I’ve been self-hosting part of my Internet footprint for over a decade. This website, my mail system, a personal wiki, my code repositories, you name it. I do this for two reasons: to be in control of my own data, and to learn by doing. After all:

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

– Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

My services are generally steady, as I’m not doing anything overly complicated. I run the stable release of Debian in a tiny virtual machine, and use packages from the official archives with unattended security upgrades. However, every now and then I have to deal with some instability. This is fine; it’s part of the trade-off of self-hosting.

During the last (southern hemisphere) summer I wrote the Emacs package Org Tempus to enhance the editor’s time tracking capabilities. I’ve been using it constantly since then, fixing obscure race conditions and timer bugs. Even with the aid of LLMs, it took several iterations to get things right.

The usage of LLMs still produces bloated code, also known as AI slop. However, there are techniques that can be used to prevent it. I’ve experimented with a few LLM “skills” to simplify codebases, and I was pleased with the result. Code is a liability, so cutting down on lines is desirable.

It’s been a long while since my last Debian contributions log. Life gets busy, interests change, and sometimes it’s necessary to take a break to come back more energized and with new ideas. A few months ago I started giving some love to all the packages I maintain. I was curious to see how much the workflows have changed since the advent of LLMs. Packaging work is mostly mechanical and well defined, making it quite fitting for these tools to process.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known for Le Petit Prince, wrote in Terre des hommes that:

Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.

This is normally translated to English as:

Perfection is finally obtained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there’s no longer anything to take away.

This philosophy can also be applied to software. The UNIX adage “make each program do one thing well” encourages slim applications that are not bloated with features or dependencies.

Time management is a tricky business. Ideally we should spend our precious time in Earth doing things that we’re interested in for as long as we want. Unfortunately that’s not how the life of a modern human works. We have responsibilities, chores, busy work, etc. We have activities that we enjoy doing, and tasks that we have to get over, and ideally we should make progress in all of them. We’re in a constant state of context switching. Additionally, we need to take regular breaks to ensure our brain is not overly engaged.