This year I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Boston, Massachusetts, to the annual Libreplanet conference.

I’ve started to leave my mutt niche in order to start using notmuch-emacs MUA. All in all, I can see the see the speed advantage of using notmuch, among other little perks. Nevertheless, the approach of tagging emails instead of organizing them in IMAP folders makes the use of notmuch a little non-portable for others folder based user agents. I wouldn’t mind that, but I like receiving my emails on my mobile phone and as far as I know there is no such thing as a mobile notmuch MUA.

Finally, after setting the skeleton of the game on day 1 and day 2, I’ve managed to get a chess board where you can actually play. Of course, it’s quite rudimentary and you’ll have to input the coordinates by typing them, but I think that for the moment it’ll do.

Yesterday I’ve started a blog post series where about writing a small chess interface in C. I’ve set up the types Color, PieceType, Piece, Square and Board, and talked about the general idea of the game. Finally, I’ve shown some of the logic behind printing and initializing the Board.

I’ve been programming in Haskell as my main language for almost a year now. Among other things, I love the concept of purity and expressiveness it provides. In fact, I’ve gotten so used to the functional paradigm that I’m having problems when writing code in other languages, as C, which kind of sucks because I’m a teaching assistant of a subject where we use that language.