I admire people that write blog posts. Taking the time to put something out there. I want to be like them and share too. This website receives occasional attention, when I really want to say something. Many times, I really want and still fail to do it. It piles on the backlog. This time I had a challenge: 8 posts within a month! About twice a week: challenging but feasible. But as reality would have it, even with some planning I still cram everything to the last moment. There something creative and motivating about pressure and deadlines.
Historically, I learned about shavian about a year ago. I have even worked on how to make this website multi-lingual to support shavian, it is not ready yet. Until then you get the post: Shavian: The better English script
I’m an Emacs enthusiast, I use it as much as I can. I wanted also for a long
time share my handy packages that improve my life. I had thus some posts pending
on the topic. They turned out in to be 3 in the end and I shared the
corresponding link to my dotfiles where you can find the history of such
packages. There is a long delay between doing and communicating.
Programming in lisp is a joy and doing some front-end work in inevitable. I have
really wanted to give Common Lisp a better chance. I also believe that it is
the tooling more than the language that makes it useful. I had the itch on how
do react works, and re-frame. Well there is no better way to learn than to
do it yourself. It was many days of work, reading code, synthesizing what I
learned. But the end product got distilled, so little code in the end gets you
very far. That is what I share in two posts:
Lastly, the post I have been most curios about. What do all these AI companies scrape out of my website. The post: Working for robots goes over that. The sad reality that the main consumer of my work are robots not other people.
It was a challenge indeed. Had it not been that May 1st is a public holiday I might not have been able to crunch that long weekend to put things in order and write.
It also got me into the flow of writing. How the ox-hugo exporter works is now
in my working memory and so it was easier to keep writing. The exporter is
something that I so rarely use that, like regular expressions, I have to
relearn it every time I use it.
The need to finish by the deadline does harm the quality of my output. Each post went live, with a single review pass. I do notice some post are a bit inconclusive. However, done is better than perfect!
Finally, it gave me some momentum I feel self inspired to write more. There are some topics, which I coudn’t cover because I prioritized my deadline. But now I do have them in my to do list.
If you have any feedback I’m happy to read about it, my contact details are in the about page.
Software archeologist – Recovering Physicist – Dancer
As a scientist I studied the physics of the very small quantum world. As a computer hacker I distill code. Software is eating the world, and less code means less errors, less problems. Millions of lines of legacy code demand attention and have to be understood and simplified for future reliable operation.
