August 2023 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
August 2023 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
How much progress have you made since last time? What new ideas have you stumbled upon, what old ideas have you abandoned? What new projects have you started? What are you working on?
Once again, feel free to share anything you’ve been working on, old or new, simple or complex, tiny or huge, whether you want to share and discuss it, or simply brag about it - or just about anything you feel like sharing!
The monthly thread is the place for you to engage /c/programming_languages on things that you might not have wanted to put up a post for - progress, ideas, maybe even a slick new chair you built in your garage. Share your projects and thoughts on others’ ideas, and most importantly, have a great and productive month!
Bytecode format. It's a bit hard to design since it needs to have some stablility guarantees, be decently fast to run and be somewhat easily convertable to LLVM. Third revision going on.
Oh fun! I wasn't here for the last one of these. My boyfriends and I all have pretty limited experience with programming, so we decided to learn together by making a game. We're building it with Haxe, Flixel, Pixieditor, and LDtk. It's slow going but fun. As for things to brag about, we just figured out how to get the LDtk map data mostly kinda sorta working in flixel? All the tutorials use Ogmo instead so it was a bit of a challenge 😅
Hopefully this month i can finally finish up nand2tetris. I did more or less all of it in rust to learn the language, and i feel like I'm now about as comfortable in it as i am in python. Learning how to build a computer from logic gates was sick, but debugging the compiler has been really draining. The way compilers work is neat, but all sorts of little problems keep coming up that force me to restructure large pieces of it over and over and i've lost almost all my momentum.
I'm not sure what I'll move on to next, maybe something more front-facing like a gui library, or maybe I'll finally look into anything that might actually provide me skills that will get me a job lol.
Hey thanks for sharing. I'd like to go this in rust too. Did you do the course or the book or both?
I read the book. It's not too difficult to replicate their test's functionality with rust tests, but i still ended up using their software suite a few times to verify some behavior and get a better understanding of the step-by-step logic for the alu and cpu
Solar system sim stuff.
Increased the computational core performance 120X by rewriting in Rust (og was Python).
Was a great first experience for me with Rust. Used pyo3 / maturin to make a python library in rust
You mentioned stuff built in the shop so...
Programming is a winter activity for me. Summer is for being on the water and in the shop. I used to use my boat trailer as a general cargo hauler, so I needed a way to get the boat on and off the trailer. To that end, I built a platform at trailer height that I could use to store the boat.
Now I have a proper pickup truck, so I've converted that boat stand to a cutting station. The large surface area is good for sheet goods. I installed a lowered platform for my mitre saw. It works like a charm and keeps the worst of the dust out of my shop. Now the only indoor power tools are my bandsaw and drill press, which are trivial to collect dust from. Next up are cabinet stands for those tools and a new workbench.
Back to programming, my winter plans are to finally figure out a workflow to keep Charm up to date so I can play with it (I'm new to git). Then start tracking down free or inexpensive resources to study programming language theory.
I'm making a functional programming language where the user can modify the parser using monadic parsing to display the semantics of the language in different styles with different syntax sugars. (C-like, python-like, etc.)
I just finished my first long technical blog post - blogging is a relatively new habit I'm trying to build up. I posted the blogpost already to the robotics community so I'll just crosspost it with this link. TLDR it's the trial and tribulations I had while trying to use PPO to train a robotic arm to do pick and place.
I'm putting a hold on the other project I was burning out of - something I called
coppermind(yes I'm a Sanderson fan) that handled chatbot memory/applications. I have an old version running on a digital ocean droplet plugged into Twilio, but recent degradations in ChatGPT 3.5 model response quality + that version not having my knowledge/vector database features means it's becoming a bit repetitive on its responses.Right now with my masters in robotics starting up again in late August, and this being the project for the entire thing, I'm spending some time working on tooling to get myself up to speed on ROS2 and get repeatable environments up and running for it so I can quickly fix/deploy sim robots for the project. I have some ideas I'm toying with there. Unfortunately no idea what the project will be yet.