Retrospectives

What happened in February 2026?

March 8, 2026

What happened in February 2026?

Time flies. February was a productive month, and I got many things done—with the help of my coding assistant , that is. I haven’t joined the “I haven’t written a single line of code for quite some time” flock just yet, but I am close. At the same time, I feel like I’m still locked in beginner mode. Like I have still to really tap into what agentic tools like Claude Code have to offer.

For now, the tools may have changed, but the journeys feel somewhat the same as they used to a few months back. It’s a strange feeling, and I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

Yet Another Claude Code Wrapper

In my previous retrospective, I mentioned CeCe and Vee. The former is a plugin for turning Anthropic’s model into a “modal” agent that I had vibe “prompted” with Claude itself. The latter was a second take at the exact same concept.

A month later, Vee has evolved quite a bit, to a point where the “modal” aspect of the project lost the front seat. More precisely, Vee has become a session multiplexer for Claude Code, with built-in support for spawning it in ephemeral containers with --dangerously-skip-permissions enabled. It is also a playground for me to experiment with the agent. For instance, I built a feedback system where I can point it to the good and bad things it’s doing—my feedbacks get saved in a SQLite database and appended in the system prompt during the next sessions. I’ve also tried to set up a knowledge base with embeddings. Both approaches have their benefits, but I don’t think I have clear evidence that they can be a game changer.

You may remember Vee started out of my frustration to losing control of CeCe’s internals. Well, Claude Code took over Vee’s codebase quite quickly as well. But this time, the output was a lot more satisfying. This time, I leaned into playing the role of a Tech Lead and a QA tester. Seeing the project taking shape and the tool I wanted becoming a reality that quickly has clear upsides. I also find it interesting that I have both a fairly good understanding of how the software works overall—I called most of the architectural choices—and very little insight on how the code itself is written. It reminds me of $WORK, where I am involved in some projects without being a direct IC.

I Built Myself a Cloudlab

In the first half of the month, a colleague of mine was tasked with building “staging environments à la demande” for the engineers working on $WORK’s Next Big Thing™. Their answer was a managed Kubernetes cluster and a bunch of Helm charts—and a small CLI tool to deploy the latter onto the former. A few hours later, I started building myself a k3s cluster. It’ll be a fun way to get familiar with the stack, I thought. What emerged almost resembles a managed cluster of sorts. I called it elsa , and it now hosts this very website along with a few other self-hosted services I had under my radar for a while .

Note

Yes, GitHub Pages and the like remain a better, cheaper, superior even way to host my website. But where is the fun in that? 😁

This may come as a surprise, considering I had migrated my website to a new setup called tinkerbell barely a month ago. Well, fret not. The little VPS sure has been retired early, but its legacy has not been lost. elsa was built upon the very same tools (Terraform, CoreOS, and Ignition) and promise I got hooked on a month ago: that there is freedom in designing a system whose destruction is a non-event. If anything, working on elsa has only deepened my understanding—and my appreciation—of what Fedora has been pushing for with CoreOS.

I really, really want to publish an article about elsa. I yet have to find my angle, though. Funny story, the first couple of paragraphs of this section were initially intended to be its introduction, until I grew dissatisfied with them and decided to repurpose them. Which means I need to restart from scratch. 😆

Anyway, as I was making good progress on elsa, I ran into some good opportunities to contribute to some open source software. I opened two bugfix PRs over the course of my journey: one for the official BetterStack’s Terraform provider , and the other for external-dns’ Vultr webhook sidecar . That was pretty cool! I want to do that more often.

We are almost a third into March already, and the month is clearly following the trend set by its predecessor. As such, I expect to have plenty to write about in a month’s time, meaning I should be able to keep up with publishing these retrospective pieces for a while. At least, I hope so!

What Happened in January 2026?

January 30, 2026

What Happened in January 2026?

meta vibecoding

This is my first retrospective in quite a while—I have yet to make writing these logs a real habit of mine. That being the case, so much happened this month that this article felt like the obvious thing to do.

`tinkerbell`’s First Month

On January 5th, I published my account of migrating my website to a completely new setup. Not only am I very proud of this article in and of itself, I am also quite happy that it has sparked discussions in a few places such as lobste.rs or the orange website . It has also been shared in other places like the DevOps’ish newsletter I have also created a GitHub repository to host tinkerbell configuration, and it is quietly farming stars as we speak. .

I don’t write articles with the expectation that they reach a large audience, but I will admit I had some ambitions for this one. It’s very fulfilling to know my experiment report of sorts has caught the attention of my peers, if only a little.

At first, I thought I would spend January experimenting with my new playground. I have a handful of services I want to deploy. Little did I know I would be sidetracked sharply before I had a chance to get to it.

Meeting with Claude Code

Somehow, I have managed to go through 2025 while staying afar from the code agent hype. I gave “vibecoding” a try in May by chatting with ChatGPT and Gemini while yak shaving my way towards transcribing YouTube videos in OCaml. Even I realized back then that the hype had already moved on from chat UI towards agents.

Then, the craziest thing happened. I went on holidays on December 23rd, 2025. Two weeks later, as I was going back to $WORK, Claude Code and its ilk suddenly felt inevitable. It looks like agentic workflows got very good in a matter of a few weeks, up to a point where there is a real opportunity cost in ignoring them altogether. And as I am about to take out a mortgage, it feels like a bad time to take the risk of falling out of relevance.

Looking back, I think it started with a simple, genuine suggestion—we were discussing a fairly ambitious clean-up of our test-suite at $WORK when someone mentioned Claude Code was quite relevant for this kind of tedious, boilerplate-heavy task. This resonated with all the success stories I was suddenly exposed to. Before I could realize what was happening, I was caught up in an intense introspective journey.

Part of my answer to the angst of LLMs being on the verge of reshaping the way I work is CeCe CeCe being a nickname for Claude Code (CC). .

CeCe is a Claude Code plugin ~~I have been working~~ Claude Code and I have been working on for the better part of the month, and it has become my sandbox to experiment with and understand agentic workflows. Configuring Claude Code in a very opinionated way felt only natural—that’s the only starting point I know. I am glad I did that, it enabled me to get a better understanding of how Claude Code actually works.

Ironically, since CeCe has mostly been written by CeCe itself and because it grew quite fast as a result, I do not really feel confident in modifying it myself 😆. I am now trying to rewrite it on my own, with more structure and “intention.” We will see how it goes.

New RSS Feeds

On a final note, I am glad to say that this website now features some new RSS feeds that you may be interested inThat’s actually the very first task I entrusted to Claude Code. Suffice it to say, it didn't blink, and navigated through my quite unusual setup like a champ. : one per tags, and one per series. I have been meaning to implement them since I’ve added my website to a certain aggregator that now advertises every article I publish that cites one particular programming language.

I am glad to know that camel aficionados learnt about my tinkerbell setup simply because I drew a parallel between infrastructure as code and functional programming. Maybe they don’t share my enthusiasm, though. With this change, I am one PR away from limiting this aggregator’s scope to simply the articles featuring the appropriate tag. I think they will find it useful. Maybe you will too!

What Happened in 2024?

January 1, 2025

What Happened in 2024?

Free and Open Source Software

I’ve been a “prolific contributor” at $WORK, but less so with my personal projects.

Spatial Shell remains my most “popular” projectWe should reach 100 stars on GitHub in 2025 😅. , but except for a very minor 7th release in January, I have not touched it. It’s basically a done project, and I very much enjoy using it on a daily basis. My main regret is that, contrary to what is stated in its README, Spatial Shell does not work at all with i3.
ezjsonm-encoding was initially written for Spatial Shell, but I turned it into its own OCaml package in 2024. It is a JSON-only encoding library heavily borrowing on Data-encoding API , but with a more flexible default behavior for object parsing. I enjoyed writing the documentation, inspired by a tweet from Dmitrii Kovanikov Yes, cool kids moved to Bluesky in 2024, and Dmitrii is definitely a cool kid. . That being said, I have never bothered to benchmark this package properly, so if performances are important, it may not be a good fit for you.
jsonrpc2 is, as of January 1st, 2025, an experiment in providing a general-purpose framework for servers and clients communicating with the JSON RPC 2.0 protocol. I quite like the API I’m proposing there, and maybe I’ll try to polish and publish it in 2025.
bepo-tsrn.nvim is another thing I have done for myself, but published as if it was a public good. Now, instead of having to copy/paste the same Neovim configuration file on every computer I use, I can just type yay -S neovim-bepo-tsrn-git and be done with it.
celtchar has seen its first commits since 2021, which is not nothing. As a reminder, celtchar is a little tool I have written to generate ebooks and static websites for the stories I write; and as I was doing the 2024 edition of NaNoWriMo , I found myself in need to add a missing feature (supporting books split in parts, not only chapters).

Overall, I’ve been defaulting to OCaml for the past two years or so, and I am starting to think it is time to widen my perspective again. I will probably start with relearning GoI don’t know why, but I have been mildly obsessed with this language lately. .

Blog posts

2024 was not a very productive year when it comes to this website. I have published 5 articles, which is half the number of publications of 2023. As a logical consequence, not a lot of folks have visited my website this year. Funnily enough, the most read article (by far) in 2024 was published in 2023To be fair, it was published on December 30, 2023. .

Yes, 2024 was a quiet year for this website

That being said, I am quite happy with the content published in 2024.

Using git maintenance with Encrypted SSH Keys is the first article I published in 2024. It is a direct consequence of my trip to Brussels in February to attend to FOSDEM . If you haven’t already, you should watch Scott Chacon’s talk about Git less known commands; it is the only reason why I learned about git maintenance.
Installing a LUKS-Encrypted Arch Linux on a Vultr VPS is mostly a gift I have made to Future Me. It is a very specific how-to that I can use to quickly set up a new server with disk encryption. Funny story, I was planning to publish a follow-up about how I use systemd-nspawn to run my web services in containers , but no matter how many times I tried, I’ve never quite found a good way to tell this story. As I plan to educate myself on Kubernetes in 2025, it is not clear I will ever publish it now.
Introducing bepo-tsrn.nvim is probably the less useful article I have published in 2024, considering I expect the userbase to bepo-tsrn.nvim to stick to 1 until the very endBut who knows? Maybe one of you will prove me wrong! .
On Vestigial Structures hardly qualifies as a blog post, and is mostly a joke. It is also the only content on my website that was mostly generated by ChatGPT, and it is flagged as such. I don’t like using AI to write, but I do appreciate having a reviewer always at hand.
Serving This Article from RAM for Fun and No Real Benefit was very fun to write. This little experiment was stuck in my head for basically two years, and it turned out basically exactly as I had pictured it. That being said, I want to learn about CDNs now.

Overall, I still enjoy having my own little corner of the Internet, but if there is one thing I’d like to improve in 2025, it is its reach. I’d like you folks to run into my website, instead of having to promote it every time I write something. 2025, the year of SEO?

`$WORK`

2024 started with my decision to go back to a Software Engineering position, after giving an honest try at being an Engineering Manager in late 2023.

I want to remember 2024 for two things.

This year, more than ever, I have tried to appreciate my work beyond my individual contributions. I am confident in my programming skills (although I have so much to learn), but being an accomplished engineer is much more than contributing code. Making sure every engineer in the team can work to the best of their current ability, fostering a work environment favoring growth and initiative, estimating as precisely as possible the amount of time needed to deliver the next important thing, collaborating efficiently with non-technical teams... I am becoming increasingly interested in these areas.

Besides, this year was all about delivering and deploying in production. It’s been a wild ride , and I loved it even if it was very demanding. After having mostly contributed to R&D projects, the focus on UX, backward compatibility, etc. was very refreshing. I learned so much through the year, and had many opportunities to make significant impacts.

In 2025, I want to keep learning about software engineering, and maybe start sharing my thoughts on the subject on my website.

Talks

I gave only one talk in 2024, at a conference called EthCC . It was actually a follow-up to the talk I gave the year before. You can watch me deliver the talk here , but if you are more into written content, I have also published a transcript on this very website. I actually loved writing it down, and plan to systematically publish similar content for every recorded talk I will give in the future.

I also had the opportunity to participate in a Twitter Space .

This year, my public speaking opportunities were all $WORK-related. I would like to change this in the future, because there are enough events out there for me to start speaking about something other than workIt’s too late to apply to FOSDEM, but maybe I can find something to say to an event later in the year! I think. .

Sport

This year was a bit of a disappointment, sport-wise. I tried several times to get back to running regularly, and failed miserably. I went to Lyon for a 10km run without proper training, and skipped the half-marathon I signed up for. I should update my Running Log nonetheless. I started swimming regularly during the Summer, only to pierce my earlobes in September 😅.

Let’s hope I do better in 2025! I am planning to register for the Triathlon de Deauville with my sister. That promises to be fun! And I want to commit to the 20km de Paris as well.

On the bright side, I have started to use my bike again. I love riding around Paris, especially at night.

Final Notes

Overall, I’ve devoted a large part of my time to $WORK in 2024. Hopefully, I will find a better balance over the course of 2025, which should give me more time to explore and experiment more things.

Anyway, happy new year everyone! And happy Dry January!

What happened since December 2022?

May 18, 2023

What happened since December 2022?

emacs meta neovim releases spatial-shell

Initially, I started this “What happened” series as an exercise to publish more regularly on this website. Suffice to say, I haven’t done a particularly impressive job in that regard, which only means I have a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, if the first few months of 2023 has been mostly $WORK focus, the same cannot be said for April and May. For one, I have started running again. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Spatial Shell got its first releases

Spatial Shell is probably my hobby project I am most excited about. The “call for testers” article I have published recently managed to catch the attention of a few folksYou want to hear a lesson I learned the hard way just after publishing it? Before calling for testers, it is better to be sure your project can actually be compiled easily by the potential volunteers . . The perspective to publish such a write-up was a very strong source of motivation for me to clean up a project I was using daily for several months now, and I am very satisfied with the result.

Mass adoption is still a distant horizon, but still, the project is now mainstream enough that it has already been mentioned in a random topic on the OCaml discourse by someone who isn’t me . 🎉

This led me to formally release a first version of Spatial Shell in the end of April, and a second today. For the first time, I have also published an Archlinux package , to make the life of potential early adopters even easier. Do not hesitate to upvote it so that it can find its way to the extra repository some day.

Goodbye Emacs! Remember me, Neovim?

In 2015, I started using Coq for my PhD thesis and at the time, there was no real support for (Neo)vimThe situation later improved. Nowadays, you can implement your theories using Coqtail , and Coq LSP will probably become a viable and interesting setup in a near future. . Everyone was using Proof General and Emacs, so I was left with little choice but to follow through. With only my courage and the good advice of a fellow “vimer” who had also made a similar journey , I started using Emacs.

Fast forward 8 years later, and my Emacs configuration has become a project of its own. Overall, I was pretty happy with my setup, but in the same time, I always remained a bit nostalgic of my Neovim days. This is probably why I decided to give this old friend a try when my company bought me a new laptop. I also used this as an opportunity to try out this LSP-thing everyone was talking about.

It has been a month now, and I do not plan to come back to my previous habits. There are still some few edges here and there, I still need to get my head around lua, but LSP is nice, and plugins like telescope are simply too beautiful.

That being said, there was one aspect of moving from Emacs to Neovim I had not anticipated: Org mode. Which constitutes a perfect transition to the next session.

Website redesign, again

Did you notice this website has been revamping recently? The changes are actually deeper than “just” a redesign, to a point where I had to port all my write-ups to a different markup languageAre you starting to understand why “Org mode” was the perfect transition to move on to this section? .

Why, you ask? Well, it’s actually pretty simple: as time goes, I’ve grown lazier.

Let me give you some context. Until very recently, my website was built around the idea to have literate programming as a first-class citizen of my author tools. For instance, you can have a look at what used to be the literate program which was responsible for generating the website. Similarly, most of my write-ups about Coq were actually Coq documents. Literate programming is actually a very nice paradigm for authoring technical contents, because it gives you the tools to keep said contents accurate and up-to-date. In a nutshell, you cannot have a typo in one of your code snippets which would prevent it from compiling, because you actually compile the snippet and catch the typo when you try to generate your website. Or at least, it is what I used to do.

I decided to stop because, for all its benefits, this approach has one major drawback: it is hard to maintain. I had invested quite some time and efforts to keep my website sources under control, but it really was an everyday fight. There are some strange things which start happening when you fully commit to this, as I think I did. For instance, software dependencies tie your article together. Suddenly, you cannot talk about this new fancy feature of the latest Coq release without upgrading all your write-ups implemented as Coq documentsWell, in theory you can. Just have each Coq document specifies the Coq version it requires, and support this level of customization in your build toolchain. But then, your blog takes forever to build from a cold repository. .

That being said, most of the work had already been done. This website was a collection of literate programs, and I was pretty proud of the state of things. I could deal with the annoyancesLike using Coqdoc syntax to write my articles, for instance. I could write about how the Coqdoc syntax irks me for ages. . But then, as I explained in the previous section, I decided to move away from Emacs. The first time I tried to start a new write-up, it hit me.

I used to write most of my contents using Org mode. Org mode, also known as the Emacs markup language.

I know of at least one “Org plugin” for Neovim , but instead of giving it a try, I decided to use this opportunity to tackle my “maintenance problem” once and for all. I gave up on literate programming for this website. As a result, this website is now generated from Markdown files only (using markdown-it with many plugins). As a consequence, the generated HTML is way more “predictable.” This was enough to motivate me at giving a try at Soupault’s indexes , which are way more powerful than I anticipated. Now, this website has

Tags. Each write-up can be labeled with as many tags as I want, there is a page which lists all the tags used in the website, and each tag has its own page (for instance, the coq tag.
A RSS feed. It was actually one of the main features I really wanted to get with this revamp.
Automatically generated list of articles in the home page, for each series (see the Ltac series for instance). Before, I was publishing “curated indexes,” or put in other words: I was writing these indexes myself, by hand. And again, I’ve grown lazier.

It took me a week to go through this rework. Translating manually every write-up was tedious, to say the least, as was implementing the Lua plugins for Soupault since I have neither proficiency nor tooling to help me write Lua code. But I am very glad for the final result.

Also, I have invested in an Antidote license, so hopefully, this website will have fewer typos and English butchering as of now. A clean text, delivered with a nice and simple design, from a sane and maintainable Git repository .

What happened in October and November 2022?

November 19, 2022

What happened in October and November 2022?

spatial-shell nanowrimo coqffi

It is November 19 today, and I’m one month and 4 days late for the October Retrospective! Truth is, $WORK has been intense lately, to a point where I have not made much progress on my side projects. Anyway.

I have implemented the last feature I was really missing in my daily use of Spatial Sway: moving windows to adjacent workspaces. As a result, I think I can say that Spatial Sway has really reached the “Minimum Viable Product” stage, with a convenient UX, and a nice enough UI. It is still lacking when it comes to configurability, though. It is the next item of my TODO list, but I have no idea when I will implement the support for a configuration file.

Another highlight of the past two months was the NaNoWriMo . I took the last week of October and the first week of November off to plan and start writing a fiction project for it. Writing again was really nice, and I even gave writing fiction in English a shot. That made me uncover a bug in the English support of ogam , my markup language for fiction writers, which led me to publish a fix on Crates.io. However, as soon as I came back to $WORK, my writing spree ended. That’s okay, though. It gave me plenty of ideas for future sessions. Thanks, NaNoWriMo! Sorry to quit so soon, and see you next year, maybe.

Finally, a nice surprise of the past month is that someone has started working on adding proper support for coqffi to dune , the build system for OCaml and Coq! I’m thrilled by this. Thanks, @Alizter !

This wraps up this retrospective. I hope I will have more interesting, concrete news to share next month.

What happened in September 2022?

September 18, 2022

What happened in September 2022?

spatial-shell meta

It is September 18 today, and it has already been a month since I decided to start these retrospectives. This means it is time to take a step back and reflect of what happened these past few thirty days or soThere is the shocking news that I have started to use syntax highlighting again. But let’s not linger too much into it just yet. .

Spatial Sway

A few days after publishing my August Retrospective, I have learned the existence of Material Shell , an extension for GNOME 3 that provides a very interesting user experience.

I tried it for a few hours, but the thing kept crashing (it’s probably on me, I did not even remember I had Gnome installed on my machine, and I would not be surprised the culprit was my dusty setup rather than Material Shell itself). The experience remained very promising, though. Their “spatial model” especially felt like a very good fit for me. Basically, the main idea is that you have a grid of windows, with your workspaces acting as the rows. You can navigate horizontally (from one workspace to another), or horizontally, and you choose how many windows you want to see at once on your screen.

And so for a few hours, I was a bit frustrated by the situation… until I learned about how one can actually manage and extend Sway (the Wayland compositor I use for several years now) thanks to its IPC protocol. I spend like three days experimenting, first in Rust, then in OCamlThis was actually an interesting thought process. I am using OCaml at $WORK for about more than a year now. I have curated a setup that works pretty well, and I am familiar with the development tools. On the contrary, I had not written a line of Rust for at least a year, my Emacs configuration for this language was broken, and I had lost all my fluency in this language. Still, I was not expecting to pick OCaml when I started this project. , and by the end of the week, I had a first working prototype I called Spatial Sway . It works pretty well; well enough that I am using it daily for several weeks now. It feels clunky at times, but it works well, and I have been able to write a Waybar configuration heavily inspired on Material Shell UI.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied with this turnout. Writing a hobbyist software project is always nice, but the ones you can integrate in your daily workflow are the best one. The last time I did that was keyrd , my little keystrokes counting daemon19,970,965 since I started using it at the time of writing this article .

Anyway, lots remains to be said about Spatial Sway, but I might save it for a bit later. I still have some key features to implement (notably, moving a window to another workspace), then I will probably try to advertise it a bit. I am under the impression this project could be of interest for others, and I would love to see it used by folks willing to give a Material Shell-like experience a try, without having to deal with Gnome Shell. By the way, considering Sway is a drop-in replacement for i3, and that it implements the exact same IPC protocol, there is no reason why Spatial Sway is actually Sway specific, and I will rename it Spatial Shell at some point.

Mandatory screenshot of Spatial Sway.

This Website

On a side note, I have started to refine the layout of this website a bit. Similarly, I have written a new, curated home page where I want to highlight the most recent things I have published on the Internet.

I have been experimenting with Alectryon as a way to replace coqdoc, to improve the readability of my Coq-related articles. Unfortunately, it looks like this tool is missing a key feature I need . I might try to get my hand dirty and implement it myself if I find the time and the motivation in the following weeks.

Finally, reading about how Xe Iaso’s talk about how she generates her blog was very inspiring to me. I can only suggest that you have a look.

Though not to the same extent, I also think I have spent way too much effort in my website. Most of my Coq-related articles are actual Coq program, expect the articles about coqffi which are Org mode literate programs. Hell, this website itself used to be a literate program of the sort, until I stopped using my homegrown literate programming toolchain cleopatra last month. At some point, I have even spent a bit of time to ensure most of the pages of this website were granted a 100/100 on websites like PageSpeed InsightGood news, I’ve just checked, and it still is! . I had almost forgotten.

A lot remains to be done, but watching this talk made me reflect on the job done. And opened my eyes to a new perspective, too. We will see what translates into reality.

What happened in August 2022?

August 15, 2022

What happened in August 2022?

emacs meta

Without further ado, let’s take a look at what was achieved for the last thirty days or so.

Emacs

I have started tweaking and improving my Emacs configuration againAfter having used Emacs for seven years now, I am nowhere close to consider my configuration as a done project. I really envy developers who are using their editor with little to no customization. .

Theme Selection Menu

The change I am the most excited about is that I have finally reduced the boilerplate in need to write to use a new theme. I am very indecisive when it comes to theming. I like to have my choices, and I get tired of any color scheme pretty quickly. As a consequence, I introduced a customizable variable to let me select a theme dynamically, and have this choice persist across Emacs session.

I have a Hydra menu that allows me to select which theme I want to use for the time being. It looks like this.

A Hydra menu for selecting a theme.

But adding new entries to this menu was very cumbersome, and mostly boilerplate that I know a good macro could abstract away. And I can finally report that I was right all along. I have my macros now, and they allow me to have the Hydra menu above generated with these simple lines of code.

(use-theme ancientless "a" :straight nil :load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp")
(use-theme darkless "d" :straight nil :load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp")
(use-theme brightless "b" :straight nil :load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp")
(use-theme monotropic "m")
(use-theme monokai "M")
(use-theme nothing "n")
(use-theme eink "e")
(use-theme dracula "D")
(use-theme chocolate "c")
(use-themes-from tao-theme
                 '(("tl" . tao-yang)
                   ("td" . tao-yin)))

Eldoc and Flycheck Popups

I have been experimenting with several combinations of packages to have Eldoc and Flycheck using pop-up-like mechanisms to report things to me, instead of the echo area.

The winning setup for now is the one that uses the quick-peek package . That is, flycheck-inline (customized to use quick-peek, as suggested in their README), and eldoc-overlay . This works well enough, so the pop-ups of eldoc are maybe a bit too distracting.

#flycheck-inline in action with an OCaml compilation error.

In my quest for pop-ups, I ran into several issues with the packages I tried out. For instance, eldoc-box was very nice, but also very slow for some reason. It turns out there was an issue about that slowness, wherein the culprit was identified. This allowed me to submit a pull request that got merged rather quickly .

Similarly, after a packages update, I discovered flycheck-ocaml was no longer working, and submit a patch to fix the issue .

This Website

I have not been investing a lot of time in this website for the past six years or so. This month, things change a bit on that side too.

New Contents

First, I have published a (short) article on higher-order polymorphism in OCaml. The goal was for me to log somewhere the solution for an odd problem I was confronted to at $WORK, but the resulting article was not doing a great job as conveying this. In particular, two comments on Reddit motivated me to rework it, and I am glad I did. I hope you enjoy the retake.

Once this was out of the way, I decided that generating this website was taking way too much time for no good enough reason. The culprit was cleopatra, a toolchain I had developed in 2020 to integrate the build process of this website as additional contents that I thought might interest people. The sad things were: cleopatra was adding a significant overhead, and I never take the time to actually document them properly.

Under the Hood

Overall, the cost of using cleopatra was not worth the burden, and so I got rid of it. Fortunately, it was not very difficult, since the job of cleopatra was to extracting the generation processes from org files; I just add to implement a small makefile to make use of these files, without having to rely on cleopatra anymore.

This was something I was pondering to do for a long time, and as often in these circumstances, this gave me the extra motivation I needed to tackle other ideas I had in mind for this website. This is why now, rather than starting one Emacs process per Org file I have to process, my build toolchain starts one Emacs server, and later uses emacsclient.

Now, most of the build time is spent by soupault . I guess I will have to spend some time on the Lua plugins I have developed for it at some point.

A New Mailing List

Finally, I have created a public mailing list that is available if you want to start a discussion on one of my articles. Don’t hesitate to use it, or to register to it!

Retrospectives

What happened in February 2026?

What happened in February 2026?

Yet Another Claude Code Wrapper

I Built Myself a Cloudlab

What Happened in January 2026?

What Happened in January 2026?

tinkerbell’s First Month

Meeting with Claude Code

New RSS Feeds

What Happened in 2024?

What Happened in 2024?

Free and Open Source Software

Blog posts

$WORK

Talks

Sport

Final Notes

What happened since December 2022?

What happened since December 2022?

Spatial Shell got its first releases

Goodbye Emacs! Remember me, Neovim?

Website redesign, again

What happened in October and November 2022?

What happened in October and November 2022?

What happened in September 2022?

What happened in September 2022?

Spatial Sway

This Website

What happened in August 2022?

What happened in August 2022?

Emacs

Theme Selection Menu

Eldoc and Flycheck Popups

This Website

New Contents

Under the Hood

A New Mailing List

`tinkerbell`’s First Month

`$WORK`