Weeknotes for March 7th – 13th. Work work work.
Things are officially back to normal, with a side of busy: I spent most of the week working, and the rest with family. Little to report, but I still enjoy the weekly check-in here.
It’s a bit scary to see that a whole week passed, and very little happened because I was so buried in work.
pretalx
Pretalx wasn’t a focus this week, so there were only a handful of tiny changes: A minor issue in our GDPR agreement plus an address update, CI improvements (auto-cancelling runs in PR if updates are pushed), and fixes to the email placeholder display. I also finally made custom exports (where you can pick and choose fields and data, and export to CSV or JSON) the first export choice you’re presented with, prompted by a user looking for exactly this and not finding it.
Venueless
Last week I said “more next week, hopefully” regarding our potential new feature, but it turns out that we need more user/customer research, so nothing yet.
Other tech things
I spent most of the week working for a non-open-source project, so I can’t tell you more than that it’s in the early project stage where I get to ask the stakeholders a ton of questions, and then some, to be sure I understand the problem. Exhausting, but promising.
Other than that, I updated a pretix plugin due to the new pip dependency resolver, and updated some other projects and translations. A new Python 3.11 alpha came out, so I updated the package on AUR, too. In my free time, I also improved my medieval tracery window generator (nerrrrd) on stream and then printed some of the resulting pictures with my pen plotter, which was very neat.
I cleaned up my shell aliases a bit, made them more resilient to running on machines without certain tools installed, and added two new ones:
alias yay="sudo trickle -s -d 6000 yay"rate limits my package manageralias htop="btop"replaces htop (which I will execute by reflex, forever) with the shiny btop
Oh, and I installed ublacklist in my browser, which makes it easy to remove entire domains from Google results. Never seeing w3schools ever again whee.
Life stuff
That project proposal I finished last week? Didn’t get it. Sad, but I had plenty of other things to do: I took my sister out for lunch, helped my brother with his big school project, met with friends for drinks, and spent all of the weekend with various parts of my family.
I improved my main website a bunch, adding more visible links to my other sites, especially to dev.rixx.de.
Books
I finally finished Stuff Matters, 14 days after starting it. That’s how it goes when I read nonfiction, even when I find it really interesting. As if to prove the point, it took me all of a single day to finish Dragonflight, that same day. Yikes.
Also managed to get out a couple of book reviews: