Well, this is my first status update in the blog, before I was writing some things based on a specific topic, as today I have many things happening but I don’t have the interest to go so much into details to explain what I am doing or thinking. So at least I want to give a time to describe briefly these things.

Dreaming in Lisp

In the past few months I have been exposed to the Lisp family language, first with Emacs Lisp (Elisp) and my curiosity for the language has increased, while Elisp only can be used inside Emacs, I was checking a more general programming language, from a long review it seems that Clojure and Common-Lisp are the most popular programming languages for that purpose.

I am now getting some expositions with CL through Exercism, and I would like to participate in the Advent of Code 2025 if I have some time these days. But overall I like the experience, certainly coming from Julia, it has been a pleasant experience to use Emacs and Slime with SBCL, while I like Julia, I feel like dealing with compilation time and the lack of mature tooling outside of VSCode get me exhausted sometimes.

Also I gave a time to use StumpWM, a window manager written in Common Lisp, it feels snappy, and the way that you can connect Emacs to the REPL and start making changes on the fly is a much more productive workflow than the suckless experience of compiling and restarting your software. Also the way that you can create and rename Groups and search by name has been a saner experience than workspaces based on numbers in my opinion.

Change to Graphene-OS

Few weeks ago I started using a Pixel 8 with Graphene OS, certainly in this experience I was hesitant to move to acquire a phone that can be impossible to unlock due to carrier restrictions, and you could ended up with a Google Phone. So I approach this with serious caution.

Fortunately, everything ended up well, and I could flash the new OS in the phone, install a sandboxed Google Play Store and install some apps that I need for daily basis, and the rest fill with only FOSS.

Overall the experience has been better than I expected, I created multiple users and when I need to move to the Google services I just move between users, It has been a peace of mind comparing with using a Huawei phone, considering that you have 2 bigh tech sneaky around your data.

Self Hosting my XMPP server

For a while I was considering to self-host a chat server for family and friends, and you have mainly 2 options XMPP or Matrix, I try to see the installation process of both using the most common protocol implementations (Prosody and Synapse respectively), and I really want to like Matrix, but I just feel Prosody was far more straightforward and easier to install, It was in the Debian Repository so you could just type sudo apt install prosody in the terminal, while I think also Matrix works out of the box and for some reasons I see most people and FOSS projects are using it.

Anyway, the big challenge is to bring people to use this thing, and that is the hardest part, people are so attached to use Whatsapp and other apps, that is hard to convince them to move to something that they will use it only for talking to one contact or one group probably. So still there is work to do.

1. Enable several features, so people will be less reluctant to change if they compare with the apps they were using (video calls, image upload, chat groups, etc)
2. Wait for an event that compromise these apps in terms of security and privacy. So if your people want to move to another app, the XMPP server will be ready to receive new users.

Thinking to Start Exploring Gentoo

Last weeks I was seriously considering to try a new Linux Distro, I have been using Debian for quite a while, as a server and desktop, but I am considering to use something different for the later, one of the main reasons is to find a Distro that is not using systemd as an init system, there are political and technical reasons to avoid it. For other side, while there are some distros that are branches from the main ones which give you alternative init systems like Devuan and Artix, I don’t like to use distros that are based on hacks of the original distribution. So that’s why I am thinking to try Gentoo as my possible next distro.

Expanding skills on Programming

Finally, I have been a data analyst for a while, my main jobs always has been related with deal with data, I am ok with that, but I am not really into data in my free time. I believe that is good to spend my time in skills that not depends on what the market want from you. The talents should belong to you and only you, data science and all these things are mainly skills that are good for your employee, and I think is important to departure sometimes from that. Learning Linux or Emacs has made me more free than learning something like Power BI or Excel.

That’s why I was considering to learn more about programming not only for the niche I was used to do professionally but also for building things, that help me in my own business.