The best thing that happened this week
This will be a long update because quite a few things happened!
The best thing that happened this week is that I made another side project public this week. I created a thing that takes an RSS feed, goes through each link in the feed, downloads the article, and generates a new RSS feed including the full article. I mostly wanted this to exist for myself, but I decided to open source the thing because I think it's useful for other people as well.
That's three side projects so far in 2026!
- An iOS app called CalAction to help importing .ICS files from anywhere;
- A Terraform module for deploying AWS SCP's more easily;
- RSS FullText to create full article RSS feeds.
One of my goals for 2026 was to consume less and create more. So far I'd say I'm on the right track.
Playing
I've 100% completed Shelldiver which has a wonderfully surprising ending for a game like that. I also 100% completed another incremental game called Zero Stress King: Idle Defense which was a bit more anti-climactic and short for my taste. Then again, it's only €5,- and it's a good 8 hours of seeing numbers getting bigger.
I'm now working on 100% completing Kirby Star Allies. After that, I'm planning on doing the same to DK Bananza.
Listening
I've been listening to RAYE's album This Music May Contain Hope quite a bit. Other than that, I will never stop listening to John Mayer so I've been having his music on shuffle for most of the time.
Random things
- Didn't get a lot of running in because of bad weather and having to focus more on stability and strength workouts. Once the weather gets better and I get the all clear from my PT I will be back to pushing that 45 minute 10k.
- AWS should really solve this thing where you randomly end up in the wrong region in their web interface. This is the second year in a row that I bought my ElastiCache reserved instances in the wrong region because of it. Should I pay more attention? Yes. Should AWS fix this region-switching thing? Also yes. Annoying. Hope support can cancel them once again.
- Everyone's doing this Cool Thing now where they move away from GitHub and onto something that isn't owned by Big Tech. I however, as a sole developer, don't really have an issue with GitHub downtime as Git is supposed to work without GitHub being available anyway. I also depend on Dependabot and GitHub Actions quite a bit to keep my personal projects manageable. I don't think moving to a different forge gives me the ROI I'm looking for at the minute. Especially since the most popular alternative, Codeberg, also has frequent downtime (mostly at no fault of their own).
- This is going to sound really posh but we hired someone to take care of our garden and so far it's been money well spent. He's done our lawn last week and you can already see the bare patches become green again. It's a nice peace of mind kind of thing for us.
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