Current tidings - May

A blooming field of tiny purple flowers, captured around Easter

It's May! How has time even flown; the last update to this page was all the way back in January!

It's been a good year so far; busy with work and real life friends and relatives to attend to, to the point that I haven't had time to do the things I usually enjoy. However, I'm finally getting into the rhythm of it! 😃

Life

I got a very good friend visiting for a few months! 🎉 He is starting a job that requires him to finally be in the big city, and what better way to spice up the weeks and learn to split chores than by inviting someone over? :')
Best of luck with the job, friend! (And let's see how long it takes me to get you to make yourself a website 😁)

Programming

I did some protocol design earlier this year, and managed to deploy a simple, sequence-number based protocol to our early-stage production environment. I even went fancy and wrote proofs for the protocol's correctness, as inspired by Leslie Lamport's closing speech at SCALE 22x.

...Sadly, correctly implementing the protocol as proven ended up tricker than expected, due to issues in PostgreSQL transaction ordering documented by Oskar Dudycz—and in the end colleagues opted to switch to something more boring. Oh well. We now have a regular run-of-the-mill task queue; at least it is simple to debug, even if it needs more state to maintain.

Books

Since December, I've had the joy of listening to Debbie Coll and Rebekah O'Donnovan's co-written first-draft-audiobook/podcast hybrid, Ballads of Beyond (through AntennaPod ✨). The Cavern at the Edge of Time was a blast, and it brought many smiles while getting to work in the bleak December mornings. Season two, The Thief in the Mirror, seems just as fun! 😊
Now, on to convincing them to move to the Fediverse instead of being stuck on Instagram 😂

In addition, I was inspired by one of the pastors at church to block off time for Bible reading daily! I'm currently mid-way through a focused read in which I try to highlight all verses that might in some way be used to defend "Intellectual Property" rights, because—well—I have a long-time suspicion that copyright and patents are entirely unbiblical, but I need to have some proof of that.

Writing

Starting today (heh, actually), I'm trying to get up early to get some writing in for the day. It worked very well for the "How I was cured of my Garfield attachment" post, so I'm hopeful it would work for other posts as well!

Let's see!

Current projects

• Work at STACKIT — an European B2B cloud provider.
• Programming with Bojidar - My tiny JavaScript programming course serving a few Bulgarian students weekly.
• Website maintenance - On-and-off maintaining Linux boxes for my programming course, for the Bulgarian Homeschooling Association (We got a new website out!! 🎉), and for a group of friends.
• Slides at church — I got an HTML file which can do everything for me, from looking up Bible verses to laying out multi-page slides. 10/10 no notes, would learn programming again if I forgot it overnight, it's far too useful when dealing with technology 😁

Backlog:

• Retry 100 Days To Offload. Oops.
• College at TESU. Halfway there, waiting on everything else getting into a calm rhythm before continuing.
• Project: World - A custom for-fun hobby programming language, with hopes of compiling to WASM (GC)!
• Xee - an XSLT toolkit written in Rust.

This page is also available as an Atom feed, inspired by Bryan Braum's /now page.