the:chris:walker ↩

A New Decade

Jan 27, 2020

So… I didn’t manage to write at all last year. I was busy. That’s no real excuse and I do quite like writing these posts.

What did I do last year?

I didn’t work on OPFS at all :(
I did release a bunch of code for writing network server software in TypeScript: https://github.com/thechriswalker/proc (which I have been dogfooding)
I wrote a tool to scrape and archive the publicly available data from Parkruns (and ran a few myself), with a view to visualising the data, and making it easier to explore.
I did 2 more exams on the way to completing a masters in Information Security.
I started a bunch more projects (that may or may not ever complete):
- SNAC a Network Access Controller I can run on my network to collect bandwidth stats and lock down what individual devices can do. This is good fun as it runs a netfilter queue to decide what to do with packets and interacts with iptables which is interesting stuff.
- BookThing a book shelf manager / reading log tool (this is where the proc dogfooding is happening).
- CharityThing which was a good idea, but I think will have to be ditched. The plan was to create a tool which you could use to budget a recurring amount of money to donate to charity and the tool would split it between your preferred charities every month. However there is no easy way to programmatically give money to a charity on behalf of an individual. Each charity does it in it’s own way and usually requires manual steps. So this project is dead in the water - charity onboarding is not something I want to spend a lot of time doing.
- A TypeScript Labyrinth game: I played the board game and liked it and decided to make a game engine for it. I built a TUI for the engine and would like to build a GUI.

And what do I have planned for this year?

I would really like to get SNAC in a good place, it has been kicking around for a while and I’d love to have it’s functionality running on my local network.

thechriswalker lives in Exeter, UK with his wife: Rosie, son: Orson and daughter: Florence. He likes bacon, drinks too much coffee, doesn't like spiders and enjoys solving problems. He'll use Vi over Emacs and doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person.

Code Monkey by trade, I like writing daemons and systems software. Preferably in Go. I've written a bunch of variable-quality stuff, all of which lives on Github.

If you want to get in touch, throw me an email.

Also, I am definitely now a qualified professional wood-hole-was-used-to-create-fire-recognitionist, which is totally a thing and will likely make me a billionaire in the future. So if you have some wood with a hole in it and want to know if that hole was created in the process of attempting to light a fire, then I'm your man.