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authorAshelyn Rose <git@tempest.dev>2023-05-08 19:25:46 -0600
committerAshelyn Rose <git@tempest.dev>2023-05-08 19:29:19 -0600
commitd89d92d3936683f4212186cef517c7930dd5b33a (patch)
treecba24caddd1dc5f950b5e42eb333261f0c13dca5 /posts
parent6cddfdf8fe9bccc291ee8625d42cb42fd4ce2134 (diff)
add markdown rendering, copy in old posts
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-rw-r--r--posts/2022-08-01_thoughts-on-neovim.md65
-rw-r--r--posts/2023-01-04_advent-of-wasm.md75
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diff --git a/posts/2022-08-01_thoughts-on-neovim.md b/posts/2022-08-01_thoughts-on-neovim.md
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+---
+title: Thoughts on Neovim
+subtitle: Who even needs an IDE anyways?
+author: rose
+---
+
+## Why I'm using Neovim
+
+When I first started coding in high school and then later in early
+college I used to jump around between editors a lot more than I do today.
+I used Notepad++, then Visual Studio, briefly Netbeans, then Atom.
+
+But since settling into frontend web development I've stayed with VSCode
+for a very long time.  I liked it because it was straightforward to get
+started with, but versatile enough to extend for other languages.
+Between various jobs and projects I used it for Javascript, Java, C#,
+Rust, and C - and it did admirably at pretty much all of these.
+
+But about a year ago I saw that VSCode had a Neovim plugin, and I was
+intrigued.  I'd wanted to get more familiar with Vim beyond the basic
+hjkl navigation, and this seemed like a great way to do that! 
+
+So for the last year and change I've had the
+<a target="_blank" href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim">vscode-neovim</a> plugin
+plugin installed, and I've been really enjoying it!
+
+I quickly fell in love with visual block mode, or the "delete N words"
+commands.  They're just so handy I suddenly felt like they were missing
+if I needed to edit code any other way!
+
+But over the weekend I made the jump from using Neovim inside VSCode to
+using it more or less on its own.  I saw a video that mentioned the
+AstroNvim configuration framework and Neovide, and decided "yeah, I think
+I want to try that", and a few days later . . . here we are.
+
+## How is it going?
+
+Overall, surprisingly well.
+
+The AstroNvim config I'm using already had NeoTree set up which is
+very nice.  I've figured out how to get ESLint and Prettier configured
+for work, rust-analyzer installed for my own projects, I've been poking
+at themes over and over again, and honestly . . . I'm really liking this.
+
+Getting Neovide to connect to a VM over the network was relatively
+straightforward, I love how easy it is to drop my config into git and
+keep it synced between computers, and finally having proper mouse support
+(which I never could get sorted out with my terminal) is a pretty big
+game changer for when I'm just reading code.
+
+Also, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't love the smooth scrolling and
+cursor animation.  I am a simple girl after all.
+
+## Should you try replacing your IDE?
+
+That is a tricky question to answer.
+
+I was comfortable spending some time experimenting with this because I
+already had decent familiarity with Vim and had been using Neovim
+specifically for a while.  If you don't have any similar experience,
+the learning curve is going to be pretty steep.
+
+But hey - if you're looking for a challenge, you'll definitely learn
+a lot.
+
diff --git a/posts/2023-01-04_advent-of-wasm.md b/posts/2023-01-04_advent-of-wasm.md
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+---
+title: Advent of Wasm
+subtitle: Now with 87% more pain
+author: rose
+---
+
+So the last few years I have done Advent of Code off and on.  Sometimes
+I have tried to learn a new language, other times I was just trying to
+beat my dad each evening.  This year though, this year I don't know what
+I was thinking.
+
+It was several weeks after everyone else had started, I had largely written
+it off for the year - I was not up for it.  Until a terrible idea crossed
+my mind.
+
+Like an intrusive thought, my mind asked: "Well you've been wanting to do
+something in web assembly for a while right?  How bad could it be?"
+
+<br/>
+
+Turns out I was definitely not ready for this.
+
+## So what was so hard about it?
+
+More than anything else, I forgot how much you need to do by hand to do
+any sort of assembly.  The first day saw me spending several hours just
+on some loader code to pass the puzzle input in from JS, call a wasm
+function, and then read back the result.
+
+Next was a few functions for reading numbers out of the wasm memory buffer,
+parsing them from ascii, etc.  The core read loop was not too tricky, but
+the bit that took far longer than it had any reason to was converting my
+answer back to ascii and shoving it into an output area.
+
+Really none of it was surprising, and none of it <em><strong>*should*</strong></em> have
+been that hard ... it's just been a while since this Javascript girl
+has written truly low-level code.
+
+To make matters worse I got hard-core distracted by the non-wasm part of
+my wasm project.  After the first day I returned to my stub JS loader and
+expanded it into a little wasm explorer.
+
+I added a code view, syntax highlighting, auto-loaded my puzzle inputs,
+even made a janky little dynamic list that would automatically pick up
+new days' solutions as I added them to the repo without needing me to
+touch the loader page each day.
+
+In the end I'm really quite proud of it, I will absolutely be reusing
+this setup for future years, and you should
+<a href="https://aoc2022.tempest.dev/" target="_blank">check it out</a>
+if you haven't already ... but for wanting to challenge myself with
+something new I was doing a lot of the same-old.
+
+Ultimately I got through 3 days before giving up jusst because every
+step along the way involved <em><strong>*so much*</strong></em> extra
+code.  I may come back to some of the puzzles later, but for now I'm
+kind of happy with what I did, and I don't feel like I need to prove
+myself by doing more.  I was doing it for fun, and so I stopped when
+it stopped being fun.
+
+## Tips if you want to get into writing wasm by hand?
+
+Uhh ... maybe consider don't?
+
+Jokes aside: do a throwaway project or two so you get used to passing
+data into and out of wasm, whatever parsing you're going to do, etc.
+
+Do everything in your power to make sure you can focus on the actual
+wasm part of your project, because (at least if you're anything like
+me) it's easy to get sidetracked with all that.
+
+With that said: I had fun.  Doing new things is always a treat, so if
+you're looking for something new to try definitely consider giving
+webassembly a look.
+