It has been round about six months since I started working on [LazerBunny][lb]. Which means I am getting close to the point where I want to evaluate my progress and do a little mini retrospective to see if any of the effort and time that went into it was actually worth it. Not in the classical project management sense of identifying sunken cost fallacies and self-flagellation, but more a curious look at which parts were the most fun and where I might want to invest more time in.
I mentioned in a previous post that I am working on a CalDav server (creative as always I named it LazerBunnycal), to take control of my appointments and calendaring needs. The first iteration was working decently well with Apple Calendar. During this week I fixed a few issues making it also work nicely with any calendar app that uses Evolution as its backend.
I am closing in on 30 years in the industry. One thing I did not imagine when I just started out was that the list of “things I have seen” would constantly grow over the decades. How naive I was, believing people know what they are doing, management making decisions based on data and the market not being a dice roll for who can lie the best. On the bright side this makes for some really good stories.
As I was working on new tools for my personal assistant this week, I ended up adding web search and thereby getting the content of a website to the toolbox. Automating anything web related in 2026 is a pretty annoying experience, and with good reason. It is understandable that website owners add scraping safeguards, considering the state of the web. Luckily, when you build tools to behave well, things are manageable.
Valve announced the Steam Machine and its price(s), causing much unrest online. Some saw it coming, some are disappointed, some have a more realistic view that this is the price of non-subsidized hardware in 2026. I think the price is fine for what you get, but you should not be paying it if you are comfortable building a computer yourself.