This month has been interesting, so I thought I’d try and capture it in words before the month clicks over and I forget it all.
Code:
It’s been a slow month on personal projects, really only been keeping git repositories up to date and testing things other people have been writing.
Specifically various Scuttlebutt clients; patchbay and mmmmm mainly and my favourite chat client ssb-chat. ssb-chat recently gained the ability to disable emoji support via the –no-emoji command line switch. This was inspired by listening to Katrina Owen on the Change Log podcast.
MyJudo.net got bumped to rakudo-2018.08 version of Perl6 from rakudo-2018.06 but did not get any of the changes I have written on the todo list done. I am part way through moving to new template engine, but need to get moving on that.
I watched the Cro talk from the Swiss Perl Workshop, so know there are some potentially breaking changes coming. I’m looking forward to making those changes.
In the $dayjob, I have been enjoying working on some interesting technically challenges. I really enjoyed working with Google BigQuery and building some internal features with that. I have recently been building some structural changes within a core object; this has been challenging but rewarding as I have tried to be disciplined in my personal dev process and that has paid of.
Specifically, I have been good at starting with a test, then implementing code that makes that pass. I am fortunate that the several years of focussing on testing at my $dayjob means that I had some great tests to inform my changes and to provide confidence that what I was doing was breaking in expected ways and then working when I made changes.
I have endeavoured to make one change that offers a feature per day, rather than building all the planned feature set and taking several days to get that done and into code review/QA.
This has worked nicely as I am getting faster feedback and we have deploy-able code at the end of everyday. It has also meant that the changes become compartmentalised and framed in such a way that there is “context” for reviewers, testers, etc.
Tech:
Scuttlebutt and the decentralised web still keeps me excited, I have a DAT server running at home now, quietly seeding a Scuttlebutt friends music from a raspberry pi. The link between a p2p data network and a p2p person network is really interesting.
Somehow I got pointed at Perkeep (previously Camlistore) which I have played with before. So I have been playing with that and exploring it as a solution to the desire to own my own data and also to have my data be available to me forever.
It also works into my plan of having my files stored somewhere that is cached on my local machine (on SSD), and also available from slower disks (external drives) and via offline (S3). I’d like it to be transparent so I can just use files and have them magically shuffle off my SSD if I don’t use them.
Perkeep give point in time access to files via the FUSE mount. It has a webui with search and currently I have a few tests on the fuse mount and have it importing blog posts (like this one), tweets, mastodon posts and photos from my google photos.
The photos thing is nice as it’s a backup AND it has a really nice map display so I can see where photos were taken on a map, so a really nice experience.
Perkeep is a quiet project and I’d love to see more from it. Specifically, I’d love to see some more integrations (the Runkeeper and Facebook importers would be awesome!).
I am contemplating building an integration to SSB as the two philosophies seem to gel nicely and having even more things in my personal backup on Perkeep so that if I stop using a technology I still have it makes me feel happier committing to things.
October:
It’s going to be busy! I am off to a World Junior Judo Championships and MozFest in London (with the SSB crew).
So I will be fairly busy with those two things, but hoping to work on https://myjudo.net a little. But will probably be working mainly on building some tech ideas I have for the IJF information systems.
I’m also hoping to work on a small Elixir project but the plan is uncertain. 🙂
Reaching out:
Please reach out to me if you are working in the Perl language and/or if you are excited about the SSB, DAT, Perkeep and other decentralisation technologies.
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