Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Got an email asking me to "share my experience as a postdoctoral researcher" and while I have contributed to a number of scientific endeavors, I'm no where close to have even gotten a doctorate (I've been getting good job offers since I was like 12, my experience with formal education was not great, and I decided not to take on soul crushing student debt).

Also, the bakery had the large loaf of the bread I like. Normally that's sold out and I have to get the small loaf instead.

At the shop briefly today. All I need to get done there is tasting some production test batches and getting a few orders shipped out. Then I can do the rest of the work day at home, writing software with the cat (who will no doubt want to sit in my lap while I'm doing it).

In unrelated news I seem to be getting an uptick in catfishing texts. Ignoring all of those, though I did enjoy the cat pic one of them sent.

The problem with what I did seems obvious in hindsight and there's a pretty straightforward fix, but I need to be working on other areas today.

A bit of code I wrote recently in an attempt to make a program not use 100% of a CPU core ended up slowing down data propagation in such a way that everything looks like it works until you try to use it for real, at which point it quickly becomes apparent that it's become useless. I have a few ideas for how to really fix it, but for now I'll take useful operation at higher than needed CPU utilization over honestly still higher utilization than I'd like but not being useful.

Pulled out some old training material KSAs because one of my employees is getting school credit for the job (may as well if you're doing the job anyway) but one of the things I'm supposed to sign off on is so far outside sanity (crap rich people like that nobody else cares about) that I've made the allowable substitution coffee and barista skills, pulling key points from a recognized certification in the industry (I helped define those cert requirements, I may as well reuse the resources)

Did a big pile of refactoring in preparation for the next chunk of new functionality I want to add. I'm going to need to rewrite all of that again later, but I don't have the time right now to jump straight to what the implementation is going to be at release as that's a lot of additional work mostly unrelated to my current train of thought and I'd rather get the thing I'm working on up and running so I can make sure that's working properly while the relevant details are still in my head.

Stayed too late at work so dinner was a tub of ice cream and watching the Star Trek Voyager channel with the cat. Good night.

I keep getting spam for what I assume is fake luxury designer stuff and I kind of wish that if they're going to insist on spamming me with that, that they could at least pick a designer with better designs to rip off.

Wrote some extremely garbage code that was at least correct, then immediately reworked it into something at least slightly less trash, but for whatever reason today I needed to write the worse version before I could get my head to spit out something a little more reasonable.

Got an inquiry from someone hoping to rent a commercial space to me who seems to not really get what my business is and is apparently unaware of established businesses already serving the need within the same block. I'm not in any kind of hurry to have a landlord again and even if I was, I think I'd pass on this particular opportunity as their idea of what they want in the space would likely be a deeply unprofitable money pit.

The cat has decided that she must sit on me now.

Shop has been closed today and yesterday, but that doesn't mean I'm not there. I'm between lots on some coffees so I'm doing the roast plan design and verification work that needs to happen to get the new lots out on the shelf. Currently drinking a nice coffee from Costa Rica. I've been buying from this farm for over 20 years and while their farm management practices are geared toward delivering a product that's very consistent year to year, I usually need to tweak the roast just a little.

Worked out the proper fix for the issue that earlier in the day I just did a hacky work around to prevent crashing. Also a hacky work around to deal with the visual regression.

Found the source of the bug obnoxiously far away from the behavior that triggers it. I'll need to dig into that a little more later as there's really no excuse for the segfault to have happened where it did. Also because not my code changed a related thing to something visually much worse because of course when you add functionality it's only natural to take away any UI hint that the new feature might exist. *facepalm*

I was half expecting to need to change things up in that area, but was hoping for something a little more graceful than the segfaults.

Oh lovely, something broke in not my code with a stack trace deep enough that gdb crashes before it gets to my code.

I worry more about code written a few minutes at a time as I'm able to get to it over the course of several days, but sometimes that's just how the schedule works out.

Finally got some code I've been working on far enough along that I could put some debug text in and see if it's doing what I expected and get some timing data out. I started with the slower approach that doesn't involve a bunch of bit level operations to see if that's fast enough and it looks like it should be. There's more to do to properly finish the feature, but that what's already written is working correctly is a good sign.