I spent some time improving Saffron, a formal language I've been working on aimed at requirements elicitation and analysis.
Mainly I've been thinking about how to express common "patterns" in the underlying formalism e.g. "A message has a single author" can be expressed as infer WHERE m:Message a:Actor b:Author MATCH Author(m,a) THEN PROHIBIT Author(m,b).
One of my goals for this week is to document some of these patterns, and perhaps allow them to be expressed in a syntactic sugar e.g. the above is perhaps more nicely expressed as constrain WHERE m:Message a:Actor EXCLUSIVE Author(m,a)
(An even better syntactic sugar might be to allow the construction of meta-types that compile down to such relationships under the hood to allow a more programmer friendly representation e.g. struct Message := { Author Content } though I am less inclined towards that direction right now as it clutters the number of formalisms at the highest level.)
I've been thinking about where microblogging/blogging fits in my life.
I used to write a lot of Twitter threads, but since the implosion and my move to Mastodon I write far fewer than I used to. Part of this is the difference in platforms, part is my own changing priorities.
For a while I maintained a personal blog for longer term thoughts but I've found it clashes with how I want to organize my thoughts. I often update old articles, redraft papers, rewrite systems etc. and so a few months ago I started writing this website, in a text editor, with no overarching taxonomy or categorization.
However, this obviously comes with some downsides, which I'm now looking to address.
Inspired by Molly White, I've implemented this Activity Feed. A place for me to microblog, collect thoughts, post links, document website updates, new papers etc. all in one place, and in a format that I have a bit more control over.
I'll probably expand the little script I wrote to compile this, and publish it once it is in a less hacky state. But it already compiles to a feed, has tag categories, and is nicely integrated with the rest of my little static site.
There is no automated cross-posting, some of the stuff posted here will end up on Mastodon etc. but most will not. This is mostly for me, but if you would like to keep track of things I am working on, then this is the place.