James Webb telescope reaches its final destination, 1 million miles away
What an amazing achievement. I cannot wait to see what it starts to see and what we start to learn from it.
|
Coding Updates
This will be a bit of a meandering post, not in the sense that I don't know where I'm going with it, but that I plan to hit a few tangentially related topics along the way. Obviously my last post was about how I had revamped my project boards for my main coding projects, so coding is on my mind.
I have found Minecraft scratches a lot of the itch I serve by coding on my own projects. Coding projects, to me, are my equivalent of the people who sew, or do woodworking, or work on cars, etc. It's a hobby and craft that I find satisfaction in the work and the end product. And Minecraft's world building fills much the same mind space for me. It's gotten to the point where I have to force myself to put Minecraft aside and turn back to these side projects lest they fall by the wayside and into disrepair.
It's also notable that the only one of my code projects which is used by other people is the main motivator for this. I run a self-hosted custom MLS Pick'em league for friends and acquaintances. With the next MLS season on the horizon, I have to get moving on updates and fixes in preparation for the next season.
And so, after several months of going hardcore on Minecraft, I have to move it to a back seat for a bit and instead return to my hobby of coding in the hours after work.
My current plotted course for this work is:
- MLS Pick'em - It will be my exclusive (well, probably) coding project until the new season kicks off. Then I'll let it fall back in priority to maintenance rather than working for new features. Putting arbitrary dates on it, I'm expecting to focus on it until middle of March and then it gets backburnered.
- Clerk - My personal tracker, it's a small project and I have a few updates and new features I'd like to add. This stuff should honestly take a week or two, so probably through the rest of March.
- Glowbug - This blog hasn't had any serious work from me for nearly a year now. And I do have work I want to do on it. This ranges from front facing layout and design, adding visitor search, importing tweets into daily archives so they get archived here, and other sundry items. Assuming the time estimates for Pick'em and Clerk are correct (and we know how good coders are at estimating work time) I think the work I want to do here would probably be all of April and could extend into May depending on how ambitious I want to be.
- CEMENT (CollEction ManagEr aNd Tracker) - I wrote about a flexible collection manager tool last year, and it is still an idea I have been turning over now that my Magic collection is sorted. So, if I'm still actively thinking about it, then it is time for me to probably act on it. It would have utility for my Magic collection, Katie's Pez collection, our boardgames, and various other collections we have. In scale, I think it would end up being closer to Pick'em as far as size, there's a lot of front end which would need to be done for it. We'll see. For Cement, I can easily see it being a 3 month project to get it up and running and then it becomes about maintenance and adding new features.
Assuming my time estimates are correct, and that life cooperates (meaning there is nearly a zero percent chance I'm right) I have coding plans up through July. We'll see.
|
An old photo of a very large BBS
This is a big flashback for me. I was only on the tale end of BBSs as a kid. I only remember ever using one BBS, and that was one dad used for work. A local PC part wholesaler ran a BBS to allow customers to log in and place orders, etc. Otherwise mine was the world of MUDs and IRC.
The machines they show look very much like machines I grew up using and working on for my dad.
|
