“Just don’t go to any company that does web stuff”

I don't remember exactly when YouTube recommended the first Primeagen videos to me. After watching a few of his videos I decided I liked them. He talked about memory management, which was a subject I knew little about. I knew from rebuilding the same open mic listing app in WordPress, Next.js, Django and Rails that …

Saving for later: “Challenging projects every programmer should try” + compiler books

I was watching a Primeagen video on YouTube where he read an article called Challenging projects every programmer should try. It has a text editor, game, compiler, operating system and spreadsheet. The article cites data structures needed to build these. During the video, Prime strongly recommended the books Writing an Interpreter in Go and Writing …

Finishing the frontend for my Go WordPress front-end tomorrow

I'm so ready to be done with my Go-powered WordPress front-end. I'm close to the finish line though! I have five items left on my front-end list, and four them are CSS. The last is implementing error screen. After that, here's what's left: Embedding CSS files & templates Build production Docker and Compose files Update …

Tabling Elixir for another couple of years

I'm perpetually interested in Elixir, but as I consider where I want to take my skills I don't see it as a major boon to my career. It might be time to accept that it's falling into the same bucket as C#: something I'm morbidly curious about but will likely never use. There are too …

Raspberry Pi OS project

As I try to go ever-deeper down the stack, I saw this tutorial today and I wanted to post here to make a note to myself about it. It looks like a cool project for maybe a year from now. https://www.rpi4os.com/

If I want to be a great developer, I need to work on hard problems

I've spent most of my career interested in the application layer of programming. What's more, I've only been building my experience in web. But lately I've been watching countless YouTube videos from Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, both of whom are independent game & game engine developers. Both are monster programmers with a deep understanding …

Fork in the road: C or Elixir/Kotlin/Swift

I decided to start learning Go for a small handful of reasons: Go has massive concurrency Go emphasizes simplicity Go compiles down to a single binary so it's easy to distribute I want to better understand pointers Companies and projects that I trust use it (Docker, K8s, Netflix, Twitch, Digital Ocean, Caddy, ddev, etc) I …

My brain is crying: learning new languages and skills

I've spent the day getting Xdebug set up and step-debugging Laravel. I'm still trying to figure out how to flash messages to my Go todo app. It's a slow process. Laravel's source is complicated. It's less complicated than Rails or Django, but anything sufficiently general-purpose is going to be complicated. Laravel is very general purpose, …

Working from a todo list again: future toy projects and languages

It's been a long time since I was working from a todo list on one of my projects. The last time was probably SacMusic back in May. Ironically, my todo list is for my todo app in Go. So far my impressions of Go are mixed. I like the simplicity of the language and I …

Changes overdue: time to get reckless

I went to a party tonight. And in the past few weeks I've hung out with a few friends whom I haven't seen in a while. In both cases I had little to talk about and little to contribute. As I was sitting, staring into the fire pit at the friendsgiving party tonight I was …