Digging In

Finding myself without suitable topics, I went out and dug for some.

I don’t need any statistical analysis techniques to tell that I haven’t been writing much in the past few months. Besides the obvious reasons (i.e., I’ve been busy with other matters, among which a nice, steady coding spree that I’ve been enjoying somewhat), there are two other reasons that bear noting.

The first is that I don’t want to dwell on the negative stuff that’s been happening (and I don’t mean this week’s news from Boston). Portugal’s a political and economical circus, I’m short on cash (not dramatically so, but enough to make a difference) and the number of people I know who’ve left for (nominally) better places keeps rising – but that’s as much as I’ll write concerning those matters for a while¹.

The second is that I don’t have a compelling story to tell right now. Or at least, one that would fit the topic and mood of this site (I haven’t tried my hand at short fiction for a good while, but this wouldn’t be the right place to post it anyway).

The stuff I’ve been working on (well, at least the stuff I should be working on were it not for the usual last minute priorities) isn’t public, most of my hobby projects are progressing too slow to be worth giving a blow-by-blow account of, and, strangely enough, it’s increasingly hard to find worthwhile news to comment upon.

There is certainly a lot to say about how the technology industry is (d)evolving into a distribution channel for content, how web development is finally starting to not suck or how computing paradigms (and, in fact, the whole of the mass market software industry) have become relatively stale since the App Store craze went round, but there are better minds than mine out there writing about that – once they can get over posting about market shares and mobile phone trivia, that is.

Still, some fun was had this week: I had another go at my Raspberry Pi projects (in a nutshell, I still don’t have a good, fast, stable WebKit browser that uses the GPU, but we’re getting closer), managed to read at least half of the PyCon 2013 presentations, played a fair bit with Go and dug into Solr innards, all of which I wish I had the time to pursue further.

And the weather’s great again, which certainly helps.