compile on their 80386 (well, at least any new ones since they dropped 80386 support a few versions ago).

Today’s project was writing a command-line version of the CrushEntropy format. I like the ability to play around with relative time blocks in it, but there’s a few other features I’ve wanted (like “find the next free space for this thing”), and the ability to keep my calendars off-line and easily searchable.

Today felt like a good day to get my repositories in order. I’ve been using GitHub kind of by default since I moved my personal stuff to git so many years ago. However, I’ve largely treated GitHub like a dumb static server with a few neat tricks, since I do a lot of stuff client-side.

In a fit of boredom before going to bed last night, I decided to pull Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming off the bookshelf (more accurately, from the stack of books on my office floor). I bought the series a few years ago, but avoided it because it looked a bit intimidating. I also assumed that I needed to read through Concrete Mathematics first, but the problem I find with most textbooks is that they’re a little hard to read on the couch while drinking a coffee.

The new CoffeeOutside bot has finally managed to successfully call its first location. Sure, the rewrite took learning 2 programming languages and several hours of my life that I’ll never get back. But the satisfaction of when it finally worked made it worth it.

Let’s talk about the Twitter API for a second. A tweet is not a “tweet,” it’s a “status”. If someone is following you, they are called a “follower”. If you follow them, in the API they’re called a “friend”. I can’t tell if it’s a cheerful sentiment, a historical anomaly, or developers writing independent parts of the API with no guiding naming spec. If you’ve worked on the Twitter API and have answers, there’s a free beer waiting for you.

Every time I learn about another thing that systemd does now (besides being an init system), I wonder how things could have been different. A more permissive license (to get the BSDs on-board), memory-safe language use, an approach that allowed better forward-compatibility. I walked miles while rolling this around in my head.

Statutory holidays are a fine time to pull a project idea out of the hat. Today I finally started to poke at Jitsi - something I’ve been meaning to do since we started doing podcasts remotely.

Sometimes it takes a vacation where you’re largely unplugged to have a really good think about the technology choices you make. Are the things you’re using in service to you? Or does it feel the other way around?

I’ve been busy pulling apart a ROM of the old Sega Genesis NHL Hockey game, will have that article up as soon as I hit the pay-dirt I’m looking for (although I’ve already found a few odd bits along the way…)

I’m pretty sure I blew out a pound of dust from the inside of my laptop today, and now magically the overheating issues seem to have disappeared. I love it when you get a nice performance bump from such a trivial activity.

It’s time for New Year’s resolutions, so I’m going with something I’ve put off for a while, and that’s finally switching to hjkl for moving around Vim. Oh sure, I could learn another programming language or something, but hjkl just seems like a change that I’ll appreciate the rest of my life.

I’m in the throes of another “do thing X every day for the month of Y” challenge (not computer related). This one is “Sewvember,” where I’ve been doing a sewing project every day so far for the month. I’ve been finding a bunch of common threads (har har) between programming and sewing along the way.

The Lisp journey continues, although I’m starting to get the itch to build something silly with the newfound knowledge. For now I’m going to keep it to simple programs until I can at least finish one of the books I’m reading :-P

Well, I’m utterly exhausted after a week at HashiConf, but it ended up being so darn educational that I feel like I’ll regain that time pretty darn quickly.

The Year of Lisp continues, one chapter at a time. I thought I’d clarify a bit how I’m going to read these books (and how I generally go about reading so many darn textbooks in the first place).

It’s been a while since I’ve written, but now’s as good time as any to check in a bit. Chatting with one of my co-workers has got me looking once again at Lisp.

I’m being my usual procrastinating self and went through Joe Armstrong’s Twitter feed, plucking out the pearls of wisdom before they bitrot away. Given his stance on the destructive nature of the World Wide Web, it’s a little funny the number of tweets in his timeline that are now missing context because of deleted tweets.

Been a while since I’ve had a good afternoon just to hack away on a project. For Record Store Day I whipped up a little Rails app to hold information about my record collection. I don’t imagine I’ll be open-sourcing it (a bit on that down the page). It’s satisfying coming up with something that matches exactly what I want in a program - and I’m seeing that this doesn’t always align with what is available in the market nor in open source software.

Final day of Winterpalooza, and I’m now free to get back at the keys and nail down some personal projects. I’m still doing a bunch of writing (not worth going into for the sake of this diary), but I’d like to get the Go rewrite of the CoffeeOutside bot done and dusted. I’ve also picked up the coffeeoutside.bike domain, which currently redirects to the Twitter account, but in the near future should have a nice little site.

The Winter Cycling Congress is over, and Winterpalooza is wrapping up tomorrow, so I’ll have free time to start work on my projects again come Monday.

I’ll give a short plug for SoundFlower, which creates a virtual audio device for recording application audio in macOS. I was surprised macOS didn’t already have this functionality built-in, but I think that’s because Linux has had the ability for so long. Anyhow, managed to record my television interviews before they fall off the internet for good.

The more I use the Kubernetes, the more I feel like this thing is shaping up as the next OpenStack (I don’t mean that in a good way). Too many players setting direction, and tooling that leaves a lot to be desired.

Still got the flu, mixed with morning internet connectivity problems. At least everything important for me is generally decentralized, so wasn’t too much of an issue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Thanks all for waiting for today’s edition, I hope you find it’s worth the wait.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

It’s a bit late in the contest, but you can still spend some time enjoying the world’s largest trivia contest at http://90fmtrivia.org - great music, and the hosts get loopy from sleep deprivation on the last day.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Woo! A second one! I’ve set up an archive at https://github.com/dafyddcrosby/computer-nerdery in addition to the one TinyLetter provides, just as future-proofing. Thanks to Mo K. for mentioning that I didn’t provide the subscribe link at https://tinyletter.com/computer-nerdery

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Yep, finally starting a newsletter, after years of “I’m gonna start a newsletter!” Please throw ideas for content, as well as any good links you come across, as I imagine this will kind of be the ‘in-between’ stuff between proper blog posts (whatever that means) :-) Will keep to ~5 links/tips an email so it’s something you can flip through while eating a bowl of cereal. I don’t know how often I’ll do this (or is even desirable).