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Journalλ︎

A journal of thoughts and experiences from commercial work and community projects 🌐 powered by Material for MkDocs

Practical.li provides free online books covering practical guides to Clojure programming and development workflows. Practicalli Engineering Playbook contains specific guides across the full spectrum of software development.

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1001 GitHut Commit Streak

On Sunday 17th August 2025 I completed 1,001 days of successive commits in GitHub (without cheating).

Practicalli Johnny profile - GitHub activity statistics - 1000 day streak

Some job hunting during the week included being contacted by a recruiter from Docker regarding an engineering manager role (security division). The recruiter that helped get me a position at Citi also got in touch for a healthcare engineering manager role.

Planned a longer cycling route to the Isle of Grain, one of the more remote parts of Kent. Grain village is right by the sea and there is a long sandy beach there. As its a remote location, there are very few people around usually.

I've taken several trips to Grain with my friend Gaiville who I trained and cycled with from Lands End to John O'Groats in 2019.

I've altered the start of the route previously used to accommodate people from the local cycling club.

Movies to see

Movies watched

  • September 5 covers the terrorist attach at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, told from the perspective of the people working at the ABC sports division who were able to broadcast live much of the tragedy.
  • A Simple Favour with Anna Kendrick in the lead role, as the perfect mom who gets involved with some 'interesting' people.
  • Matrix trilogy a relaxing bank holiday movie marathon and even after 25 years the movies looks great and are still very engaging.

Current TV shows:

  • Twisted Metal is quirky and fun show with bizarre and disturbing characters who are also quite likeable too.
  • Star Trek Strange New Worlds I find to be a very fresh and fun take on the Star Trek world, whilst still having darker storylines and background threads.
  • Gravity Falls watching this show again for about the 5th time, using it as my brain switch on / switch off show. I have watched Rick n Morty too many times 🤣

Another heatwave

This week we have the pleasure of another heatwave in the United Kingdom. Its not quite as extreme as the one in July (37 degrees Celsius), but it will in the 30 degree range again for several days.

The week started with a cycle ride to collect some new shoes. In training for a ride up a mountain during a French trip I did two more ~100km rides back to back

I use the Lake brand of shoes as they have a wide fit size. Although going through there very detailed sizing chart it was clear that not all shoes were wide enough for my feet (without being far too long).

Is AI worth the cost

OpenAI gives a curl command to initially test the account setup, then its nothing until a credit card is added to the account. So is it actually worth spending money on something I cannot try out first?

Watching Beacon 23 again and enjoying it even more a second time around. The first viewing I was a bit confused with the storyline jumps, but it makes a lot more sense now.

The Editor code assistant plugin for Neovim had a bit update, although it is no longer running the ECA server.

The Saga Begins

I tried using Hyprland with Debian Linux a few months ago but the packages are a little out of date even when using the unstable (SID) distribution. As I had been using SID packages, then the Debian Linux system had become a little too unstable for day to day use. Interestingly I installed the KDE desktop and that worked very nicely before I started again from scratch.

Hyperland is kept up to date in Arch Linux although there is a lot more work to learn and maintain arch linux compared to Debian Linux. pacman command options are quite cryptic and I found them hard to memorise. Its also easy to break things doing an update (the downside of a rolling release based distribution).

Garuda Linux adds some nice tools on top of Arch Linux (and can also used the Nix sub-system) to simplify overall package upgrades and a range of other maintenance tools.

Supporting the editor-code-assistant/eca-nvim project via testing and feedback. Contributed a plugin spec for lazy.nvim plugin manager. The eca-nvim plugin is in very early stages, but I got a prompt to appear in Neovim 😃

Health and fitness continues to improve and the number of cycle rides and distance continues to increase. In July I completed 800km distance from 11 distinct rides, totalling around 35 hours of riding across the month (not including stoppage time).

Cycling maintenance seems to be complete for both the Ribble SL Disc and Bianchi 928 RC road bikes.

Aims:

  • DONE: new cleats for the black & red Lake shoes (and readjust cleats on white lake shoes)
  • DOING: upgrade OS on rangerone (Garuda Linux Hyprland flavor)
  • BLOCKED: continue eval of shuttle and rust experiments - on hold due to service outages
  • TODO: update Practicalli Clojure hot loading examples

Practicalli working

Much cooler week and my ankle is feeling sore, so more focus on work this week.

Aims:

  • update Practicalli Clojure hot loading examples
  • continue eval of shuttle and rust experiments - on hold due to service outages
  • new cleats for the black & red Lake shoes
  • upgrade OS on rangerone (Garuda Linux Hyprland flavor)
  • in journal
  • 4 min read

Practicalli on a minimal budget

I am writing an article about running Practicalli for (almost) zero cost, only the domain name renewal incurs a yearly fee.

Surprisingly, GitHub started showing a message about a billing problem. As I shouldn't be billed for anything I am aware of, further investigation was required. The issue was resolved really quickly by GitHub support, so I can continue with describing how I run Practicalli on a minimal budget.

Movies:

Arrival is a beautiful film with an engaging story, breathtaking cinematography and a very powerful message about the importance of language and communicating. The film opens and closes with the moving "On the Nature of Daylight" composition from The Blue Notebooks by Max Richter.

Cycle rides:

Speedgate Cafe Wednesday Group Bianchi goes to Windsor Castle and back again

  • in journal
  • 7 min read

Anniversary of London 7-7

The week started slow as I was a little tired from the weekend riding. Blender was fired up to edit the videos from the Isle of Wight and Red Barn rides.

Monday was the 20th anniversary of the tragedy of the London bombings on 7th July 2005. I remember it all too well as I was a cycle courier at at the time.

Fingers crossed I finished all the maintenance on my Bianchi 928 RC road bike, which I have had since 2006. The Bianchi is still in excellent condition after a great many journeys and Audax events.

I have used a Garmin 1030 cycle computer for the last 7 years and its been really good experience. Unfortunately the mounting tabs have snapped and can no longer be mounted. I will try and repair the cycle computer by replacing the back case and if that fails I will consider trading in for a new Garmin. Either way, it seems time to consider choosing a new cycle computer for the next 5-10 years.

I was hit by a large vehicle on the way back from collecting the new cycle computer. I was a bit shook up for a day or two but apart from some bruising I seem to be in one piece.

Bigfoot Club Ride - Hildenborough

  • in journal
  • 6 min read

Half way through the year

It was too hot too think or do anything apart from watch Twin Peaks at the start of this week.

Updated the versions of libraries used in aliases within Practicalli Clojure CLI Config and cut a new release

Watched the OReilly Practical Rust with Hands-On labs live video course which had lots of Rust code examples, including the use of some data science libraries.

Movies and TV this week

  • Transcendence - an excellent film about a technological singularity and how humans struggle to understand or trust an intelligence that doesn't look like them. Small minded people end up ruining the world because of something they feared rather than tried to understand.

  • Twin Peaks is a very quirky TV show that was hugely popular when I was in my early 20s. The show has many rich characters and a few very silly ones (depending on your point of view). The storyline is based around a tragic crime that is being investigated by Agent Dale Cooper. Agent Cooper is not your typical FBI agent and really makes the show worth watching all by themselves 😃

  • in journal
  • 116 min read

Clojure LSP, Rust, Cycling & Bike maintenance

The Neovim section on the Clojure LSP site needed an update, so I created a PR with more information and updated configuration links.

Bicycle maintenance and a few final ride this week in preparation for the ride around the Isle of Wight. There were more replacements than I first thought, brake pads, cleats, pedals. I have done lots of long distance riding for most of the last 6 years (except the COVID years) so I shouldn't have been surprised.

I have been looking at more products from AliExpress and revisited the Trace Velo video about Ali Express and if its worth it for tips on getting the most out of this website. If you know exactly what you are looking for and buy from established companies, then it is as good as using services like Amazon.

Panda Podium is a company that makes it easy to find quality products from China based manufactures, greatly reducing the risk. They also have some good reviews of products too.

Investigating the Rust language again this week, in between the cycle training, maintenance and heatwave 🤣 There is a great looking deployment platform called Shuttle for Rust apps, feels like the same enjoyable experience as Heroku.

Tv & Movies this week:

  • Blade Runner: The Final Cut - one of my favourite films of all time, I never get tired of watching.
  • Flow a wonderful movie (especially if you love cats, which I do). Animation and music were very moving.

Getting hot

The United Kingdom is heading for another heatwave.

Continuing to train for a cycling trip at the end of the month. Lots of Yoga and a long ride at the weekend. Finding some interesting routes for training.

GitHub sent an email about charging the Practicalli Org. Investigation revealed a change in that GitHub started to meter usage of user accounts and Organisations since March/April 2025.

I am starting to collect my thoughts about AI (and dig up information about software agents I researched back in 1997). An interesting aspect of AI is the relationship that people are building with AI, both positive and in some cases a little disturbing.

Listening to "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, specifically the anti-war song Two Tribes, reminded me of the early 1980's and the deep concern about nuclear war, which seems to be an increasing risk at the present time.

The toppling of US-aligned governments in Iran and Nicaragua and the Soviet-Afghan war drove a significant increase of tension in the cold war, as make prevalent in the UK by the government's protect and survive public information campaign.

I remember watching the file Threads, an apocalyptic nuclear war drama which they actually showed us as school. The family in the film was very similar to my own when they were younger, so it did have a significant impact. After watching the film I realised how ineffectually the protect and survive information was.

The current near term risk to nuclear war being the violence over the continued land grab in the middle east, driven and masked by fear and hatred that has been there longer than everyone currently alive today. All this propped up with certain people using the politics of popularism to their own financial advantage.

The longer term risk of nuclear war of course being countries fighting over ever dwindling resources, e.g. food and clean water & air, due to disastrous changes to the climate of planet Earth driven by unsustainable human activities.

The 1980's had many songs that covered the darker part of humanity, often in a subtle way that people listening to the songs didn't realise (or want to realise). Here are a few examples I remembered:

  • Luka by Suzanne Vega was quite a harrowing picture of child abuse and how
  • Every breath you take by The Police which is often though of as a love song and was in part about stalking and part authoritarian 'Big Brother' control of the people
  • Russians by Sting was a commentary on the dangers of the 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doctrine pushed by the governments of the USA and Soviet Union. The song also inspired in part the nuclear war story of the Terminator movies.
  • Everybody wants to run the world decries peoples desire for control and power, often at the expense of others. The song originally titled 'Everybody wants to go to war' so reflecting aspects of the cold-war. The song also hints at humanities lack of respect for the environment.
  • In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins venting the frustration, anger and despair that so often accompanies divorce. A very poignant song personally as my parents had a very tumultuous divorce at that time that greatly affected me for many years.