Midnight Pub

Writing is hard

Hi all, it's been a while.

I've been meaning to post, but life and work and yadda yadda usual apology story, sorry I didn't pick up the phone.

Here's a bunch of stuff that should probably be their own posts, but I just don't have the discipline for it.

Work projects piling up. I'm the sole informatician in a small lab, and I was kept busy by doing all the analyses for everyone. To reduce this, I set up a dedicated Jupyter Hub[0] that is accessible via reverse proxy to the internet, and teaching everyone how to code (read: copy and paste from ChatGPT). This has been amazingly empowering, leading me to conclude that informaticians don't actually do much other than read documentation, and now AI is bringing this fire to the masses.

Android Apps. No, not Kotlin or whatever framework these companies are forcing devs to learn these days. Terminal Apps, via Termux[1]. Termux has this extremely neat interaction framework via the `termux-dialog` and `termux-notification` utilities. Essentially, you know how when you get a notification from an app sometimes, that has three buttons, or even a reply feature? Yeah, Termux offers that transparently. You can create a whole "app" by having a notification that has a button for taking input, and launching a subprocess to replace/give a new notification with new data, and so forth. I currently have an "App" that checks for train times in my area, another which produces AI generated (stable diffusion via Comfy UI[2] backgrounds), another that spawns a security cam on my home machine and shows me a window, and another that starts recording a timelapse of my current phone's camera. All interactive via android notifications.

Lamenting the loss of my bike. It's been a year now and still haven't fixed my bike. I am getting noticeably lazier, my coffee consumption has noticeably increased, and my SO is making hints that maybe I should get a new one. I want to, but somehow a decent bike in the 200-400 € range does not exist. The search continues.

Stuff I want to do before the year is up

Publish code. I've developed so much background code that has been immensely useful to myself and others in my work group, to the point that my code is being shared and is arguably invaluable to their projects, but not being cited in their papers. Maybe I get a mention in acknowledgments, but rarely a co-authorship. By publishing my code and putting it somewhere accessible (e.g. Bioconductor[3]), I don't need to be a co-author or even mentioned, just cite my code. I've got one package up to scratch and awaiting review, just 3 more to get up to that same standard.

Javascript projects. I've got a few fun JS projects that just need to be finished, displayed on HackerNews and then shelved for the toy projects they are. They're at the finishing stage now, but I just need to move the needle forward. One is a housing app that simulates how much space you will need to house X many people (based on a previous midnight post of mine[4]), and another is a simulator for alternative splicing[5].

Community contributions. I was semi-actively developing for GNU Emacs, adding a much needed feature that I wanted. This means much careful negotiation through mailing lists trying to do things /their/ way, and not my way (read: I want this feature *now*, they want this feature to last *forever*). My last active communication was two months ago, but I want to try again. I have a weird feeling that this will be my magnum opus.

Fly a drone. I have two proprietary drones owned by a company that no longer supports them, so I've been opening up their capabilities and contributing to the Ardupilot[6] open source project. The last time I messed with this, I got my drone ready for its first test flight, and it nose dived pretty hard on launch.

Check in with family. My family lives two countries away. This is by design. I've never had such a better relationship with them as I have by putting a bit of space and sporadic communication barrier between us. But my parents are getting old, and I have a sibling who needs some attention too.

Blogging! I do cool shit! I should be posting this in a place where future employers will look at my CV and think, "holy shit, we need throw money at this guy". Academia is cool and all, but the hours are long and you don't get overtime, and the pay is barely enough to keep the rent. I need an industry job. The kind of job where they fire you in a year because the company went under, but you get the severance pay.