Status Update: August 2024

Published on to joshleeb's blog

G’day!

Last month ended with completing the local-export subsystem in Pinto which was the last piece before I could use Pinto for my personal bookmarks. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, using Pinto almost everyday this month.

I’ve discovered a few small bugs which have been fixed, and some areas where the UI can be improved. But for the most part Pinto has been working delightfully well!

As promised, I took a break from the development work of Pinto. I expect this will continue into next month as I work on other personal projects, explore learning interests, and continue to get familiar with using this service I have created.

One of those interests is programming languages. Every now and again I enjoy dabbling in programming languages that aren’t part of my weekly-subset; the languages I engage with on a weekly basis. This month I spent a couple of weeks back with Haskell and OCaml writing Lambda Calculus interpreters.

Although I’m no stranger to writing parsers by hand, my time with Haskell introduced me to a parallel parsing approach that I’ve not seen before. The idea is to build on the Alternative typeclass to represent choices the parser could take. For example, when parsing a binary number, each digit presents a choice of whether we will encounter a ‘0’ or a ‘1’. It found this to be a very elegant way to write a tokenizer that could be configured in an almost declarative style without relying on code generation or additional tooling.

For the rest of the month I’ve been exploring alternative (non-mainstream) thoughts of the internet. The small-web and the indie-web are concepts that are very important to me as drivers towards a more free, open and equal web with many of the values aligning with values I hold personally.

Over the past few years I have come across a handful of articles about these alt-webs and, more generally, principled software and technology movements such as permacomputing. Finding these was inspiring as it indicated there were others who shared my views on technology. I was made aware of these articles by pure chance, yet I struggled to find more myself, in part due to the degradation of popular search engines.

Back in June, I was re-reading many of the wonderful pages on the Hundred Rabbits site, and came across an interesting word I’d never seen before, “convivial”. Looking up the definition led me to Ivan Illich’s 1973 book, Tools for Conviviality which I promptly ordered, read, and am now re-reading more closely.

To me, Tools for Conviviality seems to be the starting point (or at least one of them) for some of the ideas behind many of these movements. It armed me with some new terms I could use to find a treasure trove of writings on the topic.

Researching in this domain of technological movements is both exciting and overwhelming. It’s an area I’m excited to write more about as my own thoughts and opinions crystallize into coherent, tenable arguments and I figure out the right way to share them.

For now I’ll say that an overarching goal of mine is

To contribute towards a more convivial web

This is a goal I have had for a while but been unable to put into words until now. Pinto is certainly part of this goal and I plan for many future projects to be as well, although I don’t have a firm idea of what that looks like at the moment… But all in good time.

If you’re interested in the small-web, indie-web, and related ideas, I’ll leave some links to a few of the articles and essays I’ve read and re-read this month.

The Classics

Newly Discovered

That’s all for now, see you next month!