I am not heralding my return to blogging. This post is a collection of small bits of tech I thought would be more difficult than they actually are. A little life update is tagged onto the end. Who can resist one of those.

Git Submodules:

I avoided these for such a long time, instead depending on various pack managers.

Usually my dependencies are quite simple. SDL3 and a couple of other things which make them ideal for git submodules. There is perhaps 3 commands in git you need to learn and be aware that there is a config file.

And that's it. Sure you have to figure out integration with your build system. Assuming you are using C++ that is. If you are using rust just use cargo if you can.

Overall very painless and now I am wondering why, for so long, I avoided taking the 10 minutes to learn about them.

Different ssh keys for different sites:

Again there is a simple to use config file which makes this painless. I don't know why I assumed this would be tricky as it isn't

CMake:

I'm not a huge fan of cmake but I have decided to go with the flow on this one, use my energy elsewhere. LLM's are really good at guiding me through what I need to do for my simple use cases. There is something about reading the documentation that makes my brain switch off.

Do I have other blind spots that I should identify?

In terms of life things are trundling along at the moment. I seem to be finding a little more time for technical hobbies but I am not entirely sure where that will take me.

For now I have resubscribed to CLion for the year, mostly as a way of avoiding going down the rabbit hole of getting that perfect Emacs set up! It's also a nice IDE even if sometimes I hit performance problems when using it on Linux. My aging hardware is more than likely the fault here.

I am unsure on what direction to take from here or if the time I seem to have at the moment will persist. I am drawn between working though some technical books or starting a longer term project. Both would be fascinating and fun which it the requirement for this year.

I am lot more settled than any point in my life. While I have some stress day to day I am quite calm. Calmness is a prerequisite for good decisions.