Weeknotes 2022 W42: Wormhole

October 17​–​23, 2022
1100 words

It’s my private week­notes anniversary! I started writing them exactly a year ago, though the initial bunch are private. I don’t believe that the old week­notes are worth publishing at this point.

I’ve been losing weight at a rate of about 1kg per month. Based on this rate, I predict that I will achieve a mass of exactly zero on Saturday, January 13th, 2029, just after 9:00 in the morning.

This is exciting, because after that, my mass will be negative, and therefore be useable in the creation of traversable wormholes. That’s some next-level “donate your body to science” stuff.

Mark your calendars!

I’ve officially given up on getting a dishwasher.

My kitchen counter is above-average in height, which means that a regular dishwasher wouldn’t properly fit under it. There would be a gap above it, and I wouldn’t be able to prop up the dishwasher to make that gap go away and have it fit in nicely in the kitchen.

There are extra-large dishwashers, but I genuinely don’t need one, as I live by myself. They’re also considerably more expensive that regular dishwashers. Integrating the dishwasher nicely with the rest of the kitchen, with a nice wooden front panel, would put the cost at over €1000.

These extra-large dishwashers are particularly difficult to get. I’ve been trying on and off for over a year, with no luck. Finding any place that does delivery and installation seems to be nigh impossible, despite me living in the center of Berlin.

There’s also the question around what I do with the dishwasher when I inevitably move out of this place some day. Do I take it with me? If so, the new place would have to have an above-average kitchen counter height too, have no dishwasher yet, and have spare room for a dishwasher. Or do I leave it here — in which case: can I sell it to the next tenant?

I’ve reassigned the money I had budgeted for a dishwasher to a down payment. We’ll see how that goes.

Speaking of money: I figured that my emergency fund of € 10 000 is too large in size. I’ve not needed the emergency fund, ever — even in cases of emergency, because I budget for replacing past purchases. I’ve reassigned most of that money to a down payment, too.

The short story I’ve been writing for Esther’s creative writing workshop is finished. Go read it: Going Home. Shouldn’t take much more than five minutes to read.

Writing that story took a gargantuan effort. Writing is hard. It’s so hard. Still, the end result is decent, if not a little similar in theme and tone to the short story I wrote before.

Let me know what you think?

At work, I’ve been preparing a workshop around trunk-based development. The purpose of the workshop is to make my fellow engineers comfortable with not using long-lived branches, as well as automatically deploying to production on merge.

For this workshop, I created a demo backend in Rails. That was the easy part.

I also created a front end. I initially creating the front end in Vue, the framework that’s most commonly used at my employer. I went through tutorials, but couldn’t get it to work. I got strange compiler and type-checking errors that the official forums nor Stack Overflow could help me with. I ended up writing the entire front end in plain-old JavaScript, following the technique I outlined in You might not need React.

It’s a crude approach, but works remarkably well. Also, it’s great to be able to write an entire front-end application with no frameworks at all. There is no magic, no mystery — the entire application code is easy to follow, in a single file for anyone to read!

Speaking of front-end tech: I’ve been meaning to put Elm to good use in my personal projects. The framework-less approach I mentioned above takes some inspiration from Elm, but I’d much rather just use Elm than build my own Elm-inspired solutions.

I’m still keen on picking up work on my budgeting app prototype, which I haven’t properly touched in nine months. The prototype needs a front-end, and perhaps Elm would be a good choice for that.

I’d also need a mobile application, though, and some way of syncing data between my laptop and my mobile phone. And some authentication/authorization solution too, because I’d have to be running stuff on the public internet. Seems like a lot of backend work is needed. Ugh.

Lastly, I’m hesitant to work on any projects that involves databases. The chance of data loss is just too high. Even backups aren’t a foolproof solution. I’d rather just manage plain-text files, but I’m not sure I can write a decent application around that.

This budgeting app prototype isn’t ever going to get built, I think.

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