I haven’t been writing for a year now.
Life has been busy and as a new parent I’ve struggled to find time or motivation to write. I never thought life would get this hard or tiring. It’s not like we hadn’t been warned by everyone but I kept thinking that it would be different for us. It wasn’t. Hardship is subjective and I know others have it harder, but that doesn’t invalidate how challenging the past year and a half has felt since Léo’s birth.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on a Terminal User Interface (TUI) framework for mruby. The goal is to build cross-platform TUI executables writen entirely in Ruby. The framework itself is still a work in progress and currently private, but the two core dependencies it relies on are being developed in parallel as open-source projects.
The first is mruby-termbox2, a set of mruby bindings for the termbox2 library. termbox2 is a lightweight terminal I/O library for building text-based user interfaces. It serves as a slim, modern alternative to the convoluted ncurses library. With mruby-termbox2, developers can render and interact with terminal UIs directly from Ruby.
The second is mruby-clay, bindings for the Clay layout library. Clay (short for C Layout) is a high-performance 2D UI layout engine. These bindings allow you to design complex 2D layouts in pure Ruby.
Together, mruby-termbox2 and mruby-clay make it possible to create rich, composable terminal interfaces entirely in Ruby. Best of all, programs written in mruby can be packaged and distributed as standalone applications.
I gave a presentation on my local meetup in July about what mruby is. Here are the slides (PDF)
Recently, I’ve paused work on the TUI framework itself to focus on a smaller side project: FdRSS.com
I dropped my RSS reader 10 years ago when I arrived in New Zealand and consumed news through social media since. Applications came and went but they never failed to drain my time over the years. Nothing new here; these applications use algorithmic recommendations to increase your screen time so you have more time seeing ads. It’s such a gross and pervasive business model. The early days of the internet, when it was about building real communities, feel long gone.
The news I consume is Ruby-related and I shouldn’t have to be locked into silos like Reddit, X, Bluesky or Mastodon. This is when I looked back to RSS. Isn’t RSS dead? Not really but it doesn’t help that platforms slowly remove RSS support.
I’ve written about my switch to RSS here: Bye Reddit, Hello RSS. I currently self host my RSS client, FreshRSS, and access it through Clouflare tunnels. So far so good. I feel more focused during the day.
To help me keep up to date to with Ruby content I’ve contributed to the Awesome Ruby Blogs repository to provide RSS links for most website listed there. I also added OPML files for each section, making imports a breeze for anyone with an RSS client. It was a fun project. I got to write some scripts and play with Fibers for the first time. Check out the bin folder in the repository if you want to know more.
After a couple of months using FreshRSS I learned about the IndieWeb and that gave me the idea to create blog engine with a twist. What if people blogged for RSS readers first. From this idea originated FdRSS.com: A minimalistic blog platform dedicated to RSS. I would love you to check it out.
I will be moving some of my secondary content like Projects and Heard / Read / Saw sections to the platform with dedicated RSS feeds.
Between work and family I don’t have much time anymore to focus on side projects. That said, I still have a few short posts and announcements in the works. If you’d like to follow along, subscribe to my RSS feed.