December Adventure Day 31

Last year's December Adventure I had one project: a set of scripts to run GoToSocial bot for a song-listening club I'm in with a dozen people. That version of the club (for there have been a few) is coming up on it's one-year anniversary, and I'm proud of it. All its flaws and peculiarities remind me that of how it was handcrafted for a finite time for some friends. We'll lose steam at some point, and it will be an archive of something we shared. I like that.

This year's adventure ended with me working on porting some of that code to Rust. Because the code is not something I work on a lot, I find (for me) that Rust makes code easy to come back to. After weeks or months away from Rust code that I wrote, it's easier for me to see what I was up to and why. I still get tripped up by some interactions between async code and ownership, but the confidence I gain from a happy compiler is worth the stumbling.

But the jewel of this year, the completed project, was the creation of another GoToSocial bot, @tomes@phantasmal.work. The scripts that run it take an epub file as input, split it into 5,000–9,000 character posts, and publishes them one by one each day until the end. I was inspired by DailyLit, a service I used years ago to read a number of books by email. I've been having trouble putting aside time for reading, so I decided to bring reading to somewhere I was: the Fediverse.

Currently @tomes is posting its way through O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather, a book I chose because it was a relatively short novel I hadn't read yet. And what a pleasant choice it turned out to be. If I never load up another book for @tomes, this will still feel like a rousing success.

As I posted, I re-learned what I learned last year:

• that 20 minutes a day can be surprisingly productive,
• that I am happiest in writing code when it's just for me or for a small group of people I know personally.

I hope I will remember these lessons longer into 2026 than I did in 2025.

May we all have happy new years.

❤ a ghost