Leon Mika

Some work days are like exploring a sprawling rabbit warren. You’ve got one tunnel you know you need to follow; but you peek down another one, saying to yourself you’d only explore it for a few minutes, only to find yourself going further down that branch, and further away from where you need to go.

Been on a bit of a Savage Gardens kick recently. After hearing a podcast have a go at I Want You (felt like they were pandering to their audience IMHO), I’ve been poking around the tracks of their 90s and 2000s albums. Still quite good.

A while ago, I made an online donation for my Nonna to St. Anthony Basilica in Padua, Italy. She’s passed on but I’m still receiving emails from them. I don’t mind. Made a donation in her memory for All Souls Day.

Used to be a fan of companies building home-grown applications. Now that I’m in a position where I’m asked whether we support integrations with these home-grown application, those feelings are somewhat tempered. But it’s fine, so long as there’s nothing that makes it super easy to build these… oh!

Maybe I’ve been spoilt by standardised documentation of Go packages — and before that, Javadoc — but the documentation of third-party Python modules is quite a sorry state. And it’s nothing trivial either: I’m talking about docs for constructors that lack the documentation for the class itself. 🤷

Released v1.1 of Keep With A View. Jumping should be fairer, and a few of the levels had some bugs that needed fixing.

Day 26: Zip. #inktober

Looks like I’ll be getting another niece. And while the gender reveal didn’t involve utes doing burnouts with pink smoke and eventually catching fire, it’s still very good news.

Day 25: Fracture. #inktober Based on real events.

Devlog: Blogging Tools - Post Classifier: https://lmika.org/2026/10/25/devlog-blogging-tools-post-classifier.html Integrating Jev and TypeSafe into Blogging Tools to automatically set post categories.

Signed up to TypeSafe and started playing around with the playground. I wanted to see if it could work as a category classifier for the posts on this blog. Looks to be really promising for this, provided the questions are properly calibrated. Also, super cheap: 13 requests and 5k tokens costs 0.02¢.

The LXRP work is progressing. New stanchions for the overhead wires being installed. Many of the existing brown ones, probably in place since the railway was first electrified, are getting rarer by the day.

Day 24: Bake. #inktober

Resizing And Centering the Canvas For a Godot Web Export: https://lmika.org/2026/10/24/resizing-and-centering-the-canvas.html The project and export settings you will need in order to center the canvas of a Godot web export, and resize it to fit the browser window.

All right, we are done! 🙌 Keep With A View, my Godot platformer, is ready for release. Playable within a desktop browser (Chromium recommended). Requires keyboard. Follow the link to check it out.

Let’s talk about regret. I’ve never regretted taking an umbrella. I’ve regretted not taking an umbrella. I’ve regretted loosing an umbrella, like I did a couple of weeks ago. I don’t regret having a spare umbrella. I don’t regret remembering where I bought those umbrellas, so I can buy them again.

Day 23: Dapper. #inktober

Day 22: Beacon. #inktober

Strange of me to say this, but I’m actually a little excited about the Stripe sponsorship with Stratechery. While there are going to be sponsor reads now, being the resident “Stripe expert” it would be good to get a sense of what they’ve been... https://lmika.org/2026/10/22/strange-of-me-to-say.html

Threads is really not selling itself very well, what with throwing up a dickover the minute I try to scroll someone’s profile. Maybe interesting things that are worth my time are written over there. Who knows? I’m unable to see any of it. https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

Extraordinary effort and commitment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk-O...

After working with some text in Dequoter, I needed to sum a bunch of new-line terminated numbers. Dequoter lacks a feature, and I was wondering whether to ask the agents to add one, until I remembered that Dequoter supports plugin1. S... https://lmika.org/2026/10/21/after-working-with-some-text.html

I think this Godot game is ready. Spent the last few days fine tuning and clearing out some last minute bugs, and it feels like its in a pretty decent state at the moment. Just need to write up a small landing page, but I think it’s ready to ship.

Day 20: Lounge. #inktober

Day 19: Confused. #inktober

I appreciate those mourning the loss of their programming craft. Maybe the tasks they work on during their day to day is more interesting than mine. But much of what I do professionally, a sizeable majority, is pretty rote: define ... https://lmika.org/2026/10/20/i-appreciate-those-mourning-the.html

Apple should add a “I choose to sell my soul for notarisation” option to their developer program. When enabled, it will auto accept any agreement they throw at me, just so I can keep their notarisation services from failing requests due to some agreement I failed to agree to.

It’s a strange property of software development that the higher quality the software is, the less noticeable it is. Think about the last time you thought about who is maintaining Vim, or Bash. Software that draws attention to itself does not win loyal users. Silence is truly golden.

Day 18: Flightless. #inktober

I’ve started listening to some of A Man from the Future by the Pet Shop Boys. Haven’t heard the whole album yet but the first two tracks have been real ear worms. 🎵

Day 17: Contraption. #inktober

First time I’ve been on a flight where the crossing time is estimated to be so much faster than expected, we actually had to delay departure to arrive at our gate at the alloted time.

App recommendation: Organic Maps. Found this app to have the best maps for walking trails during my trip. Offline support too.

Auckland and Waiheke Island: https://lmika.org/2026/10/16/auckland-and-waiheke-island.html

Asked the agent to make one small addition to my FollowSpec implementation: a button which will pick one at random and open the site. The goal is to discover new sites, and while the pickings are a bit hit and miss (there are a few dead si... https://lmika.org/2026/10/16/asked-the-agent-to-make.html

The gulls are frickin’ eager today. One nicked a chip straight from the table.

Got excited with the addition of FollowSpec that I ask agents to add a “following” view to my vibecoded RSS reader. It’s a simple affair — it just opens the profile page so far — but it came out well.

Whitianga and Coromandel: https://lmika.org/2026/10/15/whitianga-and-coromandel.html

Day 15: Hooray. #inktober

Day 14: Lady. #inktober

Back in Auckland and doing something I’d never thought I’d be able to do: take the train. Nice new metro guys! 👍

🔗 Brent Simmons I wish people would stop calling it Twitter. Twitter is gone forever. It’s X. I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I not polluting the archive of this blog with such a horrible name. It’s either “Twitter” or I never speak of that site again.

🚉🎂Happy birthday to Paisley station, opened 14 October 1929, closed in 1985. Re-opening this station alongside a shake-up of Werribee line timetables would boost public transport options in this part of Melbourne's west, helping more people avoid congestion. 📷Lachlan Tansey via Wikipedia

Could I travel to San Francisco for a meetup? What’s the minimum amount of time I need to spend there to make it worthwhile? I know of someone who travelled to Wellington for a weekend to attend a movie premiere. Of course, see recent post for why that’s relatively easier to pull off.

Tauranga And Rotorua: https://lmika.org/2026/10/13/tauranga-and-rotorua.html

🔗 Jonathan Hays: Code Boom. Talent Bust I suspect we’ll have discovered that AI hasn’t eliminated the need for good software engineers. It’s simply changed what those engineers are capable of producing. We’ll also have spent... https://lmika.org/2026/10/13/jonathan-hays-code-boom-talent.html

I made the point of not being afraid to push the ped crossing button yourself when you’re with someone. Well, this intersection in Rotorua is one where you absolutely must push the ped crossing button, continuously. If you don’t, you won’t get the green person. Took two cycles to discover this.

Ran the new Blog Audit feature that was released today. Took about an hour and a half to run. Here are the results: Regretfully, many of the broken links were to sites I once controlled.

I think I’ve a little exhausted from travel and somewhat ready to go home. I’ve still got a few more days to go though. But I think for next time, I’ll take two weeks leave, but 10 days actually travelling, and a few at home recovering.

Day 13: Flimsy. #inktober