They return my hand's grasp, smotheringly close. Was this how it was meant to feel, in a classroom cutting multi-colored construction paper? Not a pain to be gotten through, but comfort, closeness, togetherness. Their design now feels aggressively overdone, broad curve just so around the thumb, as if they might tighten and snap it off. Only too large index finger's knuckle, chafing, provides some relief, some reminder that I shouldn't run.

(Thanks, liw.)

Yahoo Groups being shut down and the data deleted is a big enough story that it's being talked about on the radio. The typical presentation is that they're deleting these mailing list archives, and blocking attempts to save them and so huge amount of things will be lost from the historical record.

That's a common story these days, but it's not entirely accurate in this case. These are mailing lists, so they're not necessarily only archived by Yahoo. Anyone who subscribed to a mailing list may have archived it. I've been on a couple of those mailing lists, and the emails I kept from them are already archived rather well (10+ copies). I probably didn't keep every email, and I probably won't be exhuming those emails to add them to some large archive.org collection of Yahoo Groups. But multiply all the people who subscribed to these lists by all the traffic to them, by the probability that people keep copies of mailing list mails, and there's a huge, well-distributed archive of Yahoo Groups out there.

That ensures some of it will survive in the historical record, probably enough to satisfy a historian.

Probably even after Gmail and the other cloud mail services shut down and delete all their archives.

Previously: I am ArchiveTeam (but not speaking for them above)

filepath-bytestring is a drop-in replacement for the standard haskell filepath library, that operates on RawFilePath rather than FilePath.

The benefit, of course, is speed. "foo" </> "bar" is around 25% faster with the new library. dropTrailingPathSeparator is 120% faster. But the real speed benefits probably come when a program is able to input filepaths as ByteStrings, manipulate them, and operate on the files, all without using String.

It's extensively tested, not only does it run all the same doctests that the filepath library does, but each function is quickchecked to behave the same as the equivilant function from filepath.

While I implemented almost everything, I did leave off some functions that operate on PATH, which seem unlikely to be useful, and the complicated normalise and stuff that uses it.

This work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo on Patron.

(Someone stumbled upon my 2010 decade retrospective post and suggested I write a followup...)

This has been a big decade for me.

Ten years ago, I'd been in an increasingly stale job for several years too long. I was tired of living in the city, and had a yurt as a weekend relief valve. I had the feeling a big change was coming.

Four months on and I quit my job, despite the ongoing financial crisis making prospects poor for other employment, especially work on free software.

I tried to start a business, Branchable, with liw, based on my earlier ikiwiki project, but it never really took off. However, I'm proud it's still serving the users it did find, 10 years later.

Then, through luck and connections, I found a patch of land in a blank spot in the map with the most absurd rent ever ($5/acre/month). It had a house on it, no running water, barely solar power, a phone line, no cell service or internet, total privacy.

This proved very inspiring. Once again I was hauling water, chopping wood, poking at web pages on the other end of a dialup modem. Just like it was 2000 again. Now I was also hacking by lantern-light until the ancient batteries got so depleted I could hear the voltage regulator crackle with every surge of CPU activity.

I had wanted to learn Haskell, but could never concentrate on it enough. I learned me some Haskell and wrote git-annex, my first real world Haskell program, to help me deal with shuttling data back and forth from civilization on sneakernet.

After two idyllic years of depleting savings, I did a Kickstarter for git-annex and raised not much, but I was now living on very little, so that was a nice windfall. I went full crowdfunding for a couple of years. After a while, I started getting contracting work, supplementing the croudfunding, as git-annex found use in science and education. Both have continued ever since, amazingly.

I was free to do whatever I wanted to. A lot of that was git-annex, with some Debian, and some smaller projects, too many to list here.

Then, mid-decade, I left the Debian project. I'm still sad, still miss everybody, but I also think, had I not been so free, I would not have been able to leave it. It had driven most of my career before this point. I was lucky to be able to leave Debian. 💧

Adding to the stress of that, my patch of countryside was being sold out from under me. I considered moving to some city, but the income that's freeing here would be barely getting by there. Instead, I bought the place, using git-annex income, plus a crucial loan from a wonderful friend.

That changed how I dealt with being offgrid. Before it was an interesting constraint, something to adapt to, an added texture to life. Now it's all of those and also a source of inspiration and learning. How to install solar panels on a roof. How to wire things to code. Circuit design. Plumbing. Ditch digging. With my offgrid fridge project, things are feeling interdisciplinary in ways my work has not been before.

From here at its end, this decade feels both inevitable and highly unlikely. Now I feel.. comfortable. Settled. Surely older. More unsure of myself than ever really, nearly everything is more complicated than I used to think it was. Maybe a little stuck? But not really.

I'm planting fruit trees, something says I will be here to enjoy them. But times are getting beyond interesting. Anything could be around the corner.