As we approach the end of the quarter and halfway through 2025, I felt it was time for an update, and this time, I might mix the structure a bit.
Mostly, I’ve continued working on the projects mentioned in the last post. That is continuing to adjust my Python script that generates a JSON archive of my writings.
The purpose of this project was partially educational, partially to actually record my writings, and to encourage readers to index and adapt my blog posts for their own purposes. I suppose too I had at the back of my mind a notion of making my writing more readable by LLMs 1.
I adapted my programme to prepare a separate JSON file for my other blog. However, I’m not sure it makes much sense for that blog.
Posts there tend to be more complete thoughts than what I post here, so I think there is less opportunity for adaptation by readers. Posts can also sit quite happily in a backup folder either online or on a hard drive somewhere, so archiving isn’t really an issue. And since LLMs can read texts in multiple formats, it is somewhat debatable if there is much benefit to reformatting my texts in JSON anyway.
JSON archives aside, with some time off at Easter I took the opportunity to revisit Neovim and Git. I didn’t make much progress when I looked at these topics last year, but this time I feel I got more out of the experience. Certainly, I will attempt to use Git in my coding projects going forward. As for Neovim, well, I still find myself going to VS Code for the majority of my coding tasks. While I do think Neovim has less latency than VS Code, overall I just find VS Code more ergonomic to use. Even just cycling through files seems more straightforward. However, if I ever need to do anything in Bash, I think Neovim is the way to go.
I also continued working through Effective Haskell but eventually, I did get stuck, it gets quite tricky later.
One thing different I tried was finally getting around to working on Ray Tracing in One Weekend, but more on that later 2.
As you might have gathered from the above, I feel somewhat stuck recently. I’m not entirely sure why, I have plenty of projects I’d like to tackle but I don’t really seem to be getting to them.
I suspect part of this malaise might be due to focusing too much on the process rather than the result. By that I mean, I’ve spent quite some time learning programming skills, but I feel like I haven’t created that much for all that effort. Perhaps to move on I should focus on creating something(s) 3.
To be clear, I don’t mean making an app, or game, or any real commercial product, but perhaps some demo, something simple. Perhaps that’s the key to being more productive if my efforts lead to something more creative.
Therefore over the next quarter, I would like to look into some more creative outlets. In particular, I’ve really wanted to get into graphics more (hence reading the ray tracing book) but perhaps I could look into things like USD (that’s Universal Display Language) or engines like Unreal.
Let’s see, as ever, I have some ideas…
What I’ve been up to 5 © 2025 by William Samuel McDonald is licensed under CC BY 4.0
New blog update: ql-blog.co/posts/2025-0...
— Sam McDonald (@sammcdonald.me) June 28, 2025 at 4:15 PM
[image or embed]
Yes I am quite ok with LLM scrapping my work. As I’ve said before my motivation is not particularly commercial and I suppose some LLM thinking about what I wrote in the future is a kind of legacy (?) ↩
Strictly speaking I worked on it over a holiday weekend and took the following Monday off too so for me it’s more accurately Ray Tracing in a Four-Day Weekend. It’s a great book, with a unique format - essentially it walks you through one exercise in detail. ↩
I may reflect on this later in a separate post, maybe something titled along the lines of Making vs Creating. ↩