I feel like I’ve done nothing this morning. I’ve been sitting in front of my computer, fiddling with various bits of open source work. To make myself feel a bit better, I figured I would write out what I’ve done here:
I’ve closed all of the remaining issues on low-resource-languages, which included searching through the ACL wiki at length, and also making high-level decisions about the list;
I’ve added a footnote to my thesis about the ACL Wiki’s quality, which I didn’t fully know about before;
I’ve fixed all of the tests for ships-log, updated all of the dependencies, and learned more about Promises, afterEach, and Mocha;
I’ve triaged and generally reviewed around 100 open issues on GitHub, reaching notification 0 there;
I’ve read some newsletters and sorted my email;
I’ve reported fraud on my credit card and ordered a new one;
I’ve had a cup of coffee.
All told, this is actually a lot of work. The piecemeal nature of it makes it seem like nothing, but this is the sort of work that builds and leads to goals being realised. One morning spent closing these issues isn’t so bad - this is the first time in years I’ve had nothing specifically labelled to do on low-resource-languages, for instance.
I’m going to pat myself on the back and go for lunch.
Well, a couple of hours later, and I have audit-templates published and working just fine. I also fixed some bugs in covenant-generator related to the cli and creating subdirectories as needed. Feels good to get my hands dirty with some code.
I’m highly tempted to make audit-templates automatically fill out the template for things that I know are in there. But that’s not really the point of the module - the point is to print out a template for an audit, not to start filling it. I think I’ll hold back, because I don’t want to spend a ton of time creating tools that I can do manually faster. Think smarter.
I use npm install often when programming. And… I don’t actually know what yarn does. I wonder if I am being inefficient.
I remember hearing that npm5 actually solved a lot of the problems that Yarn was made to address. So, I’ve just googled that, and found this article.
If I’d start a project tomorrow, I would pick npm to manage dependencies, because:
now it comes with lock file support,
it does not send package usage information to Facebook (yarn uses Facebook’s npm registry mirror)
Well, that solves that problem. Let’s keep going with npm. I wish there was better content addressing with npm, where it would keep a copy somewhere in my harddrive and then pull from there for versions I already have. I don’t know if someone has done this yet with IPFS, but it sounds like a tool that would make sense. I should ask David Dias or Jeromy.
I think that’s probably fine. But I don’t want to have to continually remember the URL. I could add a line to my bash_profile… or perhaps an npm module? I could copy covgen’s code pretty easily. Let’s do that.
Now that I know that I have some money coming in for the summer and that I’ll be OK for contracts for the next few months, keeping an excessive amount of savings seems odd and counterproductive. I can save later.
I just paid off another student loan. Goodbye, $4000 federal loan. That leaves another $4k federal loan, and then two quite a bit larger ones (roughly $45k each). The two larger loans are higher interest, but I want to see clear progress, and I want to whittle down my monthly payments. And, every time I get rid of a loan, I feel just a little bit more free. That’s more important than anything else.
I’ve set up the blog again for this month. I miss writing in public, and I let myself lapse with the April blog after working single-mindedly on my thesis for so long. Now that that is mostly over (I’m still waiting for some reviews), let’s get back into the habit of writing and thinking in public.
A note on the process of setting this up: I used the newly created monthly-blog template and this util script to set this blog up.