Programming projects in 2019

This is a post where I summarize some of the projects I have been hacking on during 2019. Note that only non-work related projects are covered by this list.

(The text below is an excerpt from my general page about programming which can be found here.)

• 2019: Went to two shorter online courses in Computer Science at Uppsala University. It was nice, but in the end it felt hard to find the proper time to both be working full-time, parenting four children and in addition to that also find time to study in the evenings, so I decided to take a break with my studies after the 2nd course.

  • chaos (42h). Decided to make a new attempt at fixing the soundblaster server (the previous attempt was the year before), with the end goal of making it possible to play music with the .mod player again. Got it working , only to realize that the music started to experience cutoffs/etc after a while. Turned out that our malloc-based IPC (one memory allocation for each IPC send) was a bad idea, so I refactored it to use a circular queue instead - this was a nice experience where I even managed to get my feet wet with unit testing of C code, which I haven't done much before. It was really nice to be able to place breakpoints and run my new circular queue implementation from inside VS Code, and make sure various scenarios were properly handled by my implementation.

    This led up to the 0.3.0 release, which included for the first time in years (or decades :-) a working .mod player.

    Full list of commits for the year is here.

  • EnvironmentCriminal (28h). This was an ASP.NET MVC/C# project I did for one of the university courses previously mentioned. The project used a local SQL Server DB and Entity Framework for accessing the DB. It was nice to get some up-to-date experience with these technologies, and I wouldn't mind using them again. I think the "classic" (non-SPA) based approach to writing web sites fits my mental model better than e.g. Ember, React and friends. If Blazor + WebAssembly changes things greatly I might reconsider accepting the SPA paradigm again. :-)

  • 2is206_laborations (14h). This was a little Java project we did in the other university course, playing around with some (fairly simple) algorithms. Sorting and things like that. I think this was a good brain exercise for me. Even though I've been working as a professional programmer since the last century, there are still gaps in my knowledge, areas where I can improve. Getting stronger in algorithms is clearly one of these. Interestingly enough, it was after going this course that I then did the circular queue implementation in C for chaos (mentioned above).

  • perlun.eu.org (2h). The blog didn't get a whole lot of love during this year. I think I've almost spent at the time of writing (January the 5th) more time on this during 2020 already. :-) (given the work I've spent on updating these lists of projects etc)

  • perlang (1h). Perlang is a new programming language I am thinking about writing. This is yet on the drawing board; there is not a single line of code written on the compiler yet. As of yet, I have jot down a few examples of how the syntax could look and some aspects on how it would work. I also keep a page in my notebook at work, writing down various idas I get while working with my at-work project(s). :-) Who knows, maybe this will become a new killer language? Either way, I'm hoping to write more about it on this blog at some point.

  • chaosdev.io (1h). I spent a little time writing up a post with release notes for 0.3.0, as well as some other small fixes.