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I'm quite a bit late on this one, but Haunt version 0.4.0 was released released back in July. I haven't had much time for blogging, but I'm catching up now! This release contains a small set of improvements and bug fixes since the 0.3.0 release in 2024. About Haunt Haunt is a static site generator that uses the Guile Scheme as its configuration language. It aims to be simple, functional, and extensible. Features include: Easy blog and Atom/RSS feed generation Markdown post support Simple development server for viewing edits before publishing Purely functional build process User extensibility Notable changes Added support for HTML in Markdown documents. This was a long time coming because guile-markdown did not support it and the library was abandoned by the original maintainer. As part of my work at Spritely, we forked it, implemented the relevant portions of the CommonMark specification, and released it. Spritely's guile-commonmark fork is now considered to be the official upstream by Guix and others. A further consequence of this is that guile-lib is now a required dependency for building Haunt as we need the (htmlprag) module to parse Markdown documents with embedded HTML. html->shtml from guile-lib's (htmlprag) module is now used instead of xml->sxml in the HTML reader. It was silly of me to use xml->sxml for this purpose years ago, but at the time I wanted guile-lib to be an optional dependency. Added haunt new subcommand for creating a new site. Added default directory, template, and prefix arguments to flat-pages procedure. Added support for index metadata flag to flat pages for pretty URLs. Flat pages now receive all page metadata, not just the page title. This is a breaking change from 0.3.0. Added .scm as an additional extension for sxml-reader. make-file-extension-matcher now supports multiple extensions. Fixed emission of <script> and <style> elements. Fixed handling of no available reader in flat pages builder. Fixed unreachable error handling clause when a reader is not found for a post. Fixed default blog theme template missing an <html> tag. Fixed overloaded -h option in haunt serve. Deprecated post in Skribe reader in favor of document. Download Haunt 0.4.0 is already available in Guix: guix pull guix install haunt See the Haunt project page for information on how to build from source. Thank you to Camilo Rodrigues, Noé Lopez, jgart, Jakob L. Kreuze, and Daniel Meißner for their contributions to this release! Happy haunting!
I'm happy to announce that guile-bstructs 0.2.0 has been released! About guile-bstructs Guile-bstructs is a library that provides structured read/write access to binary data for Guile. A bstruct (short for “binary structure”) is a data type that encapsulates a bytevector and a byte offset which interprets that bytevector based on a specified layout. See the guile-bstructs project page for more information. Notable changes Added support for anonymous structs and unions. Contrived example: (define-bstruct <location> (struct (id int) (union (struct (x double) (y double) (z double)) (coords (array 3 double))))) Made bstruct-wrap offset optional. Added bstruct-by-value syntax. Added void primitive type. Added support for array elements to bstruct-ref, bstruct-set, etc. Bug fixes Fixed guard clause for bstruct-by-value. Added missing symbolic-match? check in define-bstruct-primitive. Internal type descriptor ids are now stable to allow for clean redefinition at the REPL. Download Starting with this release, I am no longer uploading release tarballs. This is due to Guix moving away from them and for good reason after events like the xz-utils backdoor. Build from the v0.2.0 tag in Git, instead.
I'm happy to announce that guile-websocket 0.3.0 has been released! Guile-websocket is an implementation of the WebSocket protocol, both the client and server sides, for Guile Scheme. Highlights for this release are: New (web socket) module that provides a standard Scheme port interface for WebSockets. WebSocket is a framed protocol, not a simple bytestream, but the new wrappers websocket and wrap-websocket provide the useful illusion of a raw bytestream. The #:max-attempts argument to read-data-frame can now be #f, meaning that the read operation should never give up in the case of a read timeout. This is useful for keeping server-side client connections alive as long as the client hasn't hung up, even if ping frames haven't been sent in awhile. New websocket-upgrade-request?, websocket-upgrade-response?, and make-websocket-upgrade-response procedures in (web socket server). These new procedures allow for integration of WebSockets into custom Guile HTTP servers rather than having to use the overly simplistic built-in one that only handles WebSocket requests. The #:configure-socket argument to open-websocket-for-uri has been deprecated. In practice, user code just needs to set some socket flags, particularly SOCK_NONBLOCK for asynchronous I/O. Use the new #:flags argument instead. source tarball: https://files.dthompson.us/releases/guile-websocket/guile-websocket-0.3.0.tar.gz signature: https://files.dthompson.us/releases/guile-websocket/guile-websocket-0.3.0.tar.gz.asc See the guile-websocket project page for more information. Bug reports, bug fixes, feature requests, and patches are welcomed.
I'm happy to announce that guile-websocket 0.2.1 has been released! Guile-websocket is an implementation of the WebSocket protocol, both the client and server sides, for Guile Scheme. This small patch release contains the following changes: Greatly improved validation of initial handshake request on server. In previous releases, when bots discovered a server and sent random HTTP requests they’d cause needless exceptions to be thrown and clog up server logs. The accept-client hook can now return #t when a new client has not connected but the server loop should continue anyway. source tarball: https://files.dthompson.us/releases/guile-websocket/guile-websocket-0.2.1.tar.gz signature: https://files.dthompson.us/releases/guile-websocket/guile-websocket-0.2.1.tar.gz.asc See the guile-websocket project page for more information. Bug reports, bug fixes, feature requests, and patches are welcomed.
I'm pleased to announce that the very first release of guile-bstructs, version 0.1.0, has been released! This is a library I've been working on for quite some time and after more than one rewrite and many smaller refactors I think it's finally ready to release publicly. Let's hope I'm not wrong about that! About guile-bstructs Guile-bstructs is a library that provides structured read/write access to binary data for Guile. A bstruct (short for “binary structure”) is a data type that encapsulates a bytevector and a byte offset which interprets that bytevector based on a specified layout. Some use cases for bstructs are: manipulating C structs when using the foreign function interface packing GPU vertex buffers when using graphics APIs such as OpenGL implementing data types that benefit from Guile's unboxed math optimizations such as vectors and matrices This library was initially inspired by guile-opengl's define-packed-struct syntax but is heavily based on "Ftypes: Structured foreign types" by Andy Keep and R. Kent Dybvig. The resulting interface is quite similar but the implementation is completely original. This library provides a syntax-heavy interface; nearly all of the public API is syntax. This is done to ensure that bstruct types are static and well-known at compile time resulting in efficient bytecode and minimal runtime overhead. A subset of the interface deals in raw bytevector access for accessing structured data in bytevectors directly without going through an intermediary bstruct wrapper. This low-level interface is useful for certain batch processing situations where the overhead of creating wrapper bstructs would hinder throughput. Example Here is some example code to give you an idea of what it’s like to use guile-bstructs: ;; Struct (define-bstruct <vec2> (struct (x float) (y float))) ;; Get size/alignment (bstruct-sizeof <vec2>) ; => 8 (bstruct-alignof <vec2>) ; => 4 ;; Allocation (define v (bstruct-alloc <vec2> (x 42.0) (y 61.0))) ;; Check type (bstruct? <vec2> v) ; => #t ;; Read (bstruct-ref <vec2> v x) ; => 42.0 (bstruct-ref <vec2> v x y) ; => 42.0, 61.0 ;; Write (bstruct-set! <vec2> v (x 0.0) (y 0.0)) ;; Convert to s-expression (bstruct->sexp <vec2> v) ; => ((struct (x 42.0) (y 61.0))) ;; Convert FFI pointer (pointer->bstruct <vec2> my-pointer) ;; More type examples: ;; Type group with a union (define-bstruct (<mouse-move-event> (struct (type uint8) (x int32) (y int32))) (<mouse-button-event> (struct (type uint8) (button uint8) (state uint8) (x int32) (y int32))) (<event> (union (type uint8) (mouse-move <mouse-move-event>) (mouse-button <mouse-button-event>)))) ;; Array (define-bstruct <matrix4> (array 16 float)) ;; Bit fields (define-bstruct <date> (bits (year 32 s) (month 4 u) (day 5 u))) ;; Pointer (define-bstruct (<item> (struct (type int))) (<chest> (struct (opened? uint8) (item (* <item>))))) ;; Packed struct modifier (define-bstruct <enemy> (packed (struct (type uint8) (health uint32)))) ;; Endianness modifier (define-bstruct <big-float> (endian big float)) ;; Recursive type (define-bstruct <node> (struct (item int) (next (* <node>)))) ;; Mutually recursive type group (define-bstruct (<forest> (struct (children (* <tree>)))) (<tree> (struct (value int) (forest (* <forest>)) (next (* <tree>))))) ;; Opaque type (define-bstruct SDL_GPUTexture) Download Source tarball: guile-bstructs-0.1.0.tar.gz GPG signature: guile-bstructs-0.1.0.tar.gz.asc This release was signed with this GPG key. See the guile-bstructs project page for more information.
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Being focused is about doing less things, and giving more space to the stuff that matters. I am spread out on too many projects and I can’t give enough attention to all of them. It’s time to clearly sort out which one I will keep maintaining and which I should drop entirely. Chuttersnap Mikochi Mikochi is a self-hostable remote file manager I’ve started in 2023. It’s my most successful open source project. I personally use it every day, and thousands of people have adopted it and started using it on their own servers. This year the project has been receiving more and more attention. Maybe it just reached a critical mass of users. In practice, that means a bit more maintenance work, since people have been pointing out bugs and suggesting new features. At the same time, working on Mikochi is fairly enjoyable. It’s a small, self-contained project made with technologies I enjoy working with. I’ve got no complaints about spending some time working on it. Verdict: Keep maintaining Mikochi and actively continue improving it. Itako Itako is an investment portfolio tracking SaaS. I built it for the most part between 2023 and 2025. In terms of scope, it’s the largest project I’ve done entirely by myself. Is it a success? Not really. There are definitely a lot of people who tried Itako, and some who’ve kept using it a bit. But it’s not engaging enough for anyone to consider getting the premium plan. And honestly I don’t find myself using it that much. My view of investing and portfolio management has significantly shifted since I started this project. While I used to think that more sophisticated analysis would lead to better returns, I now realize that the only strategies that consistently make money are honestly stupidly simple. Or maybe it’s a U curve: on one end you’ve got a monkey throwing darts, on the other end you’ve got Jane Street, and everyone in-between fails to beat the market. Anyway, the biggest issue with Itako is how dull working on it is. The interesting parts of the projects are working on statistics and data visualization. But in practice, 90% of the time is spent tediously fixing data, understanding why some German stocks have an exchange labelled XETRA instead of XETR, why some Belgian stocks still have quotes while Euronext shows them as delisted… Verdict: Shut down Itako today. Milou Milou is static site generator for press kits. It started as a fork of presskit.html which was completely abandoned at the time. It’s a very useful tool. At Tsukumogami, it’s part of our Cloudflare pipeline which builds our website in a few minutes whenever we need to change something. It seems like a few other game studios have picked it up, although I rarely get any feedback about it. I’ve not spent too much time working on it in 2026. I think it could be interesting to come back to it and add a feature or two. Better support for multiple languages could be an idea. At least, I need to make sure we don’t fall into the good old Node.js dependency rot. Verdict: Spend some time on Milou. Luluka Earlier this year, I created Luluka. It’s a CLI that allows previewing the output of Ebitengine shaders. I do still think Ebitengine is a great engine and Go is better suited for game development than most people realize. However, after quite a long period of experimentation around it, we’ve decided to remain a Godot studio. On top of having quite a large sunk cost in infrastructure surrounding Godot, the tooling and possibility of doing 3D games still makes it a more attractive engine for our use cases. And I’ve been doing a lot of 3D work lately, so better put those hours to use. Verdict: Archive the project. The rest I’ve had a lot of good ideas that stayed as almost empty repositories in my GitHub. For example, Hakumei was a terminal companion to Mikochi. I made a few commits on this project and never found the time to work on it again. I have to admit I’m probably never going to have the time to work on all those repositories. Time to archive them all!
The resiliency startup has slashed the amount it spends on AI; down from $4,500 per dev, per month, in August, to $1,600 now.
This post was previously published through my newsletter on November 9, 2026. From time to time, I will republish newsletter issues on my blog here if I think people (and search engines) might benefit from it. If you want to read everything I’ve written once it is posted, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. If you’re doing anything to stay on top of what is happening in the world of software testing and test automation, like browsing or even posting on LinkedIn, which I stopped doing for the foreseeable future, or reading blog posts - my preferred way of keeping up these days, and I highly recommend Dawid Dylowicz’s excellent Software Testing Weekly aggregator mailing list if you prefer longer-form reading, too you’d be thinking that AI has consumed our entire field, and that everybody (or at least those who post or write in public) is an AI expert these days. The reality, though, is far from that. Yes, some people use a lot of AI, even when I would only call a small fraction of them ‘experts’. I definitely do not classify myself as an ‘AI expert’, by the way. A much larger group uses AI on a less frequent basis, and they’re getting some value out of it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. That’s the group I’m probably in. And then there’s a group of people who haven’t really been using a lot of AI at all so far, beyond maybe the odd prompt to ChatGPT or Claude. I don’t have the actual numbers, but I suspect that this group is a lot larger than you would think from browsing your feed or surfing the blogosphere. You just don’t see them, because they’re typically not the people who do a lot of work in public. A few weeks ago, I started working with a small group of testers to teach them how to use AI in their daily work. This work covers both test automation as well as broader software testing tasks, as some of them contribute to automation on a daily basis, but not all of them do. I’m working with them one day per week, on average, for three months, and we’re making small steps towards making AI a more prominent tool in their tool belt. So, what are we working on right now? I’m pulling ideas from my ‘Valuable Feedback, Fast with AI’ course, and so far, we’ve spent some time setting up Claude, going over some important concepts such as context windows, models, tokens, and (of course!) the probabilistic nature of LLMs, and what that means for the results they provide. We have gone through several initial conversations, using Claude to learn more about and review specific user stories, which was an excellent segue into using talking about MCPs and setting up a connection to both Jira and Confluence using the Atlassian MCP. Last week, we also started experimenting with writing straightforward skills to make it easier for Claude to repeat certain actions in a structured way. These actions ranged from reviewing stories and acceptance criteria to refactoring small chunks of code in their (Robot Framework-based) test automation suite. What I loved about this is the avalanche of ideas that popped up in their heads when they saw how easy it was to use Claude. We made a short to-do list of ideas to try out for the next couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to seeing them getting more confident around using Claude. One thing I have noticed is that their level of comfort around using AI varies quite a bit. Some of them are naturally quite cautious, which means they’ll ask ‘can we really do this?’ and ‘should we really do this?’ frequently before even submitting a single prompt. This is a good habit, I think, but we’ll have to do some work to get them more comfortable with using LLMs, without losing too much of that caution. Others in the group are the opposite: I need to hold them back a little, because otherwise they’ll create a beautiful mess within days, simply because they see so many opportunities to use Claude in their work. That, too, isn’t inherently bad, but I do want to teach them not just how to get the most out of an LLM, but also (more so) how to use AI prudently. Over the next couple of months, we’ll dive deeper into writing better prompts, creating and structuring skills, better context management, and creating and using agents, and probably a few more things, too. I’m looking forward to seeing these people grow more comfortable around using AI in their daily work, and figuring out where AI genuinely adds value and where it doesn’t in their own context. Is there a deeper message in this newsletter? Maybe not, and I’m just happy to tell you about this project, and how it is a great example of a what I call ‘corporate mentoring’, a very efficient way of teaching a small group of engineers new skills, within their own context. But maybe it’s also to show you that, despite what you might see on the Internet, especially those places featuring a lot of self-congratulation (I’m looking at you, LinkedIn), not everybody out there is an AI expert. At least not yet. So, if you feel like you’re ‘behind’ simply because you’re not running at least 17 agents continuously, creating 5400 merge requests per day, know that you’re not alone. Quite far from it, I would say.
The economics of software engineering have fundamentally changed.
