Or, "How I learned to fuck around and find out"

I have a bad habit of telling people that I like to have interesting problems to work on. On its own this isn't so bad, but saying this in interviews quickly ensures that your day-to-day involves being air dropped into weird and wonderful situations with varying amounts of context and high expectations.

So, how do you get better at coping in this sort of environment?

As is probably the case with a lot of programmers, I've been searching for my "ideal" text editor for programming for quite a while now. Over the years I've picked up, configured and moved on from a long list of editors and IDEs so it was only really a matter of time before I found myself wondering how hard it would be to write my own from scratch one rainy afternoon.

Spoliers: turns out it's actually a fair amount of work. Who knew.

In 2020 during lockdown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic I (like so many others) found myself with a lot of time on my hands. A lot of people decided to take up a new hobby, maybe do some work on their house or perhaps get a dog.

Me?

I decided to write an X11 tiling window manager.