miniblog.

A 9V battery with wi-fi, so it can notify you when your smoke alarm is activated: https://getroost.com/product-battery.html I'm not sure I'd ever buy one, but it's an innovative way to build a noninvasive integration.

I have a couple of projects that have had a bunch of releases, but no v1.0 yet. In some respects a v0.33 release has more positive associations (a history of support and bugfixes) than a v1.0. I don't have a good solution.

Emergent behaviour of agents in early text adventure games (The Hobbit, released 1982): https://if50.substack.com/p/1982-the-hobbit

Languages with large ecosystems often develop interoperable languages. Scala, Clojure, F# and Typescript all benefit from compatible packages in the "primary" language. I think Rust will eventually see these too. What will they look

mrustc, the compiler for Rust written in C++, can now bootstrap rustc 1.39.0!

I've just added `and` to my toy lisp compiler: https://github.com/Wilfred/proper-compiler-hat/commit/af5c77e30ecbf4884e71c1177a086337aa74d237 It's just a plain function, not a macro or special form. Is that so bad? I've seen confusing uses of `and` with truthiness e.g. `(and maybe-nil (compute-default))` and I'd rather avoid that.

Thoughtful talk on the compile time, runtime and cognitive overhead of abstractions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIkrotSwcc

Suffix syntax (e.g. foo.field or result_bar?) tend to provide a better IDE experience. Languages deliberately tailor features for this, e.g. Rust has .await. Is this a historical accident? I can certainly see how parsing unfinished suffix syntax is easier.

The optimal size for a hobby project seems to be medium. Big projects are more work to change. Little projects have too few opportunities for tinkering/minor refactoring.

C-Reduce has a fun concept of "interestingness", the predicate that you are trying to preserve whilst shrinking your program: https://embed.cs.utah.edu/creduce/using/ It's a great term: previously I've used the boring "property under test".

Have you ever wondered what happens if you hook up a lexer to a diff algorithm? I was feeling smart until I built it and saw the result. The longest common subsequence here is ( ) ( ) ; which is not terribly helpful. I'm going to have to look at proper tree diffing techniques.

When your codebase reaches a scale where you have bots automatically detecting and cleaning up dead code!

It feels really un-Emacsy (to me at least) to have a UI with different font sizes. It's totally supported, but it seem to run against the "everything is an interchangeable buffer of text" vibe.

Technical debt laundering: using a new feature as an excuse to do much-needed refactoring of your code.

Today I learnt that C includes a hash table implementation! libc is bigger than I realised.