Weekly Brain Dump #40
At a Glance
- Taylor Progress! I have some energy again, so using it on Taylor
- Porting Old Projects Having some fun porting things to Taylor
- Catching up on RSS I love RSS
- Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
- Comments
Taylor Progress!
I actually merged a pull request that I wrote for the first time in months. It felt really good to actually sit down with my brain and just quietly solve a problem.
This problem has been bugging me for a while and I knew about it since v0.4.0
but didn’t realise it was going to cause massive issues on Windows. It turns out
ever since v0.4.0 you haven’t been able to use taylor.exe from your $PATH
for development. I dunno if anyone actually does this on Windows but if they
had, it would have broken.
Again, I’m just happy to have the brain power back to be able to do things. This was a mentally tricky problem for me because there were quite a few cases and the whole “launch a development app” is surprisingly fiddly with how it handles paths.
Porting Old Projects
I got inspired the other night to start porting a few little games that I made for my wife from C++ and Godot over to Taylor. I mostly want to do this to keep them easy to maintain and host for her but partly as a fun little experiment to see how hard it is to port.
The C++ game should be really trivial, it’s already using Raylib (although
v3.0.0) and it’s written in my usual style of scenes. This is the one I
started the other night and hopefully will have it done in a couple of short
sessions.
The Godot tool I built will probably be a little trickier but that’s part of the fun. It makes use of audio and camera movements so this will be interesting.
Of course I have kept this from my wife to keep it a surprise. I think she could use a random act of kindness to help pick her mood up a little.
Catching up on RSS
As you can probably see from the amount of Interesting Links I have posted, I’ve been catching up on my RSS reader. It’s been hard to have the motivation to sit down and properly take in technical articles so I’ve left them aside for when I had the energy.
Just quietly, how good is RSS? I tried a few times in my life to get into RSS but it only stuck a couple years ago when I figured I didn’t need a web based one and could just use Feeder. It gives me that “scrolling through Mastodon” vibe that makes it easy to pick up and use.
Interesting Links
microlighter: A new syntax highlighter for web, focusing on being lightweight and using modern CSS.
Math for PICO-8 devs: Just because it focuses on PICO-8 doesn't mean it isn't universally useful.
ActivityPub - Is it worth defending against replay attacks and message/signature time skew?: An interesting look at how each service handles replay attacks and whether you should even care.
I Don’t Have a Smartphone…: A great take on how smartphones are still useful but shouldn't be shoved down our throats.
ActivityBot is the recipient of an NLnet grant!: Two Terence posts in one list! Absolutely great to see projects like this get funding. I'm still SO tempted to write an activity pub compatible thing sometime.
Converting a Ruby block interface to start/stop methods with a Fiber: Some very cool tricks with Ruby, this is very worth your time to look at and understand.
Beyond ORMs: I've been feeling the pain of ORMs in a large Rails monolith recently and have started thinking this pattern would be much better for maintenance and performance. Perhaps this'll push me to look into Hanami again?
Named Return Values Without Oopsies: Odin is an interesting language that I should give some time.
ZJIT 🤝 GC: Inlining GC Fastpath in ZJIT: My brain hasn't been alive enough to really go through this, but it seems very interesting.
Bringing Rails into the Ractor-age: I'm always excited when I see people pushing ractors!