Summer’s Digital Retreat

As the Finnish summer begins to draw its curtain with the impending arrival of September, I cherished my final retreat to my summer cottage during the past weekend. Fate smiled upon me, bestowing a canvas of radiant sunshine.

With the sands of time slipping away, age has granted me the clarity of knowing my desires and the freedom to indulge in them on my terms. I’m an early riser, with the soft rays of dawn gently prying my eyes open slightly before seven even on weekends. The world is still, my family still lost in dreams. These tranquil mornings are my sanctuary. I take solace in the gentle hum of my trusty old ThinkPad as I delve into lines of code. The retreat of a summer cottage shields me from the distractions of daily life, allowing me to immerse myself deeply into my craft.

Recently, I’ve rekindled my relationship with writing — a voyage into rediscovering my creative spirit. I’ve chosen to share my thoughts, irrespective of the occasional blush of embarrassment. I’ve embraced a business wisdom: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Feedback is the compass to refinement.

But does this axiom hold true for small coding endeavors? The digital realm is littered with software projects that began with passion but soon were abandoned. Sometimes the initial spark was brilliant, but then life intervened. For others to take the baton and continue the race, they must first decode the original developer’s train of thought — a task often more daunting than starting afresh.

Writing contrasts this. A piece once written lives its life: read, (hopefully) appreciated, and then left untouched. Someone might stumble upon it again someday, perhaps drawing inspiration. Software, however, carries a mostly utility value. If its utility doesn’t justify the learning curve, it risks obsolescence.

Yet, during those serene summer mornings, utility wasn’t my muse. I yearned to dabble in the uncharted waters of the Dart programming language, to reconnect myself with the 6502 assembly, to experiment with an AI coding assistant, and to simply enjoy in geeky delight. The utility was negligible, but the joy was boundless. As the whirlwind of autumn approaches, I ponder the fate of my summer project. Last year’s Rust project has been just collecting dust. Do they face pushing aside to the vast abyss of the internet’s unfinished symphonies?

Yet, propelled by that slight sting of embarrassment, I’ve decided to cast my creation into the sea of GitHub. Life’s too fleeting to be shackled by hesitations. Why pen code only for it to gather virtual dust in a desktop hard drive?

Introducing:
dax64 —Commodore 64 machine code disassembler and assembler
https://github.com/tevuore/dax64