Notes #1

I wanted to write tonight as I’m fighting jet-lag, hoping to go to bed no sooner than 8:30pm. I’ve been following Chris’ weekly notes for a little while now and I’ve been enjoying the format. Without any hopes of making this a weekly things, I’ve decided to experiment with notes of my own. So let’s do this.

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Keeping my dependencies up to date

A man wearing a blue shirt, a speech buddle says updated Vapor to 4.57.0, it ain't much but it's honnest work

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.

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On migrating my blog to Gatsby

A scientist pouring a red liquid (looking like the Jekyll logo) into a green one (with a label that says Netlify).

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.

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Harkness, part 2: the UI

The raspberry pi sitting on the desk, projecting some javascript Code

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).

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Rendering Git commit messages on a tiny screen

Romain making magic

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.

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