General update

It has been a while since I've blogged -- this is the fate of all long running projects online, isn't it?

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant to blog here is mainly because I've been considering setting up a Hugo site and running it myself for my blogging platform. I got some way with this, and may still move to it eventually -- but for now I want to treat blogging in the same kind of way as I do running -- it works for me because there's almost zero friction.

When I run, I put on my shoes and go. I think I should prioritize this kind of ease-of-use with blogging as well (for now, at least). So I'll stick to this for the moment.

 

So what have I been up to

  • By virtue of being an open source developer, I've continued making monthly contributions to open source. I was hoping to deep dive some of that here but, unfortunately, it's all so workaday that it's uninteresting.
  •  I've graded for my orange belt in karate - however, I also injured myself (my hip! How old am I???), so I've unfortunately had to step back for a little while to let it properly heal rather than have it flare up every lesson.
  • I've started writing again ... perhaps this deserves its own post. But maybe only after I publish something new.
  • I've also picked up my reading pace, interestingly.

 

So there you have it. Not too much going on, except for writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

9th Kyu - on our way

 So a little while ago I started going to a Karate class with my daughter. She's very busy, in band, glee club, drama, and so on - but last year she gave up ballet, which she'd done for five or six years at this point, and with that, gave up the only physical activity in her roster of things-shes-busy-with. Given that I prioritize physical activity -- I work out most days, either running, spinning, weights -- and know how important it is to take regular exercise, I was adamant that she needs to at least do something that would raise her heart rate a couple times a week. So I suggested Karate. Now, I've been waiting to suggest Karate for almost a decade. My daughter is ten now, but I've wanted to study Karate seriously for much longer than this. When I was my daughter's age, I did a few years with the South African JKA. My sister and I were in an after school care programme, as both of our parents worked, and in both of my primary schools there were Karate classes t...
Read more

JCE's Gifted and Talented Center

Image
Back in South Africa, in the early 90s, I was invited to take part in programmes offered at the Johannesburg College of Education's "Gifted and Talented Center". I can barely remember much about it. I recall that I did courses in electronics, drama, programming, and study techniques. Further, I remember the buildings and the general feeling of the place (massive buildings, alcoves with chairs and windows in the long passages between primary blocks, etc.). However, I couldn't remember very much around the nature of the programme (if, indeed, I ever knew anything about it) - who funded it, how were pupils identified, etc. I tried searching online but to no avail, there was one hit on someone's personal blog, but that was it. I did, however, manage to find the director of the JCE Gifted Child Enrichment Center from the time I attended and took a chance, asking him if he'd be willing to provide me with some information. He response was both generous and massively...
Read more

100 Go Mistakes 10-16

Here we go through the rest of Chapter 2  10 - Not being aware of the possible problems with type embedding Go allows you to not only include types as fields in structs, but also to embed them. Essentially this makes the fields of the embedded/base type part of the "containers" interface. Harsanyi points out that this can lead to exposing more than you might want to, since all of the base type's fields and behaviors are exposed as part of the container. If there is reason to hide the base struct's details, rather simply include it as an unexported field and write accessors. 11 - Not using the functional options pattern I'll admit that I hadn't heard about, or consciously noticed, this pattern before now, but it's quite brilliant. An issue with positional arguments in complex functions is that having tons of arguments that are either null, or unused along certain paths, etc. is a real PITA. My own preference, when factoring out the functionality into mult...
Read more