Status Update for August 2024

For a while now, I've been wanting to some kind of regular status update entry, inspired by people like Drew Devault and Simon Ser. But of course, life and my general inability to actually plan things kept getting in the way. Now that I both have some time on my hands, and have a revamped website, I thought I would finally go ahead and get started. For the time being, I'm not sticking to a strict format, we'll see how things grow and evolve. For now, I'll include a section on the main things I'm working on, things I've been thinking about, as well as media I've been experiencing.

Projects

v4.basus.me

The main project for this month has been this website. I started experimenting with Lume in July, but I started a fresh repo at the beginning of the month and started moving pages over from previous versions of the site. I've already written at length about Version 4, so I won't reiterate all that here. The overall design and structure is stable, the journal and stream are working well, and I'm gradually adding both new material, and moving over material from older blogs and sites (starting with my old Tumblr).

Beautiful Racket

I've been wanting to get into the Racket ecosystem for a while now, but never really did. This month I started working through Matthew Butterick's excellent Beautiful Racket, which explores Racket's most powerful ability: being able to create your own mini-languages. I'm progressing pretty quickly because I both have some prior exposure to Racket, and general knowledge about programming languages, compilers, interpreters and the like. I'm really enjoying it so far, and already have some ideas for things I want to build in the near future.

Project Bracer Phoenix

This is a project I'm not quite ready to talk about yet, so I'm talking a page out of the Laundry Files and giving it a code name for the time being. For now, let's just say that Project Bracer Phoenix involves TypeScript and social media. TypeScript is easy enough to pick up and surprisingly nice to work with, though managing dependencies is a bit confusing. This should be public with core functionality working in the next month, so stay tuned!

Media

I have been trying out a bunch of reading trackers: Goodreads, The StoryGraph and Literal and I don't particularly like any of them. I'm getting more serious about tracking my media consumption, and I have a feeling I'm going to be rolling my own solution sooner rather than later. That might be the next big addition to the site.

Reading

• The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor. Honestly, I picked up and put down this book so many times with long gaps in between, it didn't make much of an impression (which probably says something about the book). I think if you're already knowledgable about eastern philosophy, psychedelics or neuroscience, then you won't get much out of this.
• The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It's been a while since I've read science fiction, but this has been a delight so far. I'm only about a tenth of way in, but there's already rich worldbuilding, interesting characters and concepts, and a aura of mystery and intrigue that I can't wait to get to the bottom of.

Watching

• Season 4 of The Umbrella Academy. Man, the writers really phoned it in on this one.
• The Office. An old favorite that I still enjoy just as much, and I have successfully gotten my parents hooked as well.
• Season 1 of Teen Titans. I just started this, but I have a feeling it's going to be a keeper.

Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot about the fractured social media in the post-Twitter era, the IndieWeb, the Fediverse, and how we can create sustainable online communities and services. I also realized that the web and websites were one of my "first loves" and I regret neglecting them both for the last decade. Now I'm happy to be re-exploring that love, and also getting a trip out of actually writing networked programs.

---

That's all I can think about that's worth mentioning at the moment. I don't have much planned for September besides continuing to work on the projects above, eating lots of delicious Indian food while I still can, and hopefully getting some good news about future plans.

That's all for August, see you next month (though more like see you tomorrow).