Weeknotes for February 20th – February 27th. Sick no more!
I’m feeling much, much better this week! I still spent part of the week recovering – turns out, just mostly sleeping for two weeks takes a toll on your body and your mind. But I’m getting there, and I’m incredibly relieved.
pretalx
No big features this week yet, but a lot of small bug fixes, convenience functions, and so on:
- fixed a potential mishandling of the “featured talks” page, making it safer for new organisers
- email placeholders now show their (already existing) help text when you hover over them
- email placeholders can be hidden, so that legacy placeholders don’t clutter the list of available placeholders anymore
- it’s now easily possible to remove a “pending state” from a proposal without changing its actual state
- I found a couple of new self-hosted pretalx instances, including one from the LibreOffice foundation
- I fixed a small bug in the generation of speaker emails that led to some times not showing up
- And while I was at it, I also fixed the format of times in emails and HTML to be more consistent, and prepared it to be available for change via the event’s locale
Not direct work on pretalx-the-project, and more on pretalx-the-product: I swapped out the event logos on the home page to include more prominent and recent events. PyCon US and MozFest using pretalx means bragging rights, and I’m not afraid to use them.
Venueless
Fixed another small bug in the long-running pull request from hell, and sat down with the others to design a new server component without going too far into microservices territory. We’ll be thinking about this one some more before we start implementing it.
Other tech things
I found a project that I might be interested in, found an interested collaborator, and got additional information from the project manager to figure out if their estimates seem plausible. I believe this is what the kids call “adulting”.
Apart from that, I had to fix my Firefox setup a bit, and while I was at it, I tried out Sidebery as an alternative to Tree Style Tabs (which is load-bearing for how I use browsers). Sadly, it seems low on maintenance, so even though it’s prettier, I’m sticking with Tree Style Tabs (but I improved its look a bit to keep up with the ever changing Firefox layout).
I also updated my git server – I’m extremely thankful that Gitea updates literally only involve dropping in the new executable. While I was looking at it, I also set up mirroring for another bunch of my GitHub repositories. Sadly there doesn’t seem a way to mirror all personal repositories automatically, but it’s still much more reassuring than having nothing. Getting my GitHub account suspended would still be terrible, but at least I’d have my stuff. Issues don’t get synced on mirrored repositories, but I don’t use issues much on personal repos anyway.
Life stuff
I started feeling better around Monday or Tuesday, and spent most of the week easing back into things, very slowly. Took some time to tidy and clean my flat, which didn’t look too great after two weeks of nothing, and then did some light amounts of work from Wednesday to Friday. I really wanted to go and work a ton, because February is ending and I haven’t done any paid work all month (freelancer’s nightmare), but decided that going in too fast would be stupid.
I also reached out to a part of my family who I see rarely about visiting them (and arranged a date and who’d come with, a whole bunch of logistics), and signed up for GPN, a local chaos event, and arranged travel and a hotel and stuff.
Books
No new reviews (I completely forgot that writing reviews is a thing I should do), but I read The Fractal Prince, Watership Down and started reading Stuff Matters, all of which I enjoyed.