Microblogging Journal through 11/20/2023

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 11/13

09:21 # Started a new Node.js project to experiment with what I’m calling a “generator,” which will take markdown files and turn them into data-friendly json files. It’s possible I could do that with Hugo, though, now that I think about it. Instead of creating static index.html files, perhaps create static index.json files. The theory is that the experimental Next.js web application would have a much easier time serving pages using a pre-generated static set of json files as a data source, rather than making the web app do all the work of translating markdown and yaml into pages. Again, it’s basically what “contentlayer” does, but contentlayer doesn’t seem mature enough yet, and I don’t necessarily want the content files in the same directory with the source code. #development #nextjs #blog

22:07 # Abandoned the Node.js project to generate json from markdown files. Turns out I can get Hugo to do it with relative ease, after a bit of digging and experimenting to figure out how to render json pages instead of html pages. So that’s taken care of. Next will be reworking the Next.js blog project to use static json files as input.

Tuesday 11/14

23:46 # Successful proof-of-concept of a Next.js blog application that fetches page data from an S3 bucket containing static json files rendered by a Hugo build from markdown files. Rube Goldberg, ahoy. Anyway. Why was I doing this again? I’ve forgotten. I think … just because? #development #nextjs #blog

Wednesday 11/15

08:25 # Holy crap it’s the 15th already. Panic, panic. Open the regular blog post draft and frantically look to see if it’s ready to post, find it definitely isn’t. The usual drill. #blog

Note: The post was posted.

18:59 # Listening to Stephen King’s Fairy Tale audiobook. I’m somewhat embarrassed and horrified to realize that elderly “agoraphobic hoarder” hermit Mr. Howard Bowditch in his dilapidated house with his old dog is going to be me in ten years or so. The only difference is that I have computers and cable. And I don’t have my old dog anymore, I just have a couple cats now. It’s a little unpleasant to read that all the other characters think Mr. Bowditch is weird. #audiobooks

Thursday 11/16

14:50 # My 15GB of free Google drive space is completely full for some reason. I started doing some backups from all my computers but I didn’t think I was backing up that much to GDrive. Bummer. Something else to worry about.

20:26 # Omg FINALLY figured out how to correctly set runtime environment variables in AWS Amplify such that they would be available to a Next.js application during server-side rendering. (In my case, S3 credentials.) I asked ChatGPT 50,000 questions, never got a good answer. Googled a million times. This was the correct solution: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amplify/latest/userguide/ssr-environment-variables.html Took forever to diagnose what was even happening, because the variables were there at build time, so some pages worked, but not there at run time, so other pages didn’t work, even though they definitely weren’t being rendered client-side. What a pain in the arse. Painting a picture with a swarm of bees again. That’s node.js development. #development #nextjs

Friday 11/17

08:04 # I took the lazy way out, threw money at the problem, and upgraded my GDrive storage from the free 15GB to a paid 100GB. This saved me from having to figure out what to delete from my backup configurations on three different computers.

08:20 # In every video meeting I’m in, I can just click a button and blur the background behind my face. Imperfect, but super easy. I wish I had a button like that in DaVinci Resolve I could apply to vlog video. Or a button like that on my phone when I’m recording the vlog video. I had this thought after I made a “day in the life of a remote software engineer with two cats” vlog yesterday. Carefully selecting camera angles inside a messy house that is extremely not camera-ready is hard. #videos

23:14 # The experimental Next.js blog project is currently generating 1575 static page endpoints for Endgame Viable at build time. That’s how many distinct content pages (basically, how many posts) you can load, including the handful of section pages displaying lists of the most recent posts. #nextjs #blog

Saturday 11/18

08:33 # Oof. First day of Thanksgiving vacation. What am I supposed to do with myself. It would be nice to imagine something productive coming out of this week of free time but it seems rather unlikely on the morning of the first day.

Sunday 11/19

09:47 # Why is everything so bleepity-bleeping hard to do in the Apple ecosystem. I just want to buy a writing app for my laptop (the first one I’ve tried to purchase on this laptop through the app store) and it’s yelling at me to contact Apple support because it doesn’t understand my payment information. Geez.

09:54 # Ah there we go. I had to log into the Apple ID site, go through all the verifications there, and setup my payment details there. THEN I could buy stuff from the app store on my laptop. Arg.

10:10 # Apple App Store drama aside, I’m experimenting with IA Writer to write my markdown blog posts. In addition to the usual “distraction-free writing” features everywhere else, it has a nifty feature where it will do syntax highlighting on parts of speech, so all the dumb unnecessary filler adverbs I keep typing will be flagged in purple. I wanted a separate post editor from VS Code because I was starting to get confused between blog post editing windows and all the blog code windows and applications I’ve been writing lately. #blog