🐫 Today's updates ⌨️

Sunday, March 29, 2020 :: Tagged under: blurb pablolife culture. ⏰ 4 minutes.


Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! πŸ˜„


🎡 The song for this post is Trinkle, Trinkle, by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane. 🎡

There's a ton of news outlets trying to make sense of SARS-CoV-2; I linked the Kurzgesagt video earlier, the 3Blue1Brown video also gets linked around a lot, but I saw this one today, also appreciated it:

🐫 OCaml again

It is with a heavy heart I regret to inform you that OCaml has been at it again. I tried rebuilding Fleaswallow from a clean environment and, unsurprisingly, found that the build was not reproducible. It was especially maddening this time: Jane Street gives you a set of rewriters that play with their other libraries and they added one that killed my build because I didn't put a type annotation on an ignored variable.

They also hated polymorphic = (in Jane Street land, = is only between ints, and you must instead use phys_equal <a> <b> to do equality).

I patched it! And fixed the early bug I found. But it's silly how many hours I've spent on this, reading dune and opam docs, and it's still this weird fucking ceremony to build a project clean.

I put up with it because, sincerely, I do enjoy writing OCaml! Especially if you set up coc.nvim and a language server, it's fucking brilliant, you can just write things relatively easily and end up with a correct program that runs super fast.

Anyways, Fleaswallow can now build empty sites without posts (it was originally built explicitly for "blogs"). I'm "tracking" "issues" here, it's not something I'm working on too hard, but picking away at it.

Updates to The Setup

I've never been super attached to hardware or peripherals when computing. Here's from when I talked about "my setup":

The most odd thing about my engineering setup is that I don't work effectively with accoutrements. Most SWEs I know have external keyboards, mice, trackpads, standing desks, or keyboard trays. Most use a large external monitor, or multiple monitors, some turn a widescreen monitor on its side for more vertical space.

My desk has a bunch of stuffed toys. Every morning I pull out my laptop, use the laptop's keyboard and trackpad, on the laptop's screen, and nothing else.

So when we started working remotely, I was doing more-or-less what I was always doing: using the laptop as-is. But then my keyboard did what Apple laptop keyboards do, and work got to be impossible without a steady stream of profanities. So I present to you: the remote working setup!

The new setup: a monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset.

Things to note:

So this feels like the Animal Crossing starting tent of remote work setups. Depending on how much longer I end up doing this, I'd make a bunch more improvements:

What are your favorites? What have you been doing or find helpful? Feel free to email me or add a comment πŸ‘‡

Thanks for the read! Disagreed? Violent agreement!? Feel free to join my mailing list, drop me a line at , or leave a comment below! I'd love to hear from you πŸ˜„