Status Report - Week 15 2026

Real life

The week started with a nice train trip to Dordrecht to close the long Easter weekend. We had gorgeous weather and really liked the city. Here are a few pictures:

Nathalie had an unfortunate adventure at the French consulate while picking up her new passport. France is introducing a solution to simplify administrative procedures, France Identité. You need to be in front of an "official person" to set this up, and the plan was for her to do so while at the consulate. The idea is that you get an email with a personal link that opens an app on your phone, and you do some operations with that person. This app is coded so well that if you open it like any other app instead of via the personal link, it's "really bad", and you have to start over.

It's apparently so bad that they warned her about this multiple times beforehand, and managed to scare her so much that she decided to only download the app while at the consulate. This makes a lot of sense, but the grave mistake she made was to assume that she'd have connectivity there. I almost suspect they have some kind of jammer because she barely had any signal - signing on the app store took minutes, downloading was super slow, etc. So much that after a long time, the tech person asked her to try outside the building, and if it did not work, to make another appointment. Needless to say, she was able to do everything in seconds from outside.

So everything worked in the end, but it took a lot of time, the tech person was pissed off because what should take 5 minutes took almost 1 hour, and Nathalie was stressed out. All this because the guys who develop the app are so bad that not starting it from the personal link apparently "breaks everything". Beyond the fact that the development probably cost a million euros to France, I'm amazed that nobody thought that the UX was just unacceptable and that this should never go to Production. I guess the French administration created their own version of Amazon's "Insist on the highest standards": "Insist on the lowest standards".

On the reading front, I continue Fundamentals of Physics: Mechanics, Relativity, and Thermodynamics, still very good, and I started reading American Sniper.

I ran a bit - 22.84 km - but not enough to my liking. I need to correct this.

Finally, I had an OK week at GeoGuessr, with 21 wins out the 39 duels I played. This got me to finish 17th in my group, and stay in Master IV for one more week :-)

Open source

I made some progress on SourceHut's project hub, in particular the migration of webhook processing from Python to Go. I submitted two more pre-requisites to process all new webhooks in Go, via this patch.

I also drafted the migration of existing webhooks, so that we can simply remove the Python code. I plan to spend a bit of time on testing and submit it next week.

I will slow down a bit on "core" SourceHut patches because the staff is busy fighting a DDos attack and there's not much time stacking too many PRs on still not reviewed ones.

Instead, I plan to spend the time on increasing sr.ht-integation-testing's test coverage, probably adding support for scenarios involving multiple users.

Finally, I checked if/how I could test one of my pending servo patches. It's unfortunately not possible to do it, so the patch got merged as is.