I always want to do it all

Underjord is a tiny, wholesome team doing Elixir consulting and contract work. If you like the writing you should really try the code. See our services for more information.

My brain has very little chill on a day-to-day basis. There are moments where I can find a very peaceful state of mind. Doing something menial in the garden for an extended time, cooling off outside after a while in a sauna, winding down after heavy exercise. At most other times my mind is usually working on something or I'm itching with the need to do things.

I've had to do a lot of pacing myself recently. The big thing is, we've bought a house, fixed a bunch of minor renovations and then moved in. This has been a fairly large chunk of work and continues to be a constant stream of unpacking boxes, getting things in order, reordering things that didn't work out. It isn't quite endless, but its definitely a long-distance run rather than something I can sprint. It takes continuous effort.

This eats into my happy creative lab time. I have so many things I want to do and very little time to do them. My writing has slowed down so I can keep up with client work in the midst of all this house-stuff. But my time to experiment with programming outside of client work has pretty much completely stopped.

So I wanted to share some things I want to sink my teeth into at some point. I don't imagine I'll do half of them, so don't consider this a todo-list, it's more of a want-to-do list and it is bound to change. Currently on the list are:

• Investigate if I can fix Pi4 support for Scenic and Nerves (Elixir, UI and hardware frameworks respectively), I've already dumped what info I could find in an issue on the Scenic Nerves Pi Driver
• Build a general pointer device input driver for Scenic, mouse support and assorted touchpads/touchscreens, current one is only for the official 7" touch screen
• Build a simple rendering driver for Scenic that draws using groldan's Chisel library rather than OpenGL
• Get a simple screen specification up and running to share more library support between different simple Nerves display driver libraries
• Experiment with building a web UI framework on the tools provided by Lumen
• Finish up creation of some home sensor network stuff and actually deploy these sensors

This is just a rough list off of the top of my head. But I felt like writing them out and I might as well share them once I do that. If any of these speak to you, feel free to run with them. They're just ideas, execution is the real thing that matters and I'm not precious about any of it.

Another exciting thing that's coming up is that we are making a room in the garage into a separate office, so my work-from-home setup will get significantly more serious as I'll have a proper office. This means a big opportunity to do some interior design which is fun and challenging.

I've also been thinking about streaming some things. I've gone from a bad ADSL to a very decent fiber setup so it feels doable now. Is there anything in particular that I've covered on this blog that you think would be beneficial to see me work on over Twitch or something? Let me know. I'm all ears.

So that's a quick update. Hope to find more writing time in the days to come. Take care now.

Underjord is a 4 people team doing Elixir consulting and contract work. If you like the writing you should really try the code. See our services for more information.

Note: Or try the videos on the YouTube channel.