Weeknotes - W28-2026

13 Jul, 2026

I keep telling myself I need to post more weeknotes, so here's a bit of an update on what I'm working on lately!

Reading

I've been reading a bit more non-fiction lately and am working through a pile I checked out of the library a few weeks ago.

Through some work travel a couple weeks ago I read and finished "The Siren's Call" by Chris Hayes - a fascinating look at the attention economy from a media personality perspective, with some philosophy intertwined.

Now, I'm reading through Chris Lintott's "Accidental Astronomy" and really loving it - it's all about how random and chance finds shaped the field of astronomy and continue to.

After that, I've got one more book from the library in my pile and then I'll be reading the 2nd book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and finding my next read. My pace in reading has been a bit slow and I definitely need to get more consistent with reading daily, but I'm making progress!

Gaming

I hadn't been playing a lot of games until this weekend, when Palworld v1.0 officially released with a huge amount of new content and the official ending finally available.

I'm playing on a server with some friends and while they're miles ahead of me, I'm having a great time slowly progressing through. So far I've completed the first 2 boss towers and am working on unlocking the 3rd, while also trying to get some better gear because I seem to be a bit death-prone.

My goal is to just beat the main story with my friends on this world, and then I think I'm going to start up my own private world after that where I can go achievement hunting and try and catch all the Pals that I can.

Projects

My current main project is an enclosure for my 3D printer - based on the Prusa blog's IKEA LACK Table enclosure design. The goal is to hopefully provide a nice looking environment for the printer as well as to reduce the noise it makes a bit.

I started working on this officially in May and have so far acquired all¹ of the pieces and spent some time this week trying to start the assembly process. I've already run into an issue on Step 1 and reached out to the Prusa Discord and Forums for a bit of help, hopefully from someone else who has done this same build.

My goal is to finish it by the end of this month so I can hopefully move on to my next project, which I haven't even decided yet! I've got a few things I can return to and finish in the pipeline, as well as a few brand new ideas.

Programming

I've been working for a while on a web app I call achilles - a tool for my college fraternity chapter to better handle and manage information that flows through, and to hopefully automate a few common tasks.

I made a good bit of progress on it once I finally sat down and forced myself to stick with a single tech stack - I had swapped from Django to a custom Golang stack and back to Django, now I've chosen Laravel and I'm sticking with it for the long-haul.

But...when I started it in Laravel I went with Livewire and FluxUI for the front-end - a decision I now regret because it made the structure of the business logic a bit mangled and everywhere. This week, I started to work on re-writing some sections and move away from Livewire to just raw PHP with Blade for templating and it's been moving well so far!

Hopefully over the next couple weeks I can finish that migration and go back to writing new features. It'll also open me up to considering something like Vue for interactivity features that I still want, but it is up for debate. The only thing I think I'm really missing out on is some clean search/filtering functionality, but we'll see where things go!

Miscellaneous

I got a chance to go to my apartment pool and brought myself to finally do it - I definitely need some more outdoor time and it was nice to just hang out there.

We've been watching "The Bear" on Hulu here at home, and it's a really good drama/comedy. Definitely a bit stress-inducing at times but it really gets you hooked quickly.

My to-do list has steadily been growing, but I'm handling it a lot better these days which has been awesome.

#'Weeknotes'