There's been a pretty long gap here, a little over 5 years, which matches almost exactly with my time at my previous company. I was the second employee, fifth in the room, and spent those 5 years building simulation software and tooling for the autonomous vehicle industry. As a result of being so early in a high-growth (and thankfully/luckily successful-so-far) software startup, I didn't have time for hobbies, the likes of which I had been posting to this blog for over a decade before.

A few weeks ago, I left there to help run a smaller, "slow-growth" software business (it's a tool that makes code-review more efficient, thorough and engaging). As a result, I expect to have a little more free time for everything else in my life, including hobbies and this blog.

To quickly update some dangling threads from earlier posts:

• I no longer have my Mint Plus / iRobot Braava. I have moved apartments and no longer have much wood/smooth flooring so I switched to a Roborock S5 running Valetudo.
• I will likely not work on Cara given that gRPC is so big (and Cara never got traction as a cross between capnproto and zerorpc). I will likely instead by focusing on using some combination of capnproto/protobuf/flatbuf over shared memory / gRPC.
• I have returned the Razer Deathstalker Ultimate keyboard. Razer wasn't interested in helping with the reverse engineering, and I had gotten enough working that I got the learning I wanted out of it. Also, the keyboard just wasn't that great. More recently the Elgato Stream Deck is out and is much better supported both by Elgato (Linux/Windows/Mac support out of the box) as well as by the general community (first-party plugins, third-party open-source and open-core software, cross-platform, all the greatness).

With all that said, I hope to spend the next few weekends learning Rust, specifically by mixing the following technologies together (while seeing if I can make ChatGPT help me more than waste my time):

• Rust as the frontend and backend language
• Bazel latest for a polyglot build system
• protobuf for serialization
• A Rust frontend framework (Yew?)

It may take a lot longer than I expect now, but I intend on diving in the deep side with Rust-for-everything and judge for myself if I can use it effectively in the future.