Week 06, 2026
Why not? Writing a weekly post looks like so much fun…let’s see how long I can last! I thoroughly enjoy reading what others have been busy doing over their past seven days that I want in. Maybe I need this -- like a relaxing exhale after a long, deep breath -- now that it’s the weekend.
VS Code
It has been a fun, productive week. This is the one where I finally bit the bullet and installed VS Code on my Linux machines. It was a sad goodbye to Geany, which has served me well over the past 10 years. Geany, unfortunately, could not handle very large files without throwing a tantrum. Foolishly, I tried opening a raw data text file containing about 250k lines; it froze, then crashed and then did it again when I re-tried. It also pushed my memory and CPU right up to 100%, so yeah, I’m lucky I didn’t fry any chips.
I learned that VS Code does not try to load the entire file all at once; it does a lazy-load type thing where it memorises only what is in view, or something like that. That way of doing things, I like very much; it’s called “efficiency”.
I’ve completed customising it to my liking, and have been tinkering away with a whole bunch of code and large data sets all week. VS Code has managed to keep up and barely broke a sweat. Additionally, I’m typing this in it because, you know, why not?
GitGen
There is a lookalike GitHub contributions calendar in draft and I’m trying to fit it into the main index page. It is a slow burn, but at least I’ve taken the first few steps. I love statistics, so having this 365-day overview of past commits will be cool.
I’ve also cobbled together a Git repo file browser but it is not very good. It adds around 9 seconds to the site generation time because I’ve gone overboard, incorporating syntax highlighting via Pygments and a page-per-file export for files smaller than 50KB. That adds up to a lot of calculations and I cannot justify the additional overhead to get…what? A pretty file browser? This one is back to the drawing board, I think.
It might never happen, as I’m starting to accept that I don’t need to have a file browser; it has always been a nice-to-have as opposed to a necessity. Then again, during my tests, it did help me spot a few issues in my repos. I need to think on it some more. Next week.