I bought a framework laptop, pre-built Windows; it needs stickers now.
I recently purchased a framework laptop; the Framework 13 13th Gen Intel variant. I have no complaints about the hardware, and I’m loving the hardware switch for the webcam & microphone. I have yet to find any niggles with it (though I have only had it for ~1 week). This acts as documentation for my setup to dual boot Windows (on NVMe) and Ubuntu (on 1Tb expansion).
It’s because of supportability reasons (honestly, not because I was bored)
I forked a nodejs project a last year since I had a need to do some pretty charts with data from my Tesla Powerwall. It’s been working well enough, and I hacked around with it to get some additional info out and to make sure it could run in my homelab. Since it’s a fairly easy project to understand from a feature perspective it’s one that I’m using to experiment with other languages. I have a Go implementation and a Rust implementation in the works which might eventually get pushed.
There’s always a fight against the tooling; I avoided it mostly.
In the midst of my move of all “code related” things into WSL2, I started using Visual Studio Code with the Java extension pack and this works well enough. However, I’m a long time IntelliJ user for Java (I was using their Rust preview but stopped because it’s not that much better than the equivalent vscode extensions). If you search for ‘IntelliJ WSL2’ through your preferred search engine, you’ll find the official documentation that says its supported and you can just point it at a project in \\wsl$\Ubuntu\home\user\project and it’ll be quite happy. I gave it a go, and that’s not my experience.
Simple Tool management because sometimes real package managers are overkill
Spotify gives you Wrapped; I make myself do some introspection and examine my life rather than wondering why my top artist (categorisation error1?) was Joseph Haydn during the year. In reviewing my development toolchain; I’ve realised that I’ve been using a variation of the same thing (git+bash on Windows with Scoop) for far too long. It’s time to shake things up a bit not least because I’ve started doing a lot more with things like Node & Python rather than Java. My experience under Windows is that it’s manageable, but i’m fighting against the tooling rather than getting shit done. WSL2 is obviously the answer to the question that I’m asking, but it means a full migration of all development into the WSL2 filesystem for performance reasons. Generating this blog under WSL2, on the Windows filesystem takes over a a minute but only takes 3 seconds if the files are in the native WSL2 VHD.
If your most listened to song was ‘Chain Reaction’ performed by Diana Ross; is your favourite artist the Bee Gees? I think not. ↩︎
Like dichotomous branching, or a ‘Back to the Future’-esque timeline; drift is gonna happen
I’ve been using terraform for a while and what I’ve discovered is that there doesn’t seem to be a whole wealth of information about what to do when cold hard reality smacks your utopian infrastructure as code in the face. A classic example might be a support engineer adding LOG_LEVEL=super-verbose as an environment variable via the AWS console to some particular runtime because they’re getting reports that something blahblahblah doesn’t work.
If the first thought in your head is “That’ll never happen because IaC means they just have to modify some file; raise a PR; and then it’ll get auto deployed after going through the appropriate approval gates”; this blog post is not for you.