I have pushed a beta to my Socket RSS reader out to the public. I've already had a bit of feedback which is a great little incentive to keep working on it
Over the last few weeks, me and a couple of friends have been recording a podcast. It's an OnTheSide takeover, so the conversation circles around side projects (I talk a lot about RSS...)
Ale House Rock has been filling up nicely since Lockdown 3.0 started
I've been really enjoying the Working Code podcast. Lack of commuting has not left much space for podcasts, but this one has shot to the top of the "must listen" list (along with No Such Thing as a Fish)
With only 8 days between this and my previous notes, there isn't much to be writing about.
Playstation
In just over 2 months I managed to complete the Spiderman game on Playstation 4. Was a great little game and was excellent to be able to start & complete a game successfully. 100% in story mode with nearly all of the trophies (I'm not a perfectionist).
I purchased Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 last night, but barely got a chance to play it as it requires a 20GB download. The first 10GB came down in about 40 minutes, which meant I could do the tutorial & free play, but the remaining 10GB are crawling down as I type.
Recruitment
We are currently hiring for a backend developer at Liquid Light and, despite the note saying no agencies, I have been inundated with LinkedIn requests, emails and phone-calls. I would be willing to use a recruiter, if I could find a good one that understands my wants and needs (one being not wanting to do phone conversations).
6 Month Slump
It's been 6 months since the UK went into lockdown because of COVID-19. What seemed as a "temporary lockdown" has turned into an endless working from home journey. Pubs and Bars have opened and closed but we haven't gone back to the office. Me, along with a lot of others, seem to be struggling through a 6 month slump. No motivation, no eagerness. I'm only writing this note because I've not no desire to play any Playstation since Tony Hawk's isn't ready (which is what I would normally be doing with my night "off"). It's hard, but we'll get through it. People have got through worse. Just stay home, be sensible and wear a bloody mask.
So this isn't really "#7", it's more #6 part 2 as I am writing them both at the same time. However, this note tries to fill the July - Mid-September void.
No Coding
July and August kind of saw me down-tools on my side projects while I focused on the house. The garage (inside and out) needed painting, a long with the back of the house - so that occupied my mind which was a nice change. Half the inside of the garage is done (waiting for it to fully dry & for me to go to the tip before I do the other half) but the exterior walls are all finished.
The next project is building a garden office. It looks like we're going to be working from home for a while now, so to give more space indoors, my wife and I decided on getting a garden room built for me to work from. I'm not doing the building, but there is plenty of prep work needed to do beforehand.
Over the summer, "The Lockdown" eased slightly too. The UK government introduced a scheme which gave restaurants the ability to offer half-price food (although behind-the-scenes the restaurants are struggling to claim the money back). My wife and I took advantage though, and went out a couple of times. It was interesting to see how different places handled the situation - plenty did it very well while a couple left a lot to be desired.
11ty
I've been thinking about documentation and work and how best to store & maintain it. Our current system uses a slow CMS which is great, but puts you off writing and updating. As a side-project, I started looking into 11ty and I liked what I saw. There were a few in-built conventions I had to fight against, but the starter I've got myself is something I'm proud of.
Once i've fleshed out the styles & and used it a bit more to work out bugs, I might submit it as an 11ty Starter site.
TYPO3 Upgrades
Something that has been taking up a lot of my mental energy at the moment is TYPO3 - the CMS we use at Liquid Light. There is a major upgrade currently underway and it has fallen onto my shoulders to carry out. It's a "chuck in at the deep end" situation, but I'm learning a lot and it's good to see upgraded sites up and running - even if there isn't anything to "see"
New Developer
We're also hiring for a new backend developer, which is going to be an interesting process interviewing remotely as, one day, we would like to go back to the office. We'll see how that pans out!
Wow. Notes #6. I started so well and then haven't published anything in months. The draft of this post was made on 7th July (hence the published date) and this is actually written on 15th September.
I'm going to break the notes up into two parts - flesh out the bullets I had made in July then a second one to fill in the gaps from then until September.
Where is time?
I can't even work out why the long break happened. COVID-19 is still a thing and, although places opened up a bit more, I'm still not leaving the house much. I'm enjoying working from home but it is hard to grasp it has been 4 months (in July, when I was writing this) of home working. I seem to have lost my drive for all things side-projects at the moment. House DIY, while the weather is nice, and curiosity into things I'm doing at work have distracted me from my personal things.
Behind the Source
Behind the Source came and went, finishing on 27th July. It was great talking to all those people, and finding out what goes on behind the scenes. I'm still torn about doing a second series though.
Cloudflare & Certbot
I had been messing around with Certbot, generating SSL certificates on the server so the encryption between the server and Cloudflare is secure. It isn't needed, really, for me but it was a good exercise. I was hoping to make a blog post out of it (there is a draft, somewhere) but every time I have followed my instructions I've struggled to install it and get it working. There doesn't seem to be a clear route to installing it and making it work.
I'll still try and get the blog post out, because hopefully it will help someone!
Email.subscribeto
My early summer consisted of converting email.subscribeto from a Filebase/Slim PHP project to Craft, as I thought it would be easier to administrate. Turns out, unless you want a simple page/blog site, Craft is a PITA to code with. Granted, I want to do a lot of things that were edge cases, but I kind of regret doing it. Maybe I'll look at using a Static Site Generator or similar next time. For now, it works.
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey on PS4
Having a toddler means you don't often get to play video games, but with the routine my wife and I have, i generally get half an hour/an hour every other evening. In July, I "completed" Assassin's Creed: Odyssey on PS4. I say "completed" as I finished the main story lines - there is just an infinite sea of side quests to do that, once the main story line is over, there is no motivation to complete. I enjoyed the game and the side quests often gave a welcome break from following a path (although you make a lot of decisions that affect the story).
This week in America, riots and protests have happened across the country (and world) after the death murder of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer. It has really made me check my privilege and I am making sure I am educating myself on racism and how I can be a better ally.
With the events in America, it felt wrong to publish a Behind the Source interview this week. I have put the publishing on hold for the time being.
I was on a podcast
Si Jobling, who hosts the Make Life Work podcast hosted me as a guest this week. It was the first podcast i've ever been on and have had some good feedback. You can listen to it on all good podcast publishers or on Si's website.
Tech Stuff
Lighthouse 6 has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks. It was released on 19th May and I have spent the last few days correcting scores of our clients.
Gulp is starting to slow me down and cause issues on our larger sites, so I'm starting to look at alternatives. Despite the name, I use Laravel Mix on my personal projects that use Craft, but our work projects are a lot more complex. Webpack seems the obvious answer (we already use it for JS) but it is hell of a dog to set up and understand.
I want to give a big shout-out to Paste. An amazing app that I use daily.
Behind the Source interviews are going well and are well received. Already on the third interview today and I have had nothing but positive comments. Fortunately it is all set up beforehand, so there is minimal work each week to get it live. Unfortunately, Mailchimp have taken away the scheduling for free accounts, otherwise I could do it all automated. I'm using Figma to create the social media images (if I had more than 8 interviews I would have automated this with the command line and ImageMagick).
Apache Macros
I discovered Apache Macros recently and they changed my life. They essentially allow you to "include" a template from another Apache file. To give context, I have a sever where all my sites are set up the same. The only difference between them is the location of the "site root" and where the SSL certificate lives (and a few other bits). Excuse the brevity in the examples, this is mainly for me to remember!
Using Apache Macros, I am able to add the following to a file in /etc/apache2/conf-available:
The first line declares the variable, assigns a name and sets out the variables used, while the rest is what you want to be included.
I can then "enable" that file and call it in my Apache site file, filling in the variables and making updates & new site launches a lot easier (it also forces me to keep my server structured).
With Behind the Source re-energising my passion for side projects, I thought I would turn my attention back to email.subscribeto.at. The current tech stack was built with "prototype and push it live" in mind. I am currently in the process of re-building the backend with CraftCMS, so I am able to manage the content better and easier. So fare I've learnt a lot about extending Craft, including Twig Extensions, Behaviours and custom functions. I'll try and write a blog post about it when I understand it more!
I don't think I've mentioned this in blogs or notes before, but the UK is currently on lockdown. Since 18th March, Liquid Light have been a fully remote company - we had to quickly adapt to working in an office to all being in our own homes. It's a weird time, but I think the boy is enjoying both me and my wife being home. Despite the fact i'm not spending 2 hours a day commuting, I seem to have less time then I did before! It's going to be a hard shift when we're allowed to go back to the office again.
Thankfully we're allowed to go out an exercise - the bike rides scattered throughout the week are keeping me sane!
Behind the source gets started
It's been a long time coming, but Behind the Source is finally going to be underway next week. Last week I announced who was going to be involved and when the interviews are going public. I'm super excited about these as they have been such a good read while I've been editing and inputting them into the CMS.
If you have come here before you would have noticed there is now a new face to my blog. More space, better fonts & (in my opinion) just generally nicer.
I wrote a "timeline/history" about the blog/my site and dug up some Internet Archive links for each step. You can read about it in the blog post - Mikestreety's New Clothes
New Server
I hinted in the last Weeknotes about moving to a new server - which mikestreety (and some of my side projects) are now running on. Run by Hetzner, this server is beefier than my one before and I know a bit more about what I'm doing, so hopefully I won't screw it up!
There was one issue, where every 24 hours the network would cut out. I traced this down to an incorrectly configured IP6 interface. Not sure why or how it was happening, but I disabled IPv6 in /etc/sysctl.conf and that solved my issue:
I'm a big fan of RSS but used to rely on a desktop app on my work computer - which meant when I worked from home I missed out. After doing some research, I have installed TinyTinyRSS on my server, so I can access it anywhere.
Find and Replace in Vim
Setting up a new server means lots of command line work, and lots of vim usage. Because of that, I now have a few snippets I rely on:
:%s/find/replace/g - find all instances of "find" and replace them with "replace"
:w !sudo tee % - if you have opened a file as a user but need root permissions to save a file
So yes, I'm getting on the Weeknote train. They won't always be weekly, but a series of small notes, achievements and somewhere for me to dump my mind.
Git Hooks
Battled with git hooks after finding out that there is no such thing as a "pre-merge" hook unfortunately - I wanted to prevent our staging branch being merged into any other branch. I was able to use the "pre-commit" hook to prevent commits to the staging branch.
Podcasts
Listened to the "Make Life Work" with Dan Blundell podcast while cycling up a steep hill this weekend, part of which inspired me to start these very notes.
Zoom
With everyone working from home because of the current COVID-19 inspired lockdown, Zoom (the video conferencing company) have had a lot of bad press for their privacy policies and practices. I compiled a tweet thread of articles revealing the truth about zoom.
Hosting
My current hosting is with Scaleway, but the server I have has been bastardised due to my incompetence and indecision. I have decided this week to burn it to the ground and start again. Looking at pricing, i've decided to move to Hetzner. At the time of writing, I have set up the server but not installed or moved anything yet!
After seeing Harry Roberts talk at FFConf about his performance consultation business, I had a quick look into analytics at performance data available. Under Behaviour, there is a Site Speed section which can highlight some issues with your site. It might be worth having a look through to see if there is anything awry. One thing I did notice on a couple of our clients websites is a county or a particular browser's average was really high - this came down to one person on one day on a particularly bad page load skewing the results. So, as with everything, be careful with the data.
As a side note to this is Google Search Console has added a "Speed" section, which is worth a look at.
Git Grep
Another thing to come out of FFConf was from Alice Bartlett's fantastic talk on Git. She mentioned, in passing about git grep - something I wasn't aware of. Based on this I went and did a search and found this Git - Searching link. This explains not only about git grep (which will grep the contents of the files) but also about git log -S "search term", which will look through the commit messages.
Tina CMS
I was listening to SyntaxFM podcast and Wes Box mentioned TinaCMS in passing. On further inspection it is a React based CMS for Gatsby and Next.js, neither of which I use.
Bling JS
Another good titbit from Wes Bos on Syntax was Bling JS. It's a small JS utility that adds a jQuery style $ selection and an on function to JavaScript in 15 lines. Adam Argyle forked it and added some more functionality (boosting it up to 74 lines), including off, and attribute selection.