Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• What I think about this last week, all in all.
• How well I followed the plan.
• Reasonable near-term goals.
• Thoughts on further-out improvements.

One thing I'm seeing so far, is a lack of any kind of "standard" week, when I let myself really get into this stuff. Maybe that'll change once I have access to Python 3.7 on CI (chop chop, Appveyor; and it looks like the answer on Travis is "just use a docker image", which... does exist, I guess, so I just need to learn how to use it...) But for now, I just have to take each week as it comes.

When it comes to last week in particular, I gave myself a few goals, blew most of the way through one of them, and kind of plinked away at the other. No matter how I feel about the whole "syntax definition" question, it's undeniable that the blog publisher script is in a much better place.

In terms of following the plan, I ended up realizing that most of the big improvements I wanted were such low-hanging fruit that I just had to, like, decide to do them. And so I did. I'd had the good fortune to have several things in mind, so I was able to give myself other stuff to focus on, of a higher priority. Maybe that's something I could do with these projects. Come up with a few things that appeal to me, and switch off by priority.

Also, now that I really look at what the reST syntax does, some of these matches look weirdly restrictive? Like what's the deal with how the raw html block is specified? Anyway, for now, I just switched on the syntaxes as default, so I get the full force of the not-quite-bakedness. Give me some incentive to fill these in.

I kind of wonder how far out coming up with new syntax files is going to go. I kind of want to say, anything beyond what I need for Python, I'd like to open things up as some kind of community project, but I'm pretty sure I'm not in a position where that makes sense now. I don't really have any greater ambition for these projects, I just want something that works for me.

Next week... mi sona ala. mi ken sona e ijo kepeken toki pona? Or not, I don't know. Maybe I'll write up what the heck the Python syntax file does for a Free Topic day sometime.