Notes for the Week #30 (2026)

This week note covers the week of 21st–26th July.

Last week was quite busy with a lot of running around. In the week prior, we celebrated our now 4yo A’s birthday. Since we were never able to have a big party for A for any of her important occasions in the last four years, we decided to throw one this time. We booked a party hall and invited all her school and home friends and their parents. The party hall had a children’s play arena attached to it and all the children had great fun. The parents were probably bored making small talk to each other, but the children were running around having the time of their life.

We had A cut a giant purple cake and lunch was served. There were small hitches here and there, like forgetting to turn on the music in the party hall, and misplacing the knife just before cutting the cake. Nevertheless, overall it went great and everyone was happy and well fed.

Afterward, all three of us collapsed in our beds from the weariness and stayed unmoving till dinner time.

That was the main highlight of the week. Behind the scenes, my wife and I did quite a lot of running around arranging things, buying return gifts, getting the decoration done etc. That’s how the week went by.

Oh, and I learned to play Blur — Song 2 on drums. It took me over 1½ hours of playing the two minute song on repeat. I made a recording but it didn’t come out great so I’m keeping it private. In its place, I give you a photo of my drumming setup at the drum school:

BlogShake made it to the Haskell Weekly Issue 534. I am happy to see it get some eyes. Now I actually need to start using it.

Writing BlogShake had a secondary effect. I decided to refactor by website’s SSG code to use same patterns as the BlogShake code, which was inspired by ShakePlus. ShakePlus wraps the Shake Action and Rules monads with a ReaderT monad transformer to implicitly pass read-only config to deeply nested code. Till now I was passing this config explicitly via function arguments. I refactored my code to use ReaderT and it cleaned up the code by a lot. Then I continued on, and moved some functions to different modules and split some large module into small ones. The code was now cleaner but now I had too many modules — 103 to be exact — causing a long compile time. I had the great idea of moving some of the low-level modules to separate Nix packages, and leveraging Nix’s caching to reduce compilation. It worked and now my SSG compiles 12% faster. No new features added at all, but the cleanup allows me to add features at a faster rate later.

I have not been having time/motivation to write blog posts, so I used a questionnaire to write one last week: 100 Questions for Webmasters. It was fun.

I didn’t watch much of anything last week, except random YouTube videos etc.

Some interesting Internet links that I found last week:

• Drawing is Seeing
• Don’t Take the Black Pill — Andrew Kelley
• Go-flavored concurrency in C

That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.

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