Weeknotes #104

I’m on holiday in the Lake District so you know what that means: writing weeknotes on a phone, of course.

I wanted to write some yearnotes in January but couldn’t find the necessary block of uninterrupted time to do so.

Instead, I emitted a series of disorganised yeartoots covering the voluntary liquidation of Ghost Cassette Ltd, my new permanent role at a fruit-themed computer manufacturer and my renewed interest in the re2 gem with the release of 2.0 and, with it, precompiled, native gems.

I continue to work on re2, having released 2.10.0 two days ago and relentlessly trying to polish it like some sort of dorodango.

My latest adventure has been trying to minimise the code required to statically link the gem’s vendored dependencies, a tale most recently told in a MiniPortile2 issue.

Of course, the running joke here (beloved by Tom) is that Ruby already has regular expression support but I enjoy my niche of regular expressions that are designed to be totally immune to denial of service (ReDoS) attacks.

Next week, we’re getting solar panels fitted to our house which feels a bit like a subplot from The Good Life but I am looking forward to some artisanal, homegrown electricity.

An essential tip for anyone travelling to the Lakes with a fan of Lego: Tebay Services no longer sells any in their gift shop (much to some of our party’s surprise and displeasure) but the mysteriously-named Rheged about 15 minutes further north does have a good selection and, in our case, minimised emotional distress for all concerned.