Week 28

I have to use Vue.js on one of my client's projects. I don't like it: it's messy, verbose, and counterintuitive. I don't know why anyone wants to work with something like this. I feel much better with an event-driven framework like re-frame.

The same goes for JavaScript as a language.

I recently watched and enjoyed David Nolen's talk ClojureScript from First Principles, and he makes a lot of good points about the current state of JS. It was interesting to learn why ClojureScript was based on the Google Closure Compiler and how powerful it is out of the box (no shadow-cljs needed).

Some food for thought:

• Even if there are better JS tools nowadays, web pages aren't faster or lighter.
• If the modern JS story is so great, why is there an overall sense of declining software quality?
• 7MB of transpiled ClojureScript compiles to 3KB of JavaScript code (in 1.5 seconds).

In my spare time, I'm working on a small project to see if it's possible to train a neural network to return the spectrophotometric curve, given its L*a*b* values. I have a moderately sized dataset (300k+) to refine to make it truly useful. I'm using TensorFlow, pandas, scikit-learn, and the Colour library. As soon as I get good results, I'll probably write an article.

I'm cleaning up and moving my private repositories from GitHub to a self-hosted instance of Gitea. It's probably a bit too late to escape Copilot, but it's never too late to keep AI away from my personal code.

In the last few months, I moved from Gnome to KDE, and back to Gnome.

KDE was one of my first desktop environments (TBH, Window Maker was my first, on Debian Potato), but it's not that stable on Wayland. (Sorry, guys, I think X11 is dying.) Gnome is the least worst alternative I could find.

Earlier this year, I tried different window managers: sway, river, and niri. I think niri is the way to go for me, since I'm not really a fan of tiling window managers (I tried sway with a tabbed layout by default). I was a fan of the OS X workflow between 2010 and 2015 when there was a workspace for each application. I can't use more than two applications at the same time since most of my workflow is keyboard-driven, and that's why I work with two monitors. The left monitor is usually the one I'm working on, while the right one is dedicated to something I have to look at, like documentation, websites, or logs.

Niri really nails down this way of working. The only thing that keeps me away from a window manager is the hundreds of small utilities I have to manage to have a complete working environment: a notification daemon, a top bar, a launcher, a network manager, a screen locker, a power manager… It's too much for me to handle.