Now - A month to sleep through

Posted on February 05, 2025

We got a bunch of snow, and I caught a few colds, so I effectively slept through the first half of the month.

Creating

I've started tim, the time tracking tool.

Currently supported commands:

❯ start activity
'activity' has been started

❯ view

Today's Activity Times:

activity    0000-00-00 00:00:19.000
reading     0000-00-00 00:16:00.000

Activities Running:

activity    0000-00-00 00:02:06.506


❯ stop activity
'activity' has been stopped

❯ view all

Total Times of Activities:

activity     0000-00-00 00:00:23.000
reading      0000-00-00 04:08:08.000
blank        0000-00-00 04:31:07.000

Today's Activity Times:

activity    0000-00-00 00:00:23.000
reading     0000-00-00 00:16:00.000
blank       0000-00-00 01:01:00.000

Activities Running:

activity    0000-00-00 00:02:09.551

❯ _

Each of the commands is triggered through zsh aliases, and there is no single entry point to the system.

Architecturally, the backend "database" is a csv file. This is processed using sqlite and a variety of other command line utilities. All other management / correction / viewing is done by directly editing the csv.

I'll keep on working on this in the background and have a more proper write up once it's rough edges are refined.

Consuming

Because of the vegging, I watched a bunch.

I watched:

• Squid Game - Season 2

It was pretty aight.

• Pantheon.

Surprisingly good story, felt like it didn't take advantage of being animated a ton, but that didn't detract by being animated.

Apparently season 2 is online, but not available in the US...

• Look Back

This was beautiful.

And I listened to:

• The newest Future of Coding:

  • The best kind of reminder that I need to play Outer Wilds (I will someday.)
  • An outro that would make Carl Sagan proud

  Basically, as an implementation living in an implementation, I liked it all as usual.

Considering

Tangential to the Future of coding episode and I think related to (or maybe a byproduct of) the rewriting I've been wrapping my head around, I've had some thoughts¹ about the feeling of working within a code base:

I spent the last week or so hunting down a bug at work. In a way it's been a vacation from reality. I've found codebases can feel like a virtual world themselves but I haven't nailed down when / what attributes make them occasionally feel that way. It's not the act of editing or type of editor, or the type of project. It's kinda like getting sucked into a good book.

Sometimes projects feel like a list of instructions that are processed and sent along, and sometimes they feel like an entire universe of interaction. This is regardless of a system being run, or compiled or strongly typed or anything. There's a whole virtual machine running in my head that's doing the calculations, before the computer can get to em. Feedback can aid in this feeling, errors, and unit tests failing and all that, but I think it boils down to having a strong intuition about portion I'm working with.

It does seem like it needs to be a system past a certain point in complexity / size, need some room to walk around this world. For example, tim doesn't feel like it's at that point yet, but soon it probably will be. Maybe getting sucked into a code base is a bad sign. Architectural decisions could be made to avoid it spiraling in to a web of interconnected bits, and keep it from becoming a tree who's branches all must be climbed and verified (Although the latter seems like the relatively reasonable path).

Coming back out of that vacation has been rough given the everything going on, but nothing about that has been unexpected.