March 2017

NZ.js

As this is published, I am at a JavaScript conference in Wellington.

Now, as I write this, I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to love the talks and keynotes by @aurynn, @rockbot, @riblah, and others.

Health

In January, I weighed about 87kg. In February, I got down to 85kg. At the 1st of March, I weighed 84kg. Three weeks prior, my brother, who is an accomplished (if only by hobby) sportsman, and a second-year Med student, made the comment that given my stature and eating habits, he expected I could be slim if I did just a little bit more exercise. Thus, in March, I am upping my exercise from a 30-minute walk three times a week to the same, but every day… and with an eye to increase again in, say, two months.

Ops School

I found this: http://www.opsschool.org/ and have started on it.

I don’t think I want to pivot onto Sysadmin / Syseng roles, but I am always in quest of knowledge to both make me more effective and combat my (waning, thankfully) impostor syndrome.

Master Kylo

Currently going through a second round of detailed outlining, after changing the start point of the story and some perspective details, as well as a deepening of the original style. I’m still aiming for at least a beta release on Star Wars Day, but I may miss the mark.

Blograph

The engine this blog runs on is a custom-built server designed and implemented over three years ago when I tired at not having the options I needed, and just decided to make it my way. However, I also didn’t touch it much in those three years. Over time, some bugs were discovered, a few missing features exposed, and one large element of the design was never actually used — while creating a performance limiter nonetheless.

Also, I needed an exercise to get back into Rust.

So I did a blackbox reimplementation of my blog, plus a few missing features, minus two obsolete ones. I made it a hybrid of Rust and JavaScript, using Neon to bridge the two. I blogged about some patterns I encountered when wrangling the Neon bindings.

The new version has upwards of 300 tests (170 on the Rust side, and more than that on the JS side), sports a 5x performance boost, has up-to-spec CommonMark rendering and new footnote support, and is a lot more consciously designed instead of haphazardly put together. It’s live; you’re reading this article on an instance right now.