There was a huge heat wave that blew through and put end of summer temperatures at the beginning of summer. It was hot and clear weather. That particular wave lasted for a whole week and for whatever reason Japan declared the rainy season was officially over. Which is an odd thing to “officially announce” so many weeks ahead of the actual end of the typical rainy season. It’s been raining a lot since that heat wave settled. But not quite enough yet to hear the hordes of cicadas.
We’ve been on the look out for the next apartment as we trying to figure out how we can build up some additional savings. Moving in Japan is stupidly expensive. The fees are quite insane. You pay a huge deposit up front that you may or may not get back, and in exchange you might have a slightly more reasonable monthly payment. Even if we cut our monthly payment down by $200-$400 (plus/minus inflation), it’ll take us a whole year before we’d see any benefits in savings due to all the other costs. Because of that, it’s rather easy to get comfortable in the current place and just simply not move. We quite like our current place, and we’ve found small shops (a local coffee roaster, bread shop) that we’ll miss when we move. Things that have taken hold in our daily routines. We’re hoping that the next place will position us for more options for the next …next place. Wherever that may be.
Due to that hot and rainy weather, our mindset has very much aligned with “only go out if necessary”. Thus I’ve been working on a few projects, trying out a few new tools. It’s been fun. I have a programming language + vm project tentatively named “Tiny Machine”. It’s a sort of playground to try and experiment with what coding on a gameboy could be like, but also with it’s own programming language. I recently got functions working in the language though that might’ve introduced memory leaks into the vm. I may need to explore garbage collection for it. Still cool though.
I’ve also been exploring using Neovim a bit more seriously. In the past, I felt I tend to have a good command of my IDE, but people who were using (n)vim always seemed to be on the next level of that. Craig talks about the mechanical speed compared to our virtual speed we tend to have in software. A typewriter (despite it’s other short comings) will move just as fast as the user. It doesn’t have some input delay where it needs to think about if you wrote bananana correctly or not. There’s a lot of sluggish editors that don’t work as fast as the user can. Neovim gets much closer to that fast mechanical feel. I’ve attempted vim several times over the years. My earliest attempt was back in college. I did most of the assignment in the command line and then got stuck when I needed debugging. After that, I had an internship where they forced me to use vim. It didn’t quite stick then either. We’ll see how this time goes. I’ve figured out how to use the debugger. Tooling in general has been significantly easier now than in the past for (n)vim (with DAP + LSP being made more available).
Some other things I’ve been trying: bat, exa, rg, tmux, i3 window manager instead of gnome on ubuntu, swapping my caps lock + escape keys (which is still tripping me up sometimes). It’s been a lot of fun experimenting. My configurations have been mostly hacked together from seeing what other people are doing.