sjm @sjm@mastodon.social

noticed an interesting "physical computing ritual" that I've been doing today. I use i3, and have a laptop that I hook up to a big monitor every morning. When I first hook it up, all of my workspaces are on my laptop, and you have to do a bunch of ctrl-shift-ing to get everything over to a different monitor usually. Instead, I close the laptop lid for long enough for all of the workspaces to shift over to the monitor, then open the laptop up again.

works a treat.

I was having a read of Programming as Theory Building (https://gist.github.com/onlurking/fc5c81d18cfce9ff81bc968a7f342fb1) and now I'm thinking about if it's possible to design software in a way that makes it's theory easy to impart. Not necessarily a programming language, but at the design level.

Or possibly out of chunks of well-known theory. Dare I say "pattern language"?

the more I read about solarpunk, the more I think that Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' is pretty close to being solarpunk

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=christopher+alexander+a+pattern+language&t=canonical

I'm currently fascinated about storing and editing code in a way that is consistent with its semantics, rather than using plain text for everything and requiring that each tool parses and understands the code separately. I know that lsp has done a bunch here, but it's not quite as far as it could go.

but having said that, no idea what to do with this fascination.

I’m planning on trying this with some folk from work and the little schemer. We’ll see how it goes 😎

I wonder if pair/mob reading of difficult programming books would be useful. I’m especially thinking of books like the reasoned schemer or the little typer, where there’s a certain pace that lends itself to discussion and diving deep.

It would set up some accountability and maybe some momentum. Or it might be terrible, idk

I think it's probably both - this is the longest I've been without "work" for a long time, but this is pretty much how self-directed plans and projects have always gone.

Ah well, I had a blast learning about proof assistants, inductive proofs and idris.

I've been free of work for about 3 months now, and starting up again in a week. I'm not sure how that's going to feel, but I sure haven't been focused in my time off. I've half-done a lot of small things and then moved on. It's unclear if that's how I do things and I need others to focus me, or if it's been the extra anxiety brought on by these unpleasant times.

reading through this document of *high cadence thoughts* and struck immediately - it's so easy to forget that people teach themselves, sharing what and how you're learning, your unpolished thought process and where you find information can be as effective as *teaching*, without the implied social pressure of being 100% right and a good teacher. https://quip.com/jgBUALiGBjwp

I was working on my own note-taking software but (for now at least) org-mode and org-roam have stopped me from doing any more.

That said, I've still got some ideas that I'd like to play around with in note-taking that I haven't seen anywhere else, so I might come back to them eventually...

Finally taking the plunge into emacs+evil-mode. It's been vim for so long, but I've been getting into lisps for ages, and elisp seems like a much nicer way to build up configuration then viml...lets see if I'm right