A short, probably sensible-only-to-me list of goals. Timeboxed. I’ll also add other things as I go.

Guiding principles:

• Meet good people. Do good work.
• Keep in touch with folks.
• Focus on a goal: file distractions away for later.

Timeboxed:

• 1 month:
  • Finish Rusty Boat (return application results)
    • Write about it (slightly late: travel + sickness)
  • Paint regular Gamorrean Guards (slightly late: travel + sickness)
  • Clean up notepad, notebook
  • Outline Luddite essay
  • sent the final few versions of Julia Evans’s documentation improvements for git-reset(1)
  • submitted patch for equery(1) manual
  • submitted patch for git-replay(1) manual
  • submitted patch for mhash documentation build
  • learned the basics of the reverse-engineering and debugging tool radare2
  • wrote some not-quite-fast-enough big file crunching code in Rust
• 3 months:
  • Finish Cabin Mixer, show to NCCJ
    • functionality mostly complete for a v1, but not demoed yet.
  • Paint remaining Weequay Pirates
  • Draft section or 2 of Luddite essay
  • Test for 2nd Dan
  • Finally found a workaround for a gnarly Vim bug
  • Improved copy-range-diff to teach others about range-diff
  • Configured vim-ledger for use with hledger, which I’m using to track money and budgets this year
  • Filed a stabilization bug for OpenRC so I can pick up a fix to Alacritty
  • Sent patches to Git for stash import/export completion and a meson build oddity
  • Contributed several reviews to Git patches
  • Filed and fixed an fcron bug
  • Filed a few git-pkgs issues
  • Reviewed Dracula contributions for Vim
  • Sent patches to Vim for a bash syntax bug
  • Packaged git-pkgs for Gentoo in my overlay
  • Added alucard support to dracula/vim
  • Adopted 2 kittens
  • Helped rebase Gentoo patches for Git for new versions
• 2 months:
  • Explore verhaal in Rust
  • Paint another squad (Trandoshan Hunters, Bossk, Jawa Scavenger)
  • Draft section or 2 of Luddite essay
  • Sent more Git patches, reviews
  • Learned about OpenRC user services
  • Updated Miller Gentoo package
  • Started packaging FastGron for Gentoo
  • Created a Paint the Roses digital aid
• 4 months:
  • Went to Korea
  • Rewrite mosaic program
  • Paint another squad
  • Draft section or 2 of Luddite essay
  • Celebrated 10 years out of high school with close friends
  • Asked about worktree performance, which led to a news article about Racy Git
  • Iterated on patches to make Git’s nanosecond features runtime-configurable
• 2 months:
  • Publish Luddite essay?

Generally:

• Actively look for local folks: meetups, community groups, unions, etc. (wiki: 2025)
  • Went to a Charlotte SWE meetup
• write more
  • Git: collected resources and my workflow
  • Critical thinking (wiki: todo/critique)
  • Write about our experience reshaping our digital lives
  • Share our general personal computing expertise/experience
  • Start my book on GUI applications in Racket
• Make time for board games (say, 1 big one per month? We play lots of little ones already)
• Go to USK 2–3 times/week
• Keep writing fun, useful programs.
  • Think about where to direct open-source energy
• Decrease household food waste

Areas I want to learn more about this year:

• Linux
  • Keyboard configuration
  • Productivity tools: controlling Firefox tabs, dunst/rofi/etc., manipulating my monitor’s settings, …
  • Email client (aerc) for open source work
  • Setup LSP for ebuilds
  • Networking (wiki: linux-concepts/tcp; Rootless pings claims you need root for ping? FasterThanLime has a DIY ping series if memory serves)
    • On Gentoo, the baselayout package provides sysctls for net.ipv4.ping_group_range that allow rootless pings; additionally, the iputils package sets capabilities on the ping command (cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw=p)
• Alternative technology
  • Euro Stack
  • sourcehut
  • Email server, domain, etc. (wiki: 2025)
  • VPN?
    • I’ve been happy with TailScale lately, yay
  • VPS or colocated hosting if needed?
  • Browsers (wiki: linux) if Firefox truly gets unbearable?

Political ways I can get involved:

• Book access and general literacy
• Digital/Mathematical literacy
• LGBTQIA+ support
• Local reporting
• Digital control/privacy; personal computing
• De-toxifying masculinity

Last Changed: 2026 Aug 16

Categories: Blog

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