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Lots of Practicalli content

After a sleepy weekend recovering from my Brompton cycling adventures I am back to organising the Practicalli books and backing up my computers ready for a reinstall.

I am thoroughly enjoying the second season of Andor (Disney+). I loved the first season and the second is just as good. The only thing I would change is have it spread over 3 seasons as there are more of the story to tell that would fill in the timeline gaps. I think they could even get 4 or 5 seasons out of the story lines.

Last week I did consecutive days riding on the Brompton for my commute into London to volunteer for Devoxx UK. This week I did 2 consecutive rides on my Ribble road bike and my legs are glowing after the second ride.

The first ride was a relatively gentle 64km with 678 meters of climbing spread out over smaller climbs. I did manage a personal best of 17.2km/h up Poll Hill. It was a lovely sunny day for riding and we stopped at a nice cafe with delicious cakes (although non for me as my blood sugar is still too high).

The second ride was a little more challenging at 714 meters of climbing in 57km distance, as there were quite a few long hills to climb. I managed a personal best on the segment from Otford train station to the top of Poll Hill, although I was a bit slower up Poll Hill compared to yesterday as my legs were fading a bit.

Never argue with an idiot

“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain

Volunteering at Devoxx

Updated the command line prompt to ⚓ Starship.rs due to an ⚓ issue with Powerline10k.

Starship works very well and is fairly simple to configure using a ~/.config/starship.toml file. There is a 🌐 Catppuccin Powerline Preset (theme) that was customised to move some information onto the right-hand side of the prompt and tweaked some of the default Catppuccin Mocha colors.

Practicalli Customisation of catppuccin-powerline preset

MkDocs is used for all Practicalli websites and something has changed so that ⚓ running a local website fails to build. This does make using MkDocs a little more fiddly to use. If I dont use embedded files in a code block then everything seems okay again.

This week I have been volunteering at ⚓ Devoxx UK in London. Tuesday was setting up activates for the event, such as building video game cabinets. Wednesday and Thursday was room monitor, ensuring the speakers and attendees are taken care of. The room monitor also captures feedback about the event back to the conference organisers (so they can continue optimising the conference for next year).

Preparing Neovim Config release

Preparing the first major release of Practicalli nvim-astro5

Submitted 4 pull requests to Astrocommunity last week, to support the new config and keep it nice and light.

Received a request to add Babashka file support to Practicalli nvim-astro5

For some user acceptance testing work I did a few weeks ago, I received a nice sized Amazon gift card. To give me more ways to keep healthy, I spent some of the money on parts and upgrades to my Brompton folding bike.

Update update update

Updated Practicalli Johnny GitHub Profile to include an available for hire button. Updated the summary of roles to include more recent experiences, especially around technical leadership.

Practicalli books and blogs use Material for MkDocs for publishing to GitHub and its been very solid. I was surprised to experience a local build issue at the start of the week. An update of Material for MkDocs via Pip resolved the issue.

The Publish Book GitHub CI Workflow was pinned to a specific version. The publish-book.yaml file has been updated to use the latest version.

Started adding a Scheduled stale check CI workflow to all the Practicalli GitHub repositories.

Added GitHub Issue types to the Practicalli Organisation to help priorities and organise work.

Older and wiser

After last weeks experiments with Neovim 0.11 and AstroNvim version 5, it was time to put together the new nvim-astro5 configuration. The AstroNvim 5 based config is even simpler with fewer lines of code than current AstroNvim 4 config.

AstroNvim has replaced many plugins with Snacks and it feels even more responsive to use and more visually appealing. I've also updated the theme to Catppuccin (Cat Pussin') for Neovim and Kitty terminal app for a nice consistency.

There will be some significant changes to add to the Practicalli Neovim book as the content migrates to use Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration. So as to not disrupt users of Practicalli Astro (based on AstroNvim 4) I will use a separate git branch and publish initially to Practicalli Neovim Staging site (Update: staging site decommissioned).

Once the Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration is feature compatible and has proven itself stable, I will push all the updates to Practicalli Neovim

Firstly, I had to create a staging website and workflow to publish from a seperate branch (or a pull request) for a book created with Material for MkDocs. A staging site was used for the Practicalli blog generated by Cryogen and pushed to a separate repository (GitHub Org token added for accessing a different repository).

TODO: Release Practicalli nvim-astro5

DOING: are there meaningful icon for linking to GitHub issues, pull requests and and projects? Other than the generic GitHub icon

Material for MkDocs Icons & Emoji page has a search across all icons and emojis available. Potential icons include:

  • - Octicons issue open
  • - Octicons issue closed
  • 🎫 - a ticket
  • 🎟 - tickets (like ticket but red)
  • - a project board

Updating to Neovim 0.11 on Arch Linux was unexpectedly challenging and was an opportunity to look into package mirrors. It seems some mirrors are not updating as regularly as they could. Further investigation into the best mirrors to use for my geographical region seems valuable.

Contributions:

Hello Sunshine

Neovim 0.11 was released last week along with AstroNvim 5, so its time for some testing with Practicalli Astro configuration for Neovim.

A sunny week ahead and my focus will be on health and fitness this week. I have managed to be regular with my walking, although I am still very slow when cycling (especially the hills of Kent).

I have been using LinkedIn to consider the next steps in my career. Unless there is a really interesting role, I am tempted to focus more on community work or maybe part-time / contract work.

End of the tax year in UK

Its the end of the tax year in the UK in a few weeks, so I have been busy ensuring I maximise my pension contributions. I am able to make a significant pension contribution this tax year (and hopefully get a nice repayment via self-assessment later in the year).

I am still interested in using Hyprland (and many related packages) for a tiling desktop environment with excellent UX. I came across Garuda Linux with has many kinds of editions, one being Hyprland.

Practicalli rising

Really getting into the swing of working full time on Practicalli educational content again.

Applied for funding from Clojurists Together for a new Clojure Stacks project and for updating Practical.li content. I've been tidying up the very many tickets across the project issues across the Practicalli GitHub Org.

I created a new GitHub project for Clojurists Together Funding and discovered interesting new features of GitHub projects.

After a report on a compromised GitHub action, I restricted the GitHub action policy for the Practicalli GitHub Org. Unfortunately the liquidz/antq-runner GitHub action is not by a certified Organisation, so is blocked from running unless I add an explicit exception.

reClojure 2025 has been announced for 26th May 2025, this time an in-person event. Strangely this is a Bank Holiday in the UK, so travelling could be 'interesting'.

Unlike previous reClojure conferences, this is a paid event costing 75 GBP. With the event being on a Bank Holiday I am unlikely to attend as I'll be riding with the local cycling club or other long distance event.

Updating Neovim on Termux

After a lovely sunny weekend its back to grey and chilly outside. Later in the week it was sunny but really cold (freezing overnight).

Lots of updating software and tools this week, including

Backup continues for the Lenovo X1 Extreme laptop which is running an old Ubuntu and will have Debian Linux soon.

In the Clojurians Slack community, a post in news-and- channel highlighted a security risk to the tj-actions GitHub action. I don't use this GitHub action, but as a measure of caution I configured a more restrictive policy for running GitHub actions in the Practicalli Org.