March December Adventure Wrap-Up

2026-03-24T08:41:00Z

Well, I didn't get as much done this week as I'd hoped, but here's where things ended up.

I spent most of the (somewhat limited) spare time I had to work on projects in the last week on understanding both the architecture of the mandy prototype and ActivityPub itself. I like to write tests to check my understanding of how things work, so I got started on adding a test for the unmarshaller.

That's as far as I got this week, though. I got tripped up for a bit by the fact that SRFI-64 test output displays strings in a test-equal form without their enclosing quotes. I figured that the alist values were strings, but I didn't realize initially that the alist keys were as well. So there was a bit of "those look equal, so why is my test still failing?" going on.

But I plan on continuing to poke at the codebase, and this challenge was a good motivator to get started doing so. I'd consider that a success. :)

Mandy hacking (March December Adventure day 1/2)

2026-03-16T20:50:00Z

It's the first day of March December Adventure (really the second day, but I was busy yesterday), and my goal for this week is to learn more about how Jessica Tallon's Mandy prototype works so that hopefully I can start contributing to it. This blog series is probably going to be a bit of a rambly stream-of-consciousness as a result as I try to reason about it. (Sorry not sorry.)

There's a TODO in the code around actually supporting all the AS2 attributes since the prototype didn't, so I think that's what I'll start with since it seems like low-hanging fruit. I'm admittedly largely learning ActivityPub and ActivityStreams as I do this, but it looks at first glance like most of what I need to start adding the rest is already here. Some of the properties that still need to be added (e.g. replies on Objects) are Collections (unlike the currently supported params which are all strings), but there's already some support for collections that gets used when you spawn AP actors directly as Goblins actors so this seems like it should be doable. But I guess I'll really find out when I give it a try soon. :)

(EDIT 3/17: I've since realized that I was misunderstanding how the marshalling/unmarshalling worked a little bit... more to dig into, haha :P)

I'm always impressed by how concise Goblins code can be for what it does. Granted it's a prototype, but there's still a lot going on in a small space.

Terracrypt

March December Adventure Wrap-Up

Mandy hacking (March December Adventure day 1/2)