/tinyletter

The Programs of the Week I Started Something New

This Week’s Program: Aug 16 - Aug 19

After last week’s retrospection I spent some time this week wistfully brooding, as my ilk are wont to do. The post-launch agile blues. This week, I started on my next projects:

FreeBSD

I had a few motivations behind spinning up this server:

  • I want to set-up an SSH home base so that I can do more development on my iPad and get more comfortable managing a server remotely.
  • I want to get familiar with various flavors of *nix out there. Having encountered a fair share of friction with Ubuntu on sonic-sketches and my trials and tribulations with other flavors of Linux over the years, I wanted to explore outside of the GNU/Linux bazaar.
  • I’m fascinated with FreeBSD’s history and philosophy.
  • I’ve been really impressed reading the FreeBSD Handbook. Mostly because it exists as a thing to read.
  • Jails, ZFS, DTrace.

So we’ll see how this progresses. My goal for the next couple of weeks is to get Emacs running and to write some code (and write this newsletter) using my iPad and Prompt. I toyed a little bit with trying to get Terraform or Ansible to manage the server but that seems somewhat premature.

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I’ve been fascinated with Elm since my first encounter when exploring Functional Reactive Programming (which I stumbled upon when learning about Iteratees). It’s been really interesting to watch it evolve and see its influence spread across the web application landscape.

I’ve been toying with writing a talk abstract/proposal that traces the evolution of functional reactive approaches from the research of Conal Elliott through Microsoft’s Reactive Extensions to Evan Czapliki’s thesis to the emergence of React.js. Let me know if that’s a talk you’d like to see!

Anyway, I’ve never made a game before. I think I’d like to try that. As I dabbled in psuedorandomness I got a newfound appreciation for dice-based games, especially Dungeons & Dragons and an old favorite, Warhammer 40,000.

hive-city is a project where I will attempt to make a game with Elm inspired by Necromunda. Necromunda is a tabletop wargame from the mid 90’s, set in the Warhammer 40K universe, that encapsulates the things that I thought were cool when I was a kid in the mid 90’s. The README outlines the goals of the project. I’m only beginning to get up to speed with the Elm language and architecture.

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I took some time this week to fix an older project of mine that I had neglected: DailySpin.biz.

dailyspin takes some text or a Twitter URL and makes it the headline of a spinning newspaper gag. When I made this in 2013 these CSS techniques were all experimental and new. As browsers evolved, the newspapers stopped spinning. Now they spin again!

Until next week,
📰 Mark