littlelogs

This week I’m finally, really, seriously getting into adding #manualtracking to #exist. This is a big architectural change, and due to various requirements, will necessitate upgrading a lot of dependencies with all of the massive screwing around that’ll entail. I started setting up a new cloned copy of the codebase in a new virtual env, and started working through all of the things that are now broken after upgrading dependencies, but there’s still a lot to do before I can write any new code. Fun times.

I’m terrified right now. I finally wrote the major part of the #midnightmurderparty enhancement, which involved refactoring huge portions of navigation logic. It was the kind of refactor where you really can’t compile and test until it’s basically done.

When I finally compiled it, the compiler found two mistaken type signatures, and then it worked. But surely it couldn’t be that easy, I thought. There will definitely be errors in the runtime since I didn’t change the #JavaScript to work with it yet.

Except there weren’t. As far as I can tell, everything still works fine immediately after this massive refactor. I know this is #Elm, but this is too smooth even still. There must be a sneaky logic error somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet.

It works, and that’s terrifying.

Today I began rethinking the structure of #GraphexScala. My first iteration, during school, was very Java-minded. For this rewrite, I wanted to make the project a lot cleaner, and incorporate a handful of Scala-specific niceties.

At work today I began rewriting some of the helper functions. One of these was consolidating all multi-asterisks into a single asterisk, since for our purposes a-star-star will match the same strings as a-star (dammit markdown!). The other involved reading the “alphabet” out of the file to be checked, a set of all characters except newline. I was able to turn both of those functions into concise one-liners that use recursion and collection transformations out the wazoo.

I also put some work into remembering how my productions worked for the regex-parsing and NFA-building. I am going to keep it mostly the same as it was in the Java version, but hopefully it will be easier to debug this time.

Today we had a little assessment via unit tests. It was super easy just a bit of html css and js. Finished in about 30 minutes and submitted. That’s 10% of the module mark achieved on the first day of uni at 100% which i’m pretty happy with. It wasn’t hard at all though, all stuff you pick up on your first website so it was just a little speed flex really.

On Friday I managed to configure the majority of a #vagrant #environment for my #FinalYearProject. I’m just finishing off the MySQL configurations now. The process has been fun as I’ve decided to play with ansible for the first time. It’s actually incredibly easy though the docs don’t cater so well to someone new to automated infrastructure building. Most of my learnings came from Stackoverflow and blog posts with the docs to support it and understand things better.

First day of proper lectures today, I’m trying to figure out a project idea for the front end web dev module. None of the lecture content seems to be new so I really just want to crack on with it asap and get the project out of the way. I need to sort the proposal and idea first though, I’m thinking about doing a “student dashboard” or something which pulls in data from the uni and displays it.

Once this environment is finished I’ll move back onto my final year project proposal and finish writing that one though.

#uni day today. Watched this week’s lecture and read my textbook. Also did some research into magazines I could pitch for work. Learning very little overall, so pretty sure I won’t keep going with this degree when this unit is over. Considering switching to a psychology degree instead, as I think that would be applicable to my #writing work, but I need to think it over some more.

Also followed up some emails but I’m putting off pitching new #client #content work. Pitching is the bane of my existence these days. It’s like pulling teeth, and never gets any easier. I don’t know how other writers do it.

I spent most of today apple picking with the fam and doing chores around my apartment. #LifeRPG has really been helping me stick to my new goals, and it’s very cool to see different aspects of my life all moving forward at a good pace, while also giving me some time to relax and slow down.

I got some more work done on the #midnightmurderparty enhancement I mentioned in a previous post. I anticipate being done with it by the end of the week or sooner.

I can finally stop saying “new series,” because the #1331SotW just went live today (that’s Song of the Week for those of you who don’t know, which is probably all of you). While, like I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’ve already got four or five weeks written, I wrote a new one last night for next Sunday instead of picking one of those, because it’s good timing for it. Looking to get the new #TuesdayTunes up next week, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have time to finish it for this week. But all in all I’d say #1331blog is doing pretty well at the moment, and the Song of the Week will mean at least one thing will go up every week and keep content fresh. Also it opens up a lot of avenues for guest posts, which is awesome, and I definitely look forward to soliciting some. I might have to alter the format of my obsessive and unnecessary stats spreadsheet but that’s a ways down the line.

Made some progress on #talenthunch Jobs this evening. Not ready for launch yet, but it’s getting closer.

Tonight I made more progress on #midnightmurderparty. I’m working on a pretty big enhancement at the moment. In the #reader, there is a lot of collision detection regarding which headings are currently within the viewport of the book. The enhancement, instead of checking all headings against the viewport every page turn, just does so once–when it renders–and stores that data in a map from page number to list of elements.

The idea is to cut the slow DOM querying out of the process and to search through less elements each page turn, but there’s another benefit I just realized yesterday. If I pass this map of page num -> element list to #Elm after the render, the Elm side of the program can perform a lot more logic without having to continuously ask the #JavaScript side to check things for it. This will cut out a ton of complexity!

Aside from that, I spent most of the day with a friend. We went to a diner, made cookies, and watched a Twitch stream of Super Mario RPG.

I’m back! This has been a longer break than I meant to take, but it was probably a good idea. I started working on forming some good habits and life balance. You know, eating, sleeping, and taking breaks instead of dev’ing 15 hours/day–just little things that help in the process of staying alive and keeping my apartment intact.

To that end, I’ve spent a couple days configuring #LifeRPG to make the process a little more fun. Progress bars are always good encouragement. Some goals I’ve set include daily reading (just joined Goodreads), regular writing, daily/weekly/monthly house chores, getting some exercise (even if that just means a mile walk), socializing more, and being more effective at my job.

So far this week I:

• Wrote a #Haskell tool to figure out the RP value of LifeRPG rewards
• Played Smash Bros. Melee w/ some office mates
• Finished two books I’d been slacking on
• Started another book
• Finally got back to working on #midnightmurderparty!

Updated my dashboard to let me see the details of each purchaser for #rpg_book . I display the total sales and gross profit for the last full month. The purchase model has a refund field to let me mark off people who’ve requested a refund (2 so far). While doing this I noticed one guy had purchased the book twice last week. So I refunded him the first purchase and sent him a mail letting him know. (He didn’t open the receipt for the first purchase but had for the second) - which puts my refund total to 3 :)

I’m in-process with a few companies for my next role, another couple of weeks and I’ll have a better idea of where I’ll be.

Doing some user research on an idea for content writers currently. @belle has been pretty helpful with her feedback.

Doing a few coffee meetings next week to gather more information before I decide whether to start coding or not.

I’ve been focused on my social life the past couple of days, so I’ve made no progress on the #TuesdayTunes I’ve been working on for #1331blog. But I did write a couple of posts for the new series, and I’ve got more planned, so I’ll have some backlog when I finally launch it in the next couple of weeks. They’re short, so doing them is kind of like doing little writing exercises. Typing them up will be more of a pain than writing them, since I have to deal with formatting and linking as well.

So basically between my own personal life and the few posts I’ve written, I’d consider today a huge success.

Finally got through all my #client #content work for the week. Not sure why I’ve been so slow at this lately, but this week was extra hard because I took on one more article than I normally would. Anyway, all done and sent off so I can relax and enjoy the #AFL tonight :)

It’s been a while since I’ve been here but it’s time to start going at it again. Loads to report for the past couple of days.

1) Returned to uni after a 2 year gap of working in the industry. I put in most of the work for the degree already so I may as well finish it off. Only 9 months and I’ll be back working again! 2) Already written the first draft of my honours project proposal. I’m now officially running 2 months ahead of schedule. 3) Just started submitting for ethical approval. It seems storing user data has ethical questions around it so I’ve got that ball rolling right already. The project isn’t due to start until after Christmas officially though.

Today I’ll be setting up environments for all of this years projects. Should save myself a few days of work further down the line with that.

Made some improvements to #location tracking in #exist for #ios this morning. Thankfully, it was mostly a simply process of following threads to their conclusion to figure out what was happening, when, and why, and make it work how I wanted. Very rare for that to happen when dealing with any iOS permissions or background tasks!

Did my #exist interview today with the potential article writer. Lovely lady, and pretty knowledgeable about the space, so we got on well enough and hopefully that’ll turn into some #press for us. It’s been a while. The last interview I did over a month ago still hasn’t been published.

Rest of the day I did some random bits and pieces, everything but coding really. Wrote some more correlation descriptions, replied to lots of emails, and added a bunch of tasks to do later in the week.

I gave my #writethedocs talk yesterday morning and it went swimmingly. I’m at the airport now to go home and definitely looking forward to working on some other projects for a change.

Did a bunch of small tasks this morning:

• updated the #exist FAQs page with some new services and data types we’ve added recently
• Pitched a #guestpost to a productivity blog
• submitted my iPhone setup to a site that features user setups every week
• ordered some stuff I’d been meaning to buy for the house for ages
• made a couple of tiny improvements to #exist for #ios
• wrote a feedback survey to send to people who’ve completed my #productivehabits #course