My family's been practising "Secret Santa" for a few years and it's been great! Everyone gets to focus on a single gift, the budget is good enough for gifts to be useful, and the atmosphere of secrecy up to and around Christmas is thick!

The one yearly headache is however the draw itself. First of all it's always a bit of an involved process to complete the draw as there are rules to who you can draw (obviously you can't draw yourself, and also kinda obviously nor your spouse). One illegal draw, and we need to start over, or begin a complex process of switching draws. Because we can't have anyone expose their draw result (or it would be "disclosed?" Santa, and that sounds awful)...

So here I am again posting about a furniture project...

My last post about board game shelves ended with a teaser...

It's no secret that I'm very happy about, and tremendously proud of, my TV-stand project.

So it was only a matter of time before I'd built something else. Now the wait is over! I have built a new piece - or rather new pieces - of furniture...

My four-year-old son recently started learning the alphabet!

Obviously I cannot let such a great opportunity pass, so I've started making my own small game to help him in the process...

We recently moved into the house in which we want to grow old. It's a large old house with much to do!; painting everywhere, finalize all kinds of skirting* in many rooms, fix lots of partly broken / unfinished electrical switches, get reliable wired and wireless network, probably renovate the whole upper floor + much more.

Definitely a daunting abundance of stuff to do, and it's going to take a long while until things start to feel "finished". It does however also mean that stuff CAN be "finished". No "why spend time on that when we are going to move anyway" - I really like that...

So here's the second part of "two years with the dev-server". Part 1 was mostly an update on how I've tackled various obstacles, both those I faced from the very beginning, and those I crossed along the road.

This second part is about some additional things - very broad category I know - that I just really want to share...

I recently had a look at my website, and I was honestly very surprised to see that my-new-old-development-server is now two years old!

I think it makes sense to revisit the development server, and provide an update on how it's been...

I have a bad habit of typing Y's and H's with my left hand.

That might not seem like a big deal in itself, but I'm not very fast at typing, and I think this small oddness plays a big part in that...

Back in August I wrote a post about building an interpreter in rust.

I ended it with...

I got really tired of seeing corona-virus news!

I absolutely understand the graveness of the situation, and I do my best to not catch or spread anything myself. However, I don't think that reading about corona all the time does much good to me, and it feels like the news sites are happily making a fortune out of milking and feeding everyone's anxiety...

After having exclusively used my development server for a few weeks, there was one thing that kept bothering me: I didn't like to have a server running all the time.

Even though it was still cheaper than a cloud offering, it just felt wrong to have it running when it wasn't being used, and the fan-humming in my utility room was a frequent reminder of the total waste of power that was going on...

A colleague of mine one day told me - with much exitement in his voice! - that he moved his development environment into the cloud.

Instead of having projects stored locally they were now stored on his VPS, and using Visual Studio Code's remote plugin, he could have his editor running locally, while everything else was running on the VPS...

I really don't like not to know how things actually work.

So it's been bothering me for a while, that I - someone who's been building stuff with code for more than a decade - know shockingly little about how things work below the powerful abstractions provided by my languages of choice: javascript, ruby, php, java etc...

Back in 2015 I was in love with project hamster.

It looks like it hasn't received a lot of love the past couple of years, but it is absolutely great, here are a few reasons...

Here's how it's usually been when we've shopped groceries:

1. It's sunday, we should really figure out what to eat for the next few days, a shopping list is written - Ida (my girlfriend) is really good at this...

A spring day back in 2017 I decided that it was time to act!

I was tired of user stories being used as todo-lists; (under)estimating them, trying to share them between front-end and back-end developers, attempting to express under-the-hood work, them being ordered in irrational ways... and possibly more things that I've forgotten in the meantime...

My old site lasted nearly a decade, but truth be told, it was left outdated for way too long.

Here are a couple of screenshots that I'm not proud of...

Hours stores all of it's data locally on the phone, and so does not actively share any data...