Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Today's coding was just finding and fixing bugs as well as identifying some features that don't exist but need to.

This morning's coding session was heavy on bit level operations. The hardware documentation is suggestive (without going so far as actually having coding advice) of just using a lookup table for the command strings, but creating these directly by ORing together the right binary literals saves about 60 bytes in executable size and reads a little more clearly to me. (Clearly the engineer who designed the comms protocol thought about this approach and it just wasn''t put in the documentation)

Trying to buy more coffee. There'll have to be a price increase on the next Guatemalan coffee we bring in and part of that is the 10% tariff (which means a more than 10% increase that needs to be passed along since coffee weighs less after I roast it) while another part of that is just that the coffee is more expensive than usual.

Replaced some networking gear at work. Some strange choices for defaults on the new hardware made this take longer than it should have (and the printers needed extra convincing to go along with the change but that one I'm going to blame on the printers).

Got a lot of code written and debugged today. There are a couple tweaks I'd like to try at some point but I'm going to move on to other features first.

Got new bulbs for the can lights in the kitchen. The one by the oven wasn't burnt out yet but the other two have been replaced by brighter, lower power bulbs so I'll be able to see a little better while washing dishes or doing prep.

I've known that this was going happen soon, but today I got home from work to discover that the cat has passed away. It looks like she was in a comfortable napping spot when it happened.

Set up a new credit card terminal at the shop. Increasing sliminess and the poor quality of the latest hardware change we were forced into means that we've gone with a different company. Fortunately, we have employees and customers who have experience in their other businesses using this provider because "No Training Required" really means "We can't be bothered to provide comprehensive documentation that might scare people off".

Just about finished with the chunk of code I've been working on lately. Today I worked out a new feature. Not sure if it's how I'll keep things, but I'll live with it as it is for a while and see how that goes.

Old cat is acting like an old cat.

On reflection, this was the high point of the work day.

I saw four good dogs on the way to work today.

The strange bug involved data being reported from the future, but I had just set up one of the transformation pipelines wrong. No actual precognition was observed.

Continued with the work from the past couple days and noticed and fixed a couple bugs (one strange, the other significantly less strange). Knocked a couple items off the to do list for the part of the code base I'm working on, but still have a few more things to add.

There's a bit more work to do on today's code to get all the features I want in, but the fundamentals are there with a lot less debugging than I usually need when writing this sort of code. I still hate doing graphics code, but maybe I'm getting a little better at it.