A couple weeks back I lost my personal PC to a VR project that I’ve been wanting to get setup for awhile now. Without it I’ve been somewhat dead in the water so I started looking for a PC replacement. With my upcoming goals to get more into game development there was a desire to get a beefier workstation.

After a fair chunk of research I’ve landed on getting a Thelio Mira from System76. It ships with a flavor of Ubuntu called “PopOS!” and it seems to be pretty darn good. This blog-post is the first thing I’ve done with the new machine but it won’t be the last :D.

Last weekend my brother introduced me to a fun little puzzle game called Wordle. With it you guess a word and it highlights which letters are in the word and in the correct location or it will signal if the letter is correct but isn’t in the proper location. After watching a few game rounds I decided to write something to solve it.

The code is on github.

The demo is self hosted.

I came across the Any trait this week and it got me to thinking on how it could be used to stored different kinds of data at runtime. In this post we’ll look at this magical trait and get a better understanding of whats possible.

I’ve been working with Elasticsearch off and on in my career and more so on then off it seems for the last couple years. It’s a great tool to get aggregations and quick searching on data; however, sometimes you need to be careful or the size of your documents can get out of hand.

It’s been almost six years since switching over to NeoVim, and every so often I find myself showing off my current setup to other Vim / NeoVim users to give them an idea of what is possible with it. This post will be a quick list of recommended plugins and other tidbits you may want to incorporate in your setup as well.

Today I had a bit of fun learning how to get more into the head-space on defining better parameters in my rust functions when they work with a collection. Let’s go on a journey and get to the final evolution of where I ended up and what was learned.

You know it’s been way to long when you have to spend about two hours figuring out how to get your blog setup locally. It turns out my Octopress setup has been dead for quite a few years now and no longer builds with any recent version of Ruby! Thanks to some docker magic giving me a door to the past when this tool-chain worked I’m back in business!

Wow, it’s been a minute. I had to do a little bit of reading and fiddling to even make sure I still knew how to update my own blog :\ . What’s up with my absence? I guess there isn’t really a good reason for it, just fell out of a practice and it’s a shame that it happened.

Have you ever had to mow the lawn? If so then you’re probably familiar with getting into the pattern of glancing just head of the front left or right tire and keeping it within a tolerance that ensures you can cut the most amount of grass possible. You’ll often only need to break this subconscious practise when obstacles come up such as trees, landscaping, or a perhaps a particularly tricky turn.

At first glance if you’ve ever had to combine corn in the field, it feels like it’s roughly the same activity. However, if you try this tactic you’ll quickly find you’re in for a world of hurt. The trick to operating a combine is to keep an eye on where you’re going and glancing at how the corn is being brought in as you go. If you focus too much on the current corn being brought in you’ll get too wrapped up in the each set and quickly drown in a series of micro corrections.

This applies to so many things in life. It feels natural to want to focus on what’s immediately coming up and loose focus of the planned out row ahead of you. I find myself doing this with so many things in my life and being back on the farm has helped bring it to my attention. Don’t get hung up on the immediate success or failure of what’s going on, but rather use it as a guide to drive what you’re striving for as an indicator of the overall goal.

The Back-Story

I’ve been writing Phoenix applications for about four months now and really enjoy it so far; however, I’ve been stuck working mostly on boring web APIs and haven’t had a chance to build anything that is more rich and interactive with a specific user application in mind. That’s all changed though as I decided to beef up on my front-end skills a bit and work on a pet project I’ve had cooking in the noodle for awhile now.