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1 Vague personal updates, follow-up

More folks getting sick. I think that's about all I have to say right now.

2 Bash

I like to see how other folks program bash. Recently I've been reading bash-hackers.org. I agree with some things, but not all of it, particularly the obsolete page. I want my code to hard fail and I don't think the semantic command for test is dead. I think "[instead use p]roper control flow and error handling" is just an opinion like any other.

3 War stories

Last year at work I found something that someone wrote that had a process running the same code twice in a row, but different implementations. I looked it over and wondered if they actually had a reason for it. Then I checked the git history with shortlog. Three other senior developers and a former pre-doctorate workstudy employee had continued to maintain it over several years. At one point they started writing tests, but none of them actually asserted or even ran any of the code. So I rewrote it. I reduced the amount of code by an order of magnitude and also wrote tests.

Everyone has written bad code. I've written plenty of bad code. But I've also been rewriting other folks' bad code for over a decade now. This one really stood out because so many different folks had touched it and left it alone without even ever trying to improve the situation.

4 Doom on Emacs

I had started looking into running doom on emacs. Not the dotfiles doom, but the actual game (probably freedoom). Searching for that became a mess, so instead I looked for ways to play a video in an emacs buffer. Recompiling emacs with xwidgets support seemed like a good way at first, but I don't know if I want to have to do that when EAF or EXWM already allow it, possibly with the stock build.

For the new year, I will keep it in mind, but I have other tasks I want to focus on.

5 State of the projects

Last month I started collaborating on MED again. I had planned on dropping that project over the summer, but I found some other folks who actually want to use it. So we'll see what happens. We made lots of progress, but the last week or so nothing has changed.

The fenrisg ssg works. I still want to migrate a few of the features such as the homepage, standardize the table-of-contents for org mode, add a command to generate the lua-filters, and add some kind of file format to replace the Makefile mess currently in use.

Fenris Punk is still on my mind, daily, but my social life has completely tanked since August for work and pandemic related reasons. Someone told me a few months ago I'm living like a bear: I only have time to sleep, eat, work, repeat. I think I want to implement the game in python and add tests in order to show it works as expected. And I also still want to migrate the data, probably to DOKK.

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