Having written a blog twice and discarded the same, I feel this is one of those 'fuck it' moments.

Things are going very well both at work. I just finished a huge sprint with a very heavy refactor, but it was a refactor that was very much due. We probably gained at least a month of dev time in return, because the stability of the project is greatly improved, and implementing new features has been made much easier. On the other hand, it was three weeks of hell. Nothing quite like a few 80-hr weeks of non-stop coding, with a following week of somewhat zombie-ism that resulted as a repercussion. There were several points at which I was all 'fuck this I'll quit my job and become a librarian somewhere quiet', but I need to remain employed for my long-term plans and I do intend to get out of app development soon anyway. I'm trying to convince my company to put me in a more R&D/experimental role, which would be nice, and they seem quite receptive to the idea..

On the personal side of things, the last month has been a bit slow because of the aforementioned heavy sprint and zombie-ism. I didn't really get back to work on my vm until last week, but ho boy has it started to come together.

When I work on things, my work tends to sprawl. I pretty much bounce from task to task, trying to work on everything at once. Because of this, I'm terrible at estimates - something will be done when it is done, and not a moment sooner. It can be hard to tell if I'm ever getting anything done, to see my progress until -suddenly- it starts folding in on itself like origami following an unspoken plan. It accelerates rapidly, going from a scattering of pieces to a reification of something that until very recently only existed in my head.

I've decided to describe the original C virtual machine and Python parser/interpreter as 'alpha' and the pure-C version I'm working on now is 'beta', which will be the first releasable candidate (nobody gets to see the alpha D:<). I'm currently working on inheritance, after which I'll be implementing scope access, closures, and exceptions. When those are complete, I should be mostly done with the core VM work - meaning it'll be time to tackle porting my parser to C.