works of wanderlust

Tag: writing code

  • little green squares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in tech or tools

    … to which I am going to answer with a picture of my Github contribution graph:

    If you know you know, but if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. Github is a code repository. It is like a cloud drive for computer code that keeps a hyper-detailed change record of writing software with the intended use cases being collaboration and tracking for software development. It is like a little library tool for writing and publishing and bookkeeping for code. Any time you are happy with your code, inasmuch as it runs and you want to snapshot something you built in case you break it or need to share it or just make a record of that work, you make a “contribution” to the repository. 

    I made 687 contributions to my repositories last year. 

    That little chart is a kind of heat-map of when I was writing code… or at least when I was saving something I wrote to a permanent record of development.

    In among those green boxes are:

    • a video game I’ve been developing
    • my personal social media feed app
    • two public wordpress plugins

    And what you don’t see there are:

    • a couple of private professional projects (…which probably account for another 300 or so contributions) 

    All in all, I would guess I submitted to Github repositories (albeit my own) about a thousand times in 2025… which is to say I wrote a heckuva lot of code in 2025, kind of equally split between Rust and PHP.

    That’s not trivial. 

    I wish I could tell you that I wrote a thousand stories in 2025 or drew a thousand sketches in 2025. I cannot.

    I can tell you that I sat down at a keyboard and wrote out tens of thousands of lines of intricate computer code, some for myself and some for professional work, that turned into functioning software. I can tell you that my 2025 was a year of making, and that I am coming out of this year in a state of having made interesting and useful things in computer code that a year ago were either ideas or maybe not even that much.

    I just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and made over a hundred posts to my own micro-feed app, a lite-cms that I have been writing for three years and honing for the last few months.

    I have a game that is still deep in development but it runs on my SteamDeck and I have logged a few dozens of hours play-testing it and it is not terrible.

    I spent multiple weeks spread over five months writing code for professional clients under the flag of my new corporation and that code has now all been deployed and (I am assuming) helping those clients run websites and business operations.

    That has been my 2025 in technology: highly coded, and contributed, and there is a neat little graph that marks it all in a record of progress right there as a series of little green squares.

  • weekend wrap, fifteen

    Writing a weekend wrap on a Monday morning is very much a shakeout ritual. You see me posting some low-stakes content here summing up my random acts of nothing much on the opening day of a new week and wonder what’s the point, but getting back into the business of productive writing after a few days of schedule flux is not just as easy as it seems. Jotting a few sentences as a mental catchup, is as much a writers warmup as I’m ever going to do.

    All that is to say, this weekend was busy enough.

    Shaping the whole thing was the fact that the Kid was housesitting, so after a quick family dinner on Friday we drove her over and dropped her off for her housesitting gig. Tres exciting, non? 

    The rest of the evening we plonked on the couch and caught up on some trash television we’ve been enjoying. Not much to speak of, nor anything worth writing about, but it was a bit of weekend fare to ease out of a long-ish week.

    Saturday, I went to the doctor. Nothing urgent, of course. I’ve had a nagging cough for about a year and I’m seeing a specialist about it and the appointments are every three months on a Saturday. I get to sit in a glass box and blow into a plastic tube and then they adjust the cocktail of respiratory medications I’ve been taking and voila.

    I celebrated learning that I probably don’t have asthma by going and running my five klick lap around the neighbourhood. I’ve been working on a running streak and Saturday was day eight, the loop around day, particularly since day one was last Saturday when I did a Park Run. 

    Before it got too hot we took the dog to the off leash park and walked a lap. The highlight of that trip was randomly finding a fossil in the river. 

    And then while Karin went to The Mall, I stayed home and fuddled with some technology projects; I got a new memory card for my GoPro (delivered) which seems to have fixed the file corruption errors I’ve been getting and then I started poking at adding a new feature to my “unsocial media applet” software. I’ve been pondering some quality of life improvements for our upcoming trip to Japan, specifically simplifying the time stamping feature I had in a waaaay early version that let me tell the post I was in, say, New York and it would flag the time stamp to indicate that. I was able to pull in a location from the IP address of the internet connection and do some fancy pants stuff to automate that plus start building a kind of bespoke geographic database to simplify other aspects. Plus, I cleaned up some bugs. All in all, a few hours of coding work, but it’ll save me as much over the next year of posting.

    Another evening of chilling in front of terrible television with a beer and the day was done.

    Sunday, I met the crew for a nine klick run which was also the ninth day of my streak.

    And then I left coffee a bit early so that we could go to the thank you barbecue for the Heritage Festival French pavilion volunteers.    

    We ran another little errand to visit the Kid and drop off something she forgot, and then it was back home for more Sunday errands: a dog walk, cleaning up the kitchen, some more coding, groceries, and cooking dinner.

    I went for another walk to test my fixed code out in the “field” by which I mean, literally in the field but also on a connection that was not our house wifi, and that was about that for another late summer weekend.