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

Practicalliλ︎

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.

Sponsor practicalli-john

All sponsorship funds are used to support the continued development of Practicalli series of books and videos, although most work is done at personal expense and time.

Thanks to Cognitect, Nubank and sponsors from the Clojure community for your continued support


Short week at work

Thoughts for the week

Bank holiday Monday and two personal holidays this week, so only two days at work and very few meetings, yay!.

Should be able to make a big dent into the gardening this week.

500 Commit Streak on GitHub

Thoughts for the week

500 day commit streak on GitHub reached today. This was legitimately achieved by doing a small amount of work each day.

I am not actively coding and committing on a regular basis in my current role, so the large majority of these commits are for Practicalli or Open Source projects.

GitHub stats - 500 day commit streak

Continuing to simplify the Practicalli AstroNvim User Config, so changes from the AstroNvim template are in new files or in community.lua.

The most visual opinionated changes are in practicalli.lua, such as dashboard logo and theme.

Motivated to work on the Practicalli Sustainable Life book after joining a sustainability working group at the company.

Its April Fool

Thoughts for the week

Adding SSH keys to the YubiKey hardware security key provides convenience of SSH key use, especially when required for multiple computers.

Using a YubiKey to keep a single SSH key pair removes the need to generate a key pair for each computer.

Using one SSH key avoids the need for multiple entries in the allowed-signatures file to check locally that a commit has been signed.

Git Multiple SSH Keys & Neovim

Thoughts for the week

A short week at work made even shorter by a company day to celebrate going live. A chance to unwind and reflect.

Neovim 0.10 is planned for 1 May 2024. Plugins should be unafected, although actively developing plugins like Neogit are trying to used parts of the Neovim API. The parts of Neogit that use 0.10 api should be more efficient, although I assume there wont be a noticable difference in functionality.

I will update Neovim to 0.10 when AstroNvim confirms it is working well with that release.

Having a Donut Party with system components

Thoughts for the week

Not quite back to full health yet, so took it easy at the weekend.

More work on restoring spare bicycles so I can sell them or otherwise find a good home.

Continued the refactor of the Practicalli Service template, specifically refining the design of the system config and helper functions to support a development REPL workflow.

Debian Linux almost everywhere

Thoughts for the week

Enjoying being back in Debian Linux world, with regolith desktop as the tiling window manager.

I have several Lenovo laptops and all but one are now upgraded to Debian Linux, using the testing version of the distribution.

The most significant difference with Debian Linux is the use of a separate root account for administration, rather than using sudo in Ubuntu Linux.

Springing back into life slowly

The last month has been tough due to illness, although still managed to do a little work with Practicalli to keep me motivated (both for work and my own personal health)

I though the Practicalli Project Templates had broken when I tried to create a new service project. It took me an hour or so to realise I had simply been using the command with the wrong argument, doh!

Alias Shell that updates Shell

Thoughts for the week

As this week is mosly tweaks for Zsh history, I've titled this journal entry to be a play on words from the Shakesphere play 'Alls well that ends well'.

The fd built-in command for Zsh is a very effective way to keep the command history clean.

Engineering Practices

Thoughts for the week

Illness is all around. Around 12% of people in Germany are currenly ill through covid, flu or a stomach virus. I have some relatively mild symptoms this week.

The hunt for a new place to live continues, investigating lots of facinating places in Scotland. Discovered an Ecopark with sustainably built housing. There is one house for sale and some new builds in the near future. Requested a build plan for the new build houses.