To nobody’s surprise, the consistency of status updates have been less than perfect. But still, here I am with another catch-up post. Since the last update was a while back, this one might end up slightly longer.
First off, let me start with a career update. I have received my undergraduate degree and I am now officially a Software Engineer. Recently I’ve started working with a company that does mobile network optimization. I’m now a part of their Integration team, and I get to work with a lot of internals of mobile networks. This is exciting for me because of my interest in radio communications, as I get to work on non-toy problems now.
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I migrated my personal finances from basic CSV files to double-entry bookkeeping. I decided to go with a homebrew solution, so I published ledger.py. It has a syntax that roughly resembles ledger-cli and beancount, but is currently not compatible with either.
I have also written a few throw-away scripts that can read both my previous budget CSV and exports from my previous bank, so I get to backfill a lot of historical data.
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I started working on a networking stack, along with a custom packet routing algorithm. There is no name for the project yet, and it is not quite ready for a fancy public release, but I am occasionally publishing code dumps on gkbrk/network01. I am testing this network in a sort of closed-alpha with a small group of friends.
The network is intended to work with a topology where nodes don’t have direct links to other nodes. This is different from the so-called overlay networks. While most links between nodes go through the internet via our ISPs right now, we are intending to add radio links between some nodes in order reduce our reliance on ISPs. There is nothing in the network design that prevents different kinds of links from being used.
As of now, the network can find paths between nodes, can recover and discover new paths in case some links fail, and can route packets between all nodes. We have done some trivial tests including private messaging and a few extremely choppy voice calls.
I am intending to work more on this project and even write some blog posts about it if I manage to stay interested.
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As I have moved countries, I have a lot of paperwork to do. And some of this paperwork involves grabbing difficult-to-get appointments. I had the joy of automating this work and keeping me up to date using selenium and the SMS API from AWS.
I initially thought I would go with Twilio, but to my disappointment things weren’t too smooth with them. Everything went smoothly and I started to integrate their APIs, and it was time to put some credits in my account. While I looked completely normal to their automated systems, they decided to block me seconds after charging my card. Apparently paying for services is suspicious these days. And of course, no reply to support tickets and currently no refund in sight.
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That’s all for this month, thanks for reading!