Not much has changed - parenthood is still exhausting; COVID-19 feels like a distant nightmare, at least to others it seems; we still didn't go on any vacations and a lot of my projects or ideas are yet to be written down (properly).
It's been hard. It certainly has. But every experience is annealing. Mental state is good. Physical state, however, needs extra work...
Saisho
The above notwithstanding, a couple of days ago I "finished" writing Mk. 3 of Saisho (sans auxiliaries, except the microblog) which should hopefully simplify both maintenance and introduction of new features (when required). I first mentioned this a month ago when I already started working on the third revision, only to realize in my pursuit of making things better and simpler I was, in fact, making them more complicated. That code was scrapped (sans router) and now I actually have something. Something better.
In a gist, everything has been rewritten, but nothing is 100% finished (then again, is it ever 100% finished?): - New, better, router code. - "Proper" templates. - DIY Markdown parser Never mind. Parsing Markdown with regex is a pyrrhic victory at best. Back to Parsedown. - Logging.
I will make a separate post when the code is available publicly.
Plaintext
Yeah, so about that... I kinda forgot about this project, sorry! Truth be told, life did get in the way of my silly personal projects, for better or worse. I still have plans for this Plaintext, albeit with a slight pivot in direction. All I can say is that Saisho will play a role in its actualization. More on this later.
Tom's Data Onion
A small (and for some - easy) puzzle I decided to take upon myself as a challenge, proved to be a more formidable foe than I initially thought. Unfortunately, progress is currently halted due to the same reason as the above.
Also, PHP is definitely (probably) not the best language of choice for solving this thing. But that's what I know, at least for now.
If you're interested in trying it out yourself (and you should), check it out here: Tom's Data Onion.
Work
I've been working at [REDACTED] for 8 months now. So far it proved to be not as challenging as I'd like it to be (in the sense of personal development). On the other hand, I believe this helped me figure out the direction I'd like to take the next step in my career in - an internal tool developer.
This will allow me to stay in the world of support, but also help me get my feet wet in the development world professionally. I guess we'll see how this works out.
Goals
A certain Mr. AvE quite correctly said setting yourself goals gives you purpose. Now, these are not unachievable goals but instead interim or short-term goals. They are set so that I can give myself purpose and track my own progress.
- Pick up Python. PHP is nice (and Ruby is all but forgotten at this point), but I need extra tools in my toolkit.
- Get back to exercising. Early fatherhood, getting sacked and COVID really did a number on me.
- Finish and release at least some projects.
- Read more.