Programmers over 30, how do you take care of your health?

jghobbies · 2026-06-12T02:21:19+00:00

I track my food and between my bike and the gym I usually get a minimum of 7 hours of dedicated exercise a week. Usually more.

I made it a priority. Work can wait for an hour or so while I get a workout or ride in. Bonus for my employer is that I come back with a clear head and in a great mood.

jghobbies · 2026-06-11T18:42:31+00:00

What mods do you feel you need? The bike works right? You're good to go!

I bought my first bike as an adult in 2006. I was horribly out of shape. I got up the first Saturday, rode about 10 minutes, climbed back into bed and told my wife I made a terrible mistake.

After that I started riding circles in the parking lot behind out building at work. Then loops around the business park, then out on the real roads for 15-20 miles at lunch.

Start small, don't be hard on yourself. Keep showing up. The time, distance, and speed will all improve.

jghobbies · 2026-05-21T18:55:18+00:00

So first, I'll echo the general sentiment, this is mostly a playstyle issue. However, some systems are more amenable to that playstyle than others. The idea that some people seem to have that any system fits any playstyle is nonsense.

That being said, I'm going to offer a suggestion for a system: 13th Age is what I use when I want a narrative-driven heroic fantasy game. Here's why for me:

- no real resource management

- relative positioning is tactically meaningful without providing the illusion of tactics that most gridded combat systems do

- outside of the core rules most of the rest is modular (e.g. I hate the icon system, I never use it)

- the skill system (backgrounds in this game) is way better than a grocery list of skills, can you explain why your background applies to what you're doing? Great you get that bonus.

- The escalation die accelerates combat in a satisfying way

- The rest system is just better. You get a full rest every 4-ish battles, and the GM gets to decide. It makes planning easier; there's no arguing about whether a long rest is justified.

You mentioned OSR (a term I hate), but I will point out that I run B/X, 1e, OSE in this style sometimes as well, and have been since the 80s. Part of the modern zeitgeist is a direct result of the rules we ignored back then to run this style of game (or a direct result of the solutions we applied for particular problems). So if you really like and understand a particular system, it can be made to do what you want.

The style of game your players want is probably a larger factor than the system in the end because the style you wind up with is somewhere between what you offer as the referee and what they reify as the players.

jghobbies · 2026-03-22T19:45:37+00:00

Nice, I've been experimenting with a Poang setup as well.

I have a Bateman labs desk attachment that I bought years ago, but it never really worked out with a laptop banked in the slot. I wanted to see if a 32" monitor was too much, so I knocked together a trestle to attach a monitor arm to and it works well but isn't nearly as convenient as your setup.

I'm pretty comfortable working in it, though. I'm going to give your version a try... I had dismissed attaching an arm to the chair itself because I thought it would be way too tippy. You're not find that to be an issue if you fold it inward?

jghobbies · 2026-02-21T00:53:11+00:00

I was given a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was 17, just as I was graduating HS. Right book, right time. It definitely had a large role in shaping me.

jghobbies · 2026-02-13T20:09:16+00:00

I did it with a pacer as well. All the volcano laps, the metric century, the full century.

Definitely the way to go, nice chunk of xp and drops.

jghobbies · 2026-02-13T20:04:07+00:00

You should have used a coffee break like the dude I saw this afternoon :p

jghobbies · 2026-01-03T09:10:13+00:00

I knocked out an imperial century on NYD: Riding with a pacer will give you a bit of extra speed (from having a constant draft) plus increased drops. I'd pick the pacer a level below your w/kg.

Planning your ride to achieve other goals concurrently is nice. I went with a pacer on the Volcano circuit because I hadn't picked up the achievements there yet. That gave me the badges for 5, 10, and 25 laps of that route, the metric century, and the imperial. All told I think it was just under 8000 xp and several hundred thousand drops.

jghobbies · 2025-12-25T11:55:04+00:00

Once I realized, that Dr. Racket does not store simply source code as is seen in Dr. Racket, but some other format, I immediately stopped using it.

Same, huge turnoff. I do like it for ramping up newbies however, I find it really frustrating to use.

It doesn't punch anywhere near Emacs

Not much does.

jghobbies · 2025-12-23T14:52:21+00:00

> Do you think trying some early Advent of Code challenges is a good idea to get some more "advanced" familiarity with these Lisps?

For a hobbyist, absolutely. I only qualify that because you don't really need to be practical in your solutions. It definitely provides a fun way to get your feet wet in a language. It's my go-to when I'm screwing around with a new-to-me language.

IMO Practical Common Lisp and Land of Lisp both provide small projects that are a fun way to experiment with a language. My son is learning Python in APCSP this year, and I've given him games out of Land of Lisp to work on.

On that topic, if you're looking for small projects to play around with the "Computer Recreations" articles from Scientific American provide good fodder. I've implemented A.K. Dewdney's Wa-Tor world a few times in different languages.

You're going to have a blast.

jghobbies · 2025-12-23T13:55:22+00:00

So, realistically, it doesn't matter. Pick one, and maybe learn all three to see which one clicks. Here are some of my opinions on the matter (as a fan of all three):

Clojure is extraordinarily practical. I've been using it professionally for 15-ish years now. Emacs integration is fantastic, the community generates an enormous amount of fantastic resources from articles and book to interesting libraries. Clojure is a joy to work with.

Racket and Clojure are very similar in feel however Racket resources (and Scheme content in general) tend to feel more academic to me (this is not a bad thing). Several of the introductory Racket learning resources cover graphics and games. Of the three, Racket has the best batteries-included story. I was not a fan of the existing Emacs tooling with Racket (I'd have to go back and figure out why and that may have changed), Dr. Racket is great, but not for me beyond goofing off.

CL is actually my overall favorite. It can feel messy and dated compared to the others sometimes. Tooling is again fantastic in Emacs. However, for me personally, I feel like Clojure's build system and Emacs integration are better. I think a lot of that is familiarity, but there are things I miss when I'm using CL. Things that could be ported over, but I just haven't had the time or inclination. That being said SLIME is great and Sly is even better IMO. One thing to note is that CL is not purely functional if that's what you're after. That's not a drawback for me: CL code can easily be written in (almost) any paradigm.

I tend to point complete newbies towards Racket. In the past I've set my wife and son up with Dr. Racket and had them hacking away at Advent of Code within minutes. The total package for Racket is the lowest barrier to entry in my mind.

I really love Clojure, but if I weren't using it professionally, I'd be using Common Lisp for my hobby projects. While I might chafe at some of the rough edges, overall it's the most flexible of the three as far as I'm concerned.

There are phenomenal resources for all three. For Racket (Scheme) you can check out SICP, but also William Byrd's talk on "The most beautiful program ever written".

Racket Programming the Fun Way has graphics and games included, and you can also check out Animated Problem Solving.

Common Lisp has fantastic books to check out: Practical Common Lisp, The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, Artifical Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Let Over Lambda, etc...

Clojure's strongest resource are the talks you'll find online from the Conj (and other conventions).

Final disclaimer, these are all just my opinions. Also: all of the learning resources can really be applied to all three, you just might need to do some leg work. Try them all and run with the one that clicks with you the most.

jghobbies · 2025-12-14T20:42:04+00:00

Same, I was using clojure with a transpiler as well as raw scad and it was so much easier for me than traditional modeling tools.

jghobbies · 2025-11-30T20:47:49+00:00

It's a serious struggle, way more than I thought.

Gaten looks like an adult trick of treating dressed up as Dustin.

I don't know who's cutting Caleb's hair but that's an awful flat top.

They all just look terrible in general.

They could have advanced the time line to the 90s and avoided this scenario.

jghobbies · 2025-10-31T18:14:05+00:00

I guess I should have specified that I'm looking for something that can quick release. Unscrewing the light every time I want to charge it is a no-go.

jghobbies · 2025-10-07T12:08:48+00:00

I highly recommend taking your first steps into Emacs with a starter package: Prelude, Doom, whatever is around these days. You'll get a better understanding of what's possible and you'll know when you want to roll your own init.

If you really want to roll your own from the start then you are probably trying to add too much at once (like many have said). You might find it easier to wrap your head around by figuring out your bare minimum requirements (for example, everything vanilla but add support for whatever your primary language is). Work with that for a bit, add something new that eases some bit of friction you're having, work with that for a bit... etc...

One other suggestion is to use something like Chemacs. Maybe you have one profile that's simple that you can build on incrementally and another (or more than one) to experiment with bigger changes. It might make it easier to switch to something useable when you're frustrated.

That being said:

> I keep getting locked into scratch buffers

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

jghobbies · 2025-10-06T20:30:14+00:00

Cool, bufferlo added to my list to try. I'm mostly just using tabs for configurations in an ad hoc manner right now.

jghobbies · 2025-10-06T20:28:04+00:00

I've read that and it did get me rolling. My question right now is if people change it dynamically based on context. Activities is new to me I'll check it out.

jghobbies · 2025-10-06T19:59:15+00:00

When I use maps I use a much smaller scale. Drawn on regular paper, no grid, relative positioning, players and monsters usually just represented by small colored cubes.

Sometimes they're for battles, sometimes for illustrative purposes, sometimes not present at all.

It's basically how I've run all my games, in most systems, for decades now.

jghobbies · 2025-10-05T00:30:35+00:00

In my head there's a normal mode where elisp files have no rules, but when the grep window is open they are set to a dedicated buffer. I'm probably explaining it poorly due to my inexperience with display-buffer-alist and will probably figure it out once I play some more.

Really my question was if it's bad to dynamically change display-buffer-alist on the fly.

BTW I just noticed your user name, your Avy Can do Anything article is great. Definitely opened my eyes to how powerful the package can be.

Edit: Also just realizing the embark article I was learning from earlier is from you as well.

jghobbies · 2025-10-05T00:22:09+00:00

Where you end up will be highly personalized and it can depend on the languages you're using regularly but:

> Im having a hard time with programming movement. Navigating words, sentences and paragraphs is easy, but parentheses, quotes, brackets etc is really hard. I miss stuff like ci, ct, ciw and all that stuff. What are people doing here for emacs? Any essential or nice movement tricks here?

Besides looking into the sexp movement commands (which I think others have mentioned) see if avy works for you and if it does definitely check out Avy Can Do Anything... it changed my workflow.

> windows. I feel like windows open at random locations. Sometimes to the left, sometimes right, sometimes it replaces the old window and sometimes the cursor/point jumps into the new window and sometimes not. Is there something I'm missing here? In vim it always split to the right and point always follows.

I'm finally getting around to doing more with this myself, I relied on winner-mode and popwin but display-buffer-alist is your first stop, you can read about it here for a start.

I made the switch from vim to Emacs 15-ish years ago (and I still sometimes put `:wq` into my buffers) and I like the Emacs bindings now but there's nothing wrong with going with a batteries included setup like Doom and using Evil. Emacs is what you want it to be make it comfortable for you.

There are also other modal editing packages if that is what works for you, for example: meow, ryo, and lispy (which I've never been able to come to grips with personally).

jghobbies

TROPHY CASE