I've been working on a REST API Client for Android. Its still in beta. Here's the download link: play.google.com/store/apps/details

Started working on an authentication system for my strategy game engine and setting up administration views. Also updated dependencies, replacing babel-stuff with @babel/stuff :P and realized that Gulp 4.x is taking a different approach than 3.9.x and earlier versions. So I'll be spending some time in the morning looking into how deep that goes and possibly refactoring the pipeline.

I'm on call at work this week so it's mostly fixing critical bugs in production, attending to tech support queries. Also I recently setup code splitting and service workers. When I'm not fixing bugs, I'll be putting in the final touches and making sure it's going live this week.

Outside of work, I started building a small side project idea that I've had for a while. It's called .config, a Webpack configuration wizard for quickly generating configurations. I also live streamed the entire process on Twitch. I didn't finish the project so this week's goal is to finish it and launch it on Product Hunt.

In my free time, I'm taking a small course on MongoDB. This is the last week, so final exam! Should be easy since it's a basics course. I'm also reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications everyday starting yesterday.

I'm working on my side project, that is a SaaS for managing multiple servers. First off Ubuntu or Debian.

It should give a centralized interface for updates, resource monitoring and by time also for specific apps installed. At first that will be Laravel applications.

My goal is to make it a platform to handle servers from, hosted at different providers such as DigitalOcean and AWS.

I would like to add a uniform way of resizing and auto-resizing as well, no matter where the server is hosted.

I will not take control of the server, so it would be a support tool, but I do hope to enable more unexperienced to manage their servers.

Day job:

Lots of paper work today, cleaning up times and billings for last year and planning trainings for 2019.

This week, I want have a lot of UX rework tasks to finish, as well as cleaning up some APIs with the backend-guys on my team.

The good part: no new features, so we can finally productize our project. The bad part: visiting some really bad code, which is a bit boring, but I am glad to finally clean it!

Other jobs:

• A customer of mine wants a new website, so I have to get working on that,.
• Got to stabilize a server by setting up a restart script. Yes, it's a cheap solution to a hard problem, and I don't even feel bad about it.
• Update the PHP version for several of my old freelancing customers. Some of them are still on PHP 5.6, so I fear there might be some breakage when I switch them to PHP 7.

Hobby:

• Amethyst stopped rendering on me for no apparent reason. I have to find out why and somehow fix the problem, so that I can continue.
• My friend made good progress with a human model for my game, so it will look a bit nicer and I can test out a few new things (skeletal animations urgh).
• Prepping stuff to start working on my own homepage. Still writing on the article, and plan to release it as a series, or it will be too lengthy.
• I need to put more work into reversing the Hashnode API and finding bugs there, so they can get fixed on a low level and won't riddle the new API as well. You can have a look at the rather small codebase here. There are some examples available, however I didn't write any documentation, yet. Build the project using npm run build_node, because it's not working in the browser at the moment.

So many tasks, so little time.

Thanks for the invite! Well I've been working with Python and Dango over the weekend with MVC and hoping to finally nail it this week. I think mainly my goal is to work out how I can create my own backend template, but also programme in Python and learn more i to SQL and Mongo 😉

Fixing some ETLs, maintaining the data infrastructure as usual ;)

Well, today was a busy day for me. I cleaned up our servers on DigitalOcean which resulted in 2.5 hours of downtime and reduced the server bill by $500.

As you may know, DigitalOcean revamped their plans and pricing last year: techcrunch.com/2018/01/16/digitalocean-gives-you-… - which means you get more RAM and disk space for the same price. However, our MongoDB cluster was on a old pricing model and we just came to realise that we are paying more than its current price. So, I worked on migrating the Mongo cluster to the new model -- Basically upgraded the disk size, CPU and RAM at the same price. I also removed some unneeded servers (such as unneeded side projects, blockchain validator nodes etc) which further reduced the bill.

Todo for this week:

• Work on an article "How we brought Hashnode response time to < 100ms".
• Add AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support to Hashnode.
• Fix Push Notifications on Hashnode.
• Fix "highlighted users" for onboarding -- we suggest a list active users to new users during onboarding. That needs some rework.

... And a bunch of tiny tasks. :)

I have a couple of job interviews (today and Tuesday) and will be attending a hiring related meetup later this week :D

As always I'm sure I'll be doing some fun CSS experiments too! So far this week I've come up with:

• live-updating character count with CSS variables: codepen.io/tomhodgins/pen/GzZYBR

• live-updating word count with CSS variables: codepen.io/tomhodgins/pen/VgaEOo

• invented a pseudo-class for when you've typed more characters of text than a set limit on an element: codepen.io/tomhodgins/pen/omxJoe