THE LACK THEREOF

Various musings of Brock Wilcox (@awwaiid)

Recurse
W3/6

Created 2024-04-14 / Edited 2024-04-14

A week spent coughing, writing Java, and watching Andor. First World Problems hah. Not bad in the scheme of things! :)

  • General Status:
    • I was Virtual all week -- fighting a cough and feeling intermittently icky :( . MUCH BETTER NOW!!! Beautiful day.
      • Watched the eclipse from here in NYC. Was OK. Maybe I'll do totality next time :)
    • FEELINGS -- Because of that it was a pretty tough week, really feeling both not getting the value of all the human connections I'd like and also feeling the reality of being at the half-way point for the 6-week batch
    • Watched a few more episodes of Andor. I haven't watched any of the other Star Wars series shows, but got recommended this one by a random YouTube video and I like it. I only have a few more episodes left for the season
    • It was Beth's Birthday on Tuesday; I had dinner reservations and desert lined up ... but we called it off since I was feeling icky. BUT! We rescheduled to Saturday and had a lovely time! We are the same age yet again!
    • Here it is Sunday 2024-04-14 and I am feeling much much better. Skipping our weekly weight-training workout though to not push myself backwards
    • During the week I did attend a few things, and loved them all! I think y'all are great
    • Really one of my rare complaints is the double-edge sword of a curated community -- the insulation is dividing people in my life; like even these posts to zulip feel better to write than the public blog, and I'm not going to link to individuals on the public blog. In another week one of my bestest friends is visiting from Portland OR, and without special permission I can't bring them over to the hub. Heck I can't bring my spouse by when we happen to be nearby later today. I get it, I like it, I agree with it, and yet ... I feel that separation of insiders and outsiders. Eh.
  • Nerd Snipe:
    • I was upset that on Tuesday at a zoom meeting I had a coughing fit while screen sharing and that my desktop zoom ... wouldn't let me mute myself or stop sharing! GARRR
    • So. I think I got it. The solution: stop using the desktop zoom client. Turns out you can use the browser just like I do all the time with google meet. BYE BYE DESKTOP ZOOM
    • It seems to work better now. I still have my internet drop now and then, which has something to do with where I am physically when remote here (switching wifi APs or something), but I can tether and then all is good
    • Still doing some mild tweaks to Sway, the latest is that I got swaymonad running, which controls some initial window-placement settings to make them more like xmonad. Looks like I'll probably fork/tweak it to my liking
    • And THAT thing uses Nix! So...
    • I got Nix running (on top of my existing Ubuntu, not as a whole install)
    • Just now I was listening to a podcast (Ship It! Episode 99: From Kubernetes to Nix) and ... now am going to try to do MORE NIX, maybe inflict it upon my work people eventually. MUAHAHAHA
  • Alloy+LLM+Rails Project:
    • Well. I learned some more Alloy!
    • I also was trying to play with different ways of interfacing with Alloy, knowing that the CLI is very limited
    • BUT they are prepping for a v6.1 which actually has some good CLI tooling! Like you can use it without the GUI, export JSON, even get an interactive console mode!
    • Very cool
    • But it doesn't work
    • As in the current dev branch is in need of some bug-fixes and QA for release. Also I think this is both a "soon" release and one that has been in progress for a year. Maybe I can help!
    • So ... I'm now up to 8 open PRs against various branches and have reached out to the maintainers to do some coordination :)
    • As I mentioned in my message to the developers ... as another open-source maintainer, I know that contributors can be well-intentioned but often come around, talk up some ideas, and disappear. Or worse, submit an un-mergeable PR and disappear. So I'm trying very hard to not do that. Each one of those is very small, like one or a few lines, easy to verify, and I think immediately mergeable
    • I have noticed there are, unsurprisingly some gaps in the unit tests, so I'm going to make some CLI-specific tests next week
    • Also this is Java! It's interesting how my position here has shifted over years ... at one point I was so frustrated with all-things-java that I swore it off. But I've matured or something and also realized that I LOVE ALL PROGRAMMING!!
    • I should note that I've also sworn off mmmmmm Databases and Javascript, but here I am 20 years later and both are close to my heart :)
    • Anyway. When it comes to the usual project-existential issues during my batch, this is clearly a good foundation; if I can help get this tool itself to be updated and integratable then I'll feel pretty pretty good