I’ve been working on this side project codenamed Caretaker for a while now and since it wasn’t my main activity, I would sometime not do any work for weeks or months, depending on how my life was going (it’s going well, thank you for asking). Every time I wanted to go back to the project, I would start with the same thing: making sure my dependencies were up to date. A couple of months ago, I made a tool for it.
I started looking into Gatsby some times ago because I wanted to start writing again. After a quick test, I was really excited by the idea of using React components to write a theme for my new blog. Fortunately, I also took a step back and realized that if I needed to migrate my blog to a new engine, before I could start writing again… I would simply never write. I’m happy to announce that this blog post is not about migrating to a new platform.
Now that I finally wrote a blog post about this tiny monitor that sits on my desk, let’s talk about what makes it tick, starting with the UI part that I called the dashboard. After spending some time trying various libraries (usually written in python), I ended up with the simplest concept: a website. This part of Harkness is actually a tiny React application, and all the pretty parts are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with Typescript).
Ever since I watched the Like Light video, I’ve wanted to play around with Arduino, Raspberry Pi… Anything with some kind of hardware. My friend Angelo helped me scratch an itch by making a button to wipe a folder on my computer, but aside from that I didn’t do much. Last year, I treated myself to a Raspberry PI Zero and a HyperPixel Display and decided to play around with the ecosystem, see what could be done.
In a previous post, I mentioned Beanstalk, a simple and fast work queue. It uses a simple and straightforward protocol, and learning to implement it in Swift has proven to be extremely fun.