Current tidings - August

A random praying mantis I found hanging on a wall. Don't remember seeing one before, pretty cool to finally see one in the wild!

My August was mainly taken up by traveling around the country, to see friends and to participate in this year's Bulgarian Homeschooling Conference (link in Bulgarian).

At said conference, I had the privilege of running a workshop on "Planning and preparation for career realization" (as professional development is known around here) for the teen homeschoolers in attendance—and it was great seeing so many motivated and enthusiastic teens in one place! (..As for whether my workshop was helpful to them.. I hope it was, even though no one wanted to see or hear about a lecture after the trial of brainstorming I led them through 😁😅😂)

Life

Still going through college in the pursuit of a Bachelor's in Computer Science at the Thomas Edison State University. Around half-way there; aiming to graduate in the first half of 2026.
In the last month, finished the TECEP tests in Microeconomics and Critical thinking. I've still got a Public speaking exam haunting me, but travels made it hard to get around to it earlier.

As for the creative slump I reported last month—it seems like resting and moving around has been good enough to resolve it, as evidenced by the article I blind-typed on one of the long bus trips, Chasing shiny things. Hooray!

Programming

I did a whole week of streaming open-source bug fixes back at the start of July! Still writing recap posts about it, which you can find on the blog, starting with BugsDoneQuick: Days 1-2. From it, I've still got 2 LibreOffice patchsets to get around to as well as 3 Gwenview and 2 Element PRs/MRs that I'm waiting on feedback for.

Also, I'm starting to contribute to Xee, a Rust library implementing XPath 3 and XSLT 3! Rather exiting, though only just starting.

I'm thinking of looking for part-time opportunities soonish. While my current focus is still speed-tracking my Bachelor's, doing only research and studying full-time is not quite my thing, I need something more practical to keep me grounded. 😂

Writing

My writing time is spent mainly on articles in a bid to slowly fill up my blog with content—and not with actively writing fiction. I have a back-burner idea about a sci-fi academia novel/novella, but it's still far future—though recently, after checking out the excellent Trigaea, I'm wondering if I could adapt the worldbuilding of it to an interactive novel?

Current projects

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