We all have those personal learning projects that inspire pride in us. Many are our own takes on existing frameworks and tools such as content management systems, math libraries, billing systems, layout frameworks, game engines, etc. Attempting such projects is a vital part of learning to code, picking up new languages or approaching new ways of thinking. I’d be remiss not to encourage people to take on such tasks as a method of improving their skills and a liar if I said I hadn’t done it hundreds of times over myself.
We’ve all heard the term, we’ve all seen spiels about it’s importance, but we also have so many excuses why not to do it. The place I’m currently working at ran into two of the most common reasons I’ve seen and here I document how we overcame them for the benefit of anyone who thinks code review might help (hint: it will) but feels they can’t justify it.
No proper tools Whether the answer is no budget for Crucible or not enough time to set up Phabricator, this is an incredibly common cop out.
For a recent project I realised I would love to be able to set up webhooks for repositories I watch (and don’t administer). So to overcome that I’ve created a Node.js script, WatchedWebhook.
You pass it a GitHub username as a command line argument and it polls the “public received events” feed (including your watched repositories). Any new events that match the event type and repository of rules you specify (in rules.
Woo, finally a new post and a pretty decent occasion to make one, I’ve released a new project! ChernoBravoBB is minimalist forum software designed for ease of access, navigation and utilisation by it’s denizens and carrying an ethos of openness, transparency and pseudonymity. You can check it out on my GitLab where I’m currently hosting the project (might duplicate it to GitHub soon).
It’s based on Node.js with MongoDB backing, utilising the ExpressJS framework (with LocomotiveJS providing better MVC capability) with Jade templating for the views.
I’ve been wanting to redo my personal site for some time and desired something a bit more involved then a one-pager with my contact details. I was also starting to suspect that my Google search results may be taking a hit since I hosted two of my blogs on subdomains of http://adamogrady.id.au and the similarities in topic, authors, etc might appear spammy to the Google algorithm.
Rather than look towards the high-tech side, I was eventually swayed into trying out a static site generator given their current popularity.
On the weekend past I decided to see if I could build a small project I had in mind and get it into production on the World Wide Web before I started at my new job. I decided to try building a journal system that reminds you to update on a daily basis by sending you a nightly email with a link to the latest entry for that day. I ended up getting it working in a very basic format (with user accounts/authentication) which I uploaded to some hosting I have through Digital Ocean.
I’ve done a fair bit of Unity3D work before, but it’s mostly been “fun” projects or random stuff to test out hardware like the Leap Motion. But recently a friend has invited me to join his small collective that are working towards building a video game. It’s mostly a hobby-with-direction and since we all have our own lives as well it may not go far or reach it’s goal quickly; but that doesn’t stop us having fun and trying new things.
This entry feels like a bit of a copout, however I feel pretty good with what I’ve done so far. For years I’ve used iTunes to manage my library and it would always be on my main PC, meaning anyone who wanted to play music from our massive library of tracks would have to play it on my PC and hope I’m not doing anything that also has sound. We considered putting the music on the file server (rather than just the backup) and allowing multiple computers to connect to it, however any added music would not automatically appear on other clients, breaking the integrity of the library.
Oooh man, it’s been an exciting weekend. Alongside the effort and work in packing up the house to move shortly I’ve been spending a heap of downtime reading, practicing and learning about functional programming. I’d like to give a massive thanks to Becoming Functional by Joshua Backfield, it’s an easy to digest, fun to read text which follows the evolution of a fictional use-case/company as you rewrite it’s imperative code as functional.
My apologies for the absence and lack of updates although this may be closer to regular schedule in the future, depending on how circumstances turn out (vague-/personal-posting, sorry), but I have been working on some projects. In particular, my main focus has been on a commercial shopping cart website for a friend that I’m developing. I can’t give too much information about it since the project is still underway but it involves building my own shopping cart, creating a content management system for my friend to simply log in and update content, etc.