Newsletter July 2025: Leisure programming

This month I did some work on Timeline. Since we moved part of the development over to my own code hosting platform we lost the ability to build the Windows installer. That had to be done manually on a Windows PC. I don't like manual and I don't own a Windows PC, so this month I experimented with building the Windows installer on Linux/Wine. To my slight surprise, I think I got it working. We'll see if we get any error reports after the next release.

While I spent some time improving the infrastructure for Timeline, I also fixed some minor issues and did some cleanup in the codebase. I was reminded that I enjoy programming. It doesn't have to be a new, shiny project that has hundreds of satisfied customers. I simply enjoy the craft of programming.

This month I also played many rounds of Solitaire. Mainly to relax with something that doesn't involve a screen. That triggered me to write a program that figures out if a given hand is solvable or not. Again I had fun programming this thing and finding good ways to represent cards and the rules of solitaire. However, I think it turned out that the problem is not solvable in a reasonable amount of time. Brute force, tree searches seem to take too long. That was a bit disappointing, but I still had fun programming.

If you are a fan of thrash metal, I can highly recommend my new favourite band Bloodstain. Sooo good.