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                     JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 26TH JUNE, 2025
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SUBJECT: A quick update on things
   DATE: Thu 26 Jun 14:23:16 BST 2025

Recently my writing for the journal has been suffering. I just can’t stir up
enough enthusiasm to sit and write. Not that there has been a lot to write
about. I’m still looking for a new job and spend most of my time scrolling
through endless job lists, sending out countless CVs — only to hear nothing.

Working on mdinkling last month was fun, I wrote about that. Since then things
have not progressed. I’ve tried working on Mere, my programming language, but
I got distracted or felt guilty about not looking for more jobs to apply for.

There have been a few issues with the WolfMUD website. Like so many other
websites it has been swamped by AI scrapers. Usually this is not a problem and
I don’t mind. Performance does not suffer and nobody notices. However, one bot
was downloading everything, including the download archive, multiple times per
day. Sorry, I have monthly traffic limits so you are banned :(

I’ve been keeping up with recent developments in artificial intelligence. I
even presented another webinar “ai4all — advanced” for the Institution of
Analysts and Programmers on Friday. It did not go well. I think there may have
been issues with the invites, reminders or the “join meeting” links. Maybe
everyone was just enjoying a long weekend and mini heatwave. Whatever. Only a
few attendees turned up. Maybe the video will do better when it is uploaded?

What annoys me the most is that I diverted so much time from job hunting into
preparing the webinar :(

I’ve been keeping up with Go. The first release candidate for Go 1.25 looks
interesting. Specifically, I’m interested in the work on documentation, the
new garbage collector and improved JSON handling performance:

  • Go 1.18 introduced generics and the concept of core types. Core types were
    an abstract concept added to support generics. In Go 1.25, the concept of
    core types is being removed. This simplifies the documentation for Go and
    makes it so that you don’t have to understand generics when dealing with
    non-generics code. Being a concept change this does not change Go itself.

  • A new ‘greentea’ garbage collector experiment is available for testing. It
    is expected to achieve a reduction of between 10-40% in garbage collection
    overhead.

  • A new ‘encoding/json/v2’ JSON experiment is available for testing.
    The new json/v2 package should be more performant for many use cases.

I might dial back my interest in artificial intelligence. While I have had a
lot of success using Go, WASM and Ollama to build AI solutions, the prospects
of a job using that particular combination of skills seems bleak. Even plain
Go developer/engineer jobs are hard to find.

If you want to make it in the current job market you either need to be skilled
in Go plus a boat load of cloud skills, Python or the unholy trinity that is
a mix of Node, JavaScript/Typescript and React/Vue. *sigh*

--
Diddymus


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