new laptop

I got a new mac since my windows laptop broke. First time mac user!

To be honest, I'm really impressed by how good the laptop is in terms of performance and battery life. It is a wonderfully built beast of a machine.

That said, as a new mac user, I am still getting used to the command key, but I would say it hasn't been too difficult to pick up so far.

The biggest change that I have invested my weekends towards is actually setting up neovim.

neovim config

I began my neovim configuration journey by following ThePrimeagen's zero to LSP video, and it was a very enjoyable guide. Halfway through the video though when we reached the LSP section I was thrown into chaos, as I realized the configuration was quite outdated, being filmed in 2022, and neovim had evolved a lot since then.

Neovim v0.11+ brought upon native lsp configuration, which I had to do some reading and get it configured. Overall, I still learnt a lot from the primeagen video and will spend many nights configuring my neovim configuration, but for now I'm happy to have a basic configuration up and running. While it is still a bit messy as I'm still figuring out things, I'm putting it up on github to track the transformation of my dotfiles as I continue as a neovim programmer :D.

actually, why neovim?

I decided to pick up neovim as I had a very unforgettable experience recently when I pair programmed with a friend for my CS4212: Compiler Design class in NUS, where we worked on the third homework together, which was an assignment in OCaml where we had to build a LLVM to x86 compiler.

My friend, being the absolute programming GOD that she was, weaved magic into our codebase, writing out EVERY single line of code on their own without using AI at all, and at the speed of light I dare say. She was putting up a show, dancing through the entire codebase through her keyboard, and what seemed like an absolute theatrical performance, was something trivial to her!

She would say "ah okay I get it, let me just code monkey this, it's very boring", before writing out the entire function, proclaiming how boring this was and to not mind her as she did all this. WTF!!!! I was completely entranced by how amazing she was at programming. And all the time she was renaming the variables, complaining about the horrible naming conventions the professor has set up.

It's absolutely crazy to me, being someone that is super reliant on AI, to witness someone absolutely tearing up a coding assignment without any assistance.

And it made me want to do that too! Seriously, it was super cool.

So, I will begin my neovim journey today. :D