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.
Romain Pouclet
Keeping my dependencies up to date
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.
On migrating my blog to Gatsby
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.
Harkness, part 2: the UI
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).
Rendering Git commit messages on a tiny screen
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.