This Week’s Program: Aug 29 - Sep 2

Greetings, friends! I went and gone and did it.

For those of you who might be newer subscribers, and for everyone else too, let me break down how I author this newsletter. It starts in Emacs. All of my Tinyletters are written as markdown documents in my personal website’s Jekyll repository. When I’m ready to publish, a git pre-push hook kicks in and fires off an SMTP message to Tinyletter’s servers.

I’ve also been trying to figure out how to become reasonably productive on my iPad Pro, enough to use it as my day-to-day personal computer. The fly in the ointment here is all of the “programming” I do. Well, now I’ve got that covered.

I’m writing this newsletter on (and intend to send it from fingers crossed) my FreeBSD server that I’ve got running on a Digital Ocean droplet. I’m SSHing into it thanks to the wonderful Panic Inc.’s app Prompt. I took some time this week to get it all set-up. No Ansible or any other kind of configuration management, just trying to figure it out as I go. I hope to learn a bunch of stuff along the way:

• How to be a decent system administrator.
• How to security?
• FreeBSD ins and outs. Ports and pkg and jails and zfs…
• Do I have what it takes to be leet (elite)?

We out chea, got my dotfiles, got my emacs.d, and now I’m writing my programming newsletter by connecting to freebsd on my iPad Pro. Prepare for me to be more insufferable.

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I had to update my dotfiles to not care so much about brew. We’re all /usr/local here in the land of BSD.

Some small nags about working in Emacs on my iPad. I can’t remap the keys on my Apple Smart Keyboard. That means Caps Lock is still Caps Lock and not Control. The worst key. Also, the Option key doesn’t act as a Meta key and that’s throwing me off hard. Luckily Panic put some good software keys to make this usable, but with just a few tweaks to the keyboard I could be truly smug.

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I wrote some Elm this week, too! Here I’m modeling out a “model” in Necromunda. The terms here get murky, because the Necromunda rules frequently refer to a “model” as the physical little miniature that you move around the game board. I think I really love the ML family of languages, and Algebraic Data Types are great. Slowly starting to get a feel for the Elm way of doing things.

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Finally getting the hang of the Elm Architecture. Nothing to impressive here. I render an @ in the middle of the screen and when you click on it it becomes “selected”. The next hard part is figuring out enough SVG to structure the game’s graphics. Luckily, there’s this fantastic roguelike that someone has written that I can use as a guide. Thanks Elm Slack!

This is a three-day weekend and then my wife and I will be attending XOXO in Portland next week (our first time)(please say “hi” if you’re there). I’m not sure how that will affect my coding and tinyletter schedule, but it likely will.

Until then,
– Mark