2025

Last year’s December Adventure started strong then promptly derailed.

I have no reason to imagine this year will be any different.

Except for the “started strong” part. I don’t have any ideas as good as the CSS feed.

The key is going to be setting low expectations and building up steam, I think.

Here’s my daily log.

• 4th — I continued chipping away at my Cakefile. The hours melt away and nothing seems to happen. Now it’s after midnight — I could sleep and feel rested in the morning, and resign myself to accompishing nothing, or stay up and then, in an hour, sleep and feel less rested, and resign myself to accomplishing nothing. I feel this sort of neutral, numbing sadness every day. It’s not ennui, it’s something else. I am overflowing with ideas big and small, and I have the skills to do them. But I feel like I get —maybe— one solid productive day a month, at this rate. The rest of the time just evaporates. [some time passes] Okay, so I’ve stayed up a bit. I added a command to my cakefile — cake diff — which will compare the compiled output to a known-good copy, and another command — cake kiss — that will snapshot the current compiled output as the new known-good. I like that “diff” and “kiss” look similar but different, I like the “make them kiss” of it all, I like thinking about tasty cake and coffee when I program, and I really like this pattern of diffing compiler output against known-good output. And that… gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
• 3rd — Tiny update to Please Reload, my plucky little local web server library, to allow extending the set of supported MIME types and do a better job of managing websockets connections. It’s used by Sweetbread, my toolkit for crafting Cakefiles like the one that builds this very website. I came sooo close to rewriting Cake myself, perhaps as part of i, my personal cli, but that’ll have to wait. Yes, yes, welcome to my yak farm. Addendum: seems I broke the websockets.
• 2nd — Various housekeeping, including reviving my GOOD KNOB
• 1st — My 6yo is sick — can’t keep food down — and my partner is away, so today I was a dad and not a computer user. After she fell asleep, I sat beside her in bed and did a bit of pre-cleanup on this site. That’s my first adventure this month: attending to a long list of website desires.
• 0th — It’s weird that the first day of the month is the ordinal 1. Months are 1-indexed. “The 1st of the month”. So if the last day of the previous month is the predecessor, you either need to say “the zeroth of the month” or just skip zero and call it the “negative first”, which I like better except skipping zero feels like standing on top of a mountain in a storm, wearing copper armor, shouting ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS. Don’t toy with powers beyond your comprehension.

2024

I’m currently doing my first December Adventure. Here’s my daily log.

• 16th — All my personal project time these days goes to the weaving website. At work, though, I made some really nice sparkline-esq debug visualizations, and used them to meticulously tune a gesture.
• 15th — More work on the weaving website.
• 14th — Took a break. Played with my daughter all day. She put up “have you seen my lost stuffie?” posters around the house. She made me some “all cake” of crackers, chocolate chips, goat cheese, and berries. She built a tent out of a sheet and some microphone stands. I was just, you know, present.
• 13th — Figured out how to make my Apple Pencil vibrate.
• 12th — Recorded some cheesy 80s-ass “computer stuff is happening” music. (Edit: now public)
• 11th — Made some digital paper wiggle around to verify that, yep, its paper.
• 10th — Thinking about coordinate systems.
• 9th — Wrote a bunch of Swift today. I quite like making mobile apps. It’s a novelty for me. I’m also, separately, testing out whether I can edit this site from my phone. If you’re reading this, it worked!!
• 8th — Did some voice acting and scoring for a little secret project. (Edit: now public)
• 7th — I’ve moved my website to a new host, and added a little page talking about the site.
• 6th — Worked on turning Tone Dome into a MIDI instrument.
• 5th — I’m taking a lil class called “Prototyping Programming Languages”, and the assignment this week is to implement unification for a lil Prolog-like lang, so I did some of that.
• 4th — No personal project today, just work programming: I made a camera out of a piece of paper.
• 3rd — Worked on a website for a local group of basket weavers.
• 2nd — BPS — Eli made a falling sand metronome. I made it keep getting faster.
• 1st — CSS feed — An RSS feed of my CSS rules.

Some ideas for things I might work on next:

• Visual Programming Codex needs an overhaul, probably using the same approach as the Future of Coding wiki.
• Speaking of: fix some bugs in the FoC Wiki
• Hest and/or Dust
• Get my Blog figured out
• Make some procedural creatures (I’ve got a particular tentacle monster from the Flash era that I’d love to revive, perhaps as an SVG)
• ZERO VOID page
• RakeBook (both the project and a webpage for it)
• general cleanup of this website — the various <canvas> JS files are a mess, and I could probably refactor them and make a shared std lib that they all build on.
• PPLs stuff! Oh no forgot about that.
• Did I ever make a page for Salamander?
• Knob
• Tone Dome and FOUR FOUR need writeups (hey… that’s not coding!)
• Need to make music for Lu’s TORN LEAF thing (what is happening to this list?)
• Edit the two FoC Episodes (get the fuck out of here, non-coding stuff)
• Really need to watch The Thing at som- (okay, I’m cutting you off)