Status update, September 2020
Published on September 30, 2020
Another month gone, another status update.
My main focus this month was on reporting what I learned during the Games Made Quick gamejam. This resulted in a two-parter:
While working on those articles, I had to write some benchmarking code, available on my tests repository.
These articles had rust code samples, so I bumped into some bugs in the rouge syntax highlighting gem I’m using.
There was a PR from 2016 that fixed a lot of rust issues, but most of them were fixed in different pull requests in the meantime. I tracked those down, figured out what issues were still present in the main branch, and made a couple of small PRs to fix them:
These were merged fairly quickly, and the original PR was closed.
When publishing those two articles, I explored the idea of syndicating my blog posts to DEV.to. They can import content from an RSS feed as draft posts, so I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, this feature has issues dealing with newlines. There was some discussion on what was happening, but not why, so I cloned the repository and started making some experiments.
The issue comes from converting HTML to markdown, which is mostly handled by
the reverse_markdown gem. Part of
the problem was in a monkey patched class that didn’t get any updates, so I
fixed that:
But the other part of the problem is upstream, and I don’t see how to easily fix it. I reported my findings in this issue:
I’m not sure if I will continue working on that issue, since I can’t find a quick solution to the problem and it might require a significant overhaul.
On another note, people are renaming their git branches from master to main
(I’ve migrated some of mine, and try to use main in new repos). This change
inevitably leads to some things breaking. This happened with
Dokku’s documentation, so I made a PR to
fix it:
Dokku itself doesn’t support main by default, so maybe that’s something worth
exploring.
This week I’ve been exploring rust in a web dev context. I’m working on a toy project, imghost, to see how the experience is like. I’ll probably report on this soon.
I’ve been complaining about my laptop for months now. 8GB of ram is not enough anymore, and when it starts swapping, everything halts. Some disk heavy operations would also freeze the entire thing, so replaced the SSD to see if it helps. Instead of cloning the disk, I decided to start from scratch.
I recently changed my setup from using X11 to using Wayland (mostly to get multi-monitor variable DPI support), so there were a lot of packages and configs that I didn’t need anymore. I also decided to skip chromium and rely on firefox exclusively.
One of the advantages of starting from scratch is that I had to update my dotfiles repository. I also took the opportunity to document (in my private notes.git) the installation process and which packages I usually need. I’ll try to figure out the best way to make this public.