Status Report - Week 13 2026

Real life

This week was busier than usual in terms of "house management":

• Ever since we moved into our apartment 5+ years ago, we've had some birds nesting in a space above our balcony closet that they can access via a hole in the facade. It did not bother us and we love nature so we did not do anything about it. I ran into my downstairs neighbour who complained that the birds dirty their terrace two floors down. It's interesting that this was not a problem in the last 5 years but became one once we bought the apartment, but I can understand, and took care of this. Given the amount of wood/sand/random shit we took out, I wouldn't be surprised if that space had been occupied for the last 50 years :-)
• The dishwasher technician came to check our not-closing-anymore door. It turns out that there's nothing wrong with the dishwasher: the problem is that there is friction against the other furniture when we open/close the door, and the machine slowly moves inwards until a point where the door does not close enough for the hook to do its thing. So now we know that when this happens again, we need to pull the machine back out. Ideally we'd also renew the kitchen because the root cause is that everything moved over time and nothing's aligned anymore, but it's the Netherlands and everything's built on sand, so it will move anyway :-)

On Saturday I was on one of the juries in the "interview simulation" event organized by my kids' school. It targeted students who will only graduate next year, so I was expecting them to "perform" a bit worse than the ones one year older that I interviewed in previous sessions. I was very wrong: both candidates were well prepared and excellent. This event was yet another reinforcement of my frustration that girls seem generally much better than boys, but somehow convince themselves that they're not good enough to study "hard sciences" (while the boys their age I see tend to be mediocre at best, but think they'll win a Nobel prize - I'm barely exaggerating...).

I continued to read Wild, and started in parallel Fundamentals of Physics: Mechanics, Relativity, and Thermodynamics. I've always been more a maths/computer guy, and I never understood physics (which did not prevent me from being very good at it lol), and figured it was worth trying again after 20+ years :-)

Otherwise, I ran a mere 18.07 km (IOW the "running fire" is not back yet :-)), and had a good week at GeoGuessr with 22 wins out of 43, enough to stay in the Master IV division.

Open source

I don't have much to show this week, but it does not mean I did not do much :-)

I started to prototype migrating the processing of SourceHut's project hub webhooks from Python to Go (the next step in my ongoing work about hub's GraphQL API), and quickly realized that it would be too dangerous without at least a few tests to catch possible regressions :-)

I therefore

• resurrected some sr.ht-integration-testing tests that were based on UI parts recently dismantled, and changed them to instead query the event database table, and
• improved them to not only assert the number and structure of events, but also their full contents.

This is not fun and pretty tedious work, but it will drastically increase my confidence in my port of webhook processing from Python to Go, exactly what I want (and need).

And it already started providing value, since it helped me find an issue in version 4 of my patch to add write APIs (that I fixed here).