I’m currently employed as a “consultant”, which amounts to “programmer for hire” in my case – in these days of cloud architects, there’s rarely any good design-level consultancy done beyond that, at least in my neck of the woods.
And another project is coming to an end now. It ended a bit with a whimper, as it seems that some of what I did will never see the light of the day because of politics & project management gatekeeping, but isn’t that a common source of dissatisfaction in my area? That you work on something that either won’t be used, or only by a very limited amount of people? And on the other hand, that’s why people like open source, because the fruits of your labor are just out there?
It does make one thing, but, well in this economy…
Otherwise the end of this project meant that a bit of vacation is starting. And it looks like it’s one of those where I actually stay at home. I’m very much okay with this, as I just had another vacation in the US (NYC & DC), and thus a few days of quiet and side project hackery will be just what I need. Friday started with a holiday, so technically speaking the first day off will be Monday.
Health #
I really did a lot of late hour work to finish my project and wrap
everything up, so evening activities were devoid of gyms and hiking. I
embarked on a longer walk when I gave back my laptop to the customer,
and this made it feel that much more poignant. Dentist appointment
recently went well, too. Finally getting over my phobia there…
So, my plans are to get in a few gym days during my vacation.
Gaming #
Basically nothing. I re-started my LegendKeeper campaign wiki, but no actual tabletop roleplaying, and I don’t have a video game running right now.
Media #
I noticed that I don’t yet write about TV, movies and books. I didn’t keep track of that in recent weeks, but will start now, so soon you’ll also hear my opinion about the latest Netflix fads and old books…
Side Projects #
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I’m doing a bit of experimenting with Rust HTTP backends, and decided to skip the whole async story for as long as possible. So I picked rouille as my web framework of choice. It’s sync, doesn’t do fancy middlewares, and should get me started.
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Angular is back on the menu. It’s important for work here (South-German enterprises don’t do react), and the current changes bring it much more in alignment with my tastes. Still plan to do HTMX for the projects that don’t need it, though.
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I’ve got a few new RPG ideas, so for this vacation, I’m in triage mode on what to focus on. It’s probably the least exciting, as getting something done from start to end is important to me.
Links #
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The 1600s Were a Watershed for Swear Words – We’re effin’ suffused with swear words these days, and tend to think that either they weren’t much common in the “good old days”, or that it was all just blasphemy back then. This has a few good (bad?) counter-examples
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The Carpenter – I’m almost disappointed that we don’t get US Christian films in the theatres in Munich, as this sounds way too badgood: Viking orphan is taken in by Jewish carpenter (Jeesey-Creesey, as you already guessed), who gives him lessons about life and 20 AD Mixed Martial Arts. One early viewer complained that the hard rock soundtrack is taking him out of the verisimilitude.
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textpod – It’s a single-binary note-taking application that runs locally and you just connect with your browser. It’s very simple, basically just a few lines of text input at the top of a page, everything you write in there gets parsed and appended to the page. It does have a few nice tricks like letting you drag images to the text field which get saved locally, and even lets you store pasted links locally. I’ve been using it for some part of my note-keeping over the last week, and found that it works very well for just dumping in links and images. Basically everything that is on the web already ends up on a tiny web page, whereas I keep handwritten notes in other places.
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The Netscape bookmark format – I’ve been looking into local bookmark management lately, both in self-hosting my pinboard replacement (with linkding or linkhut), or writing some software of my own, as that’s simple enough for exploring frontend frameworks and backend languages.
And I’m surprised that the only format that’s actually used for exchanging bookmarks is still the one used in early version of Netscape Navigator from the 90s (the link above goes to Microsoft’s documentation about it). Even the tags are all in uppercase, for compatibility’s sake! -
Rewrite it in Rails – Speaking of new frameworks and backend tech stacks, sometimes going back to a “rapid development” setup you know is worth it more than hyper-optimized and resume-friendly alternatives. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a decent Perl job offer, it usually means that you have more choices on how to implement things instead of going with the standard business practices of the software du jour…
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Why Pascal deserves a second chance – The article is a bit mediocre, but I can’t help reposting anything that favors the Algol side of the procedural family, not the BCLP mess we’re in right now.
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Spritesheets for animation – Last week I posted about a website that seemed so fast to current-gen web devs, and they used CSS spritesheets to save on backend traffic – where every image is in one file and you just position your “view port” respectively. This is mostly useless in the days of HTTP/half, but there are other uses for it, including animated bitmaps. This article goes into great depth about this and is just a beautiful work of presenting that information. I recommend sticking around on that website for a while. This is what we had before Medium, Substack, etc…