Let’s check in on the Node.js i18n committee. I want to run name-your-contributors on the translation repos to see if there has been activity recently, now that I’ve cleaned up NYC this week (yesterday morning). This was suggested here.
So, I went and built a shell script that automatically pulls data - comments, PRs, and reviews - from Node’s 15 or so i18n repositories, from the past year. I used jq to filter the JSON objects I got back, and used some really basic shell scripting to print it out into a nice Markdown file that I could plop into the issue. All in all, it took around an hour - and now we know more about the activity in those repositories, and I know that name-your-contributors can be used for some pretty cool statistics.
Since GitHub repos are cheap, I uploaded all of the code here. I’m feeling pretty proud about this one. Here’s an example of a result:
nodejs/nodejs-de audit
This list was automatically generated with the following command:
$ name-your-contributors -u nodejs -r nodejs-de -a 2017-03-01
There were 3 issue commentators who made 6 comments.
There were 0 reviewers who made null review comments.
There were 0 issue creators who made null issues.
There were 2 PR commentators who made 2 comments.
There were 1 PR creators who made 1 prs.
It’s pretty clear from this that there just wasn’t much activity - no new issues, only one new PR. Hopefully we can do better in the future!
I am going to take a break and move around; time to pack for my trip to Vermont tomorrow.
Well, that’s done. I’ve learned more about GitHub Pages’ seo module, added a logo and Google Analytics, a favicon and some social icons.
I tried to get the domain to deliver from https://2018-week-12.burntfen.com, but unfortunately GitHub doesn’t make this easy. I’ve called Hover about it, and they couldn’t help me, either. I have to set up a CNAME pointing to RichardLitt.github.io, which is odd, as it isn’t the site I’m building as that that site is actually hosted on Netlify, not on GitHub Pages. Right now, it shows a 404 on GitHub, which shows that at least the CNAME is set up somewhat alright, but it doesn’t work at all with SSL, which expects to render on a *.github.io site. Nothing more to do but email support and wait.
So, that’s done. What’s next? The Node.js i18n committee.
I haven’t wanted to update this blog over the past few days, because I’ve been either unproductive or my efforts have switched between different tasks. Publicising my procrastination doesn’t seem like a clever move.
But, it’s 7:30 tonight, and I’m sat down for another four and a half hours of work. I’ve got some chai tea, a pen and paper, and I’m not getting up until midnight. So, I figured now was as good a time as any to keep this going, even if it isn’t momentous, if it isn’t interesting, and if no one is reading.
First things first: I want to check the issues on this repository and close them all.
19:31 ~/src/2018-week-12 (master) 🐕 ghi
# RichardLitt/2018-week-12 open issues
7: Add Social Media icons
6: Add Twitter Card or OG graph links
5: Add a favicon
4: Improve draft process
3: Improve SEO tags
2: Serve from burntfen.com
1: Add Google Analytics
And that’s done. I took longer than I had planned to sort through all of my old todo lists from the past two months, identify projects, and to make progress where it was expedient to do so (under ten minutes work, mainly). Yesterday, I mostly organised and performed basic admin work; started planning a trip to Vermont to go hiking in the Adirondacks this weekend; submitted a request for funding to go to JSConf and the Node Collab Summit in Berlin this May; sent money to Germany for my tuition payment; killed a collaborative project that wasn’t working for either me or my collaborator; posted a new submission to Word Hoard Press; did Maintainer tickets, and so on. The list continues. This morning, I wrote Maintainer emails and planned a long trip to Pennsylvania for late April.
Now, I have only a few major projects left for the next few weeks; mostly In Development, Maintainer, 2117.91 catchup, and launching Jekyll Scheduler. And, of course, my thesis.
It’s not ideal that it took me until Wednesday to get back to this, or that it took a full day to get progress on all of my projects. But that’s just how things are for me - somewhat scattered, with a lot of parallel threads occuring simultaneously that take time. My thesis is the largest thread that I can easily snip, to make sure it never comes back again. Let’s work on that.
The goal for the day: write and finish the section on endangered language metrics.
I’m in Cafe Osmo this morning, at the Coffee and Code Meetup, which happens every week on Tuesday morning. I’ve spent the last half hour talking to people and catching up with some old friends. One of the main issues with working remotely is that it is very easy to get into the habit of working by yourself exclusively, which ends up with an increasing feeling of isolation. By wasting a few hours of potential productivity a week going to meetups like this, I end up having a community that ultimately gives me more mental sanity than I would have otherwise. The time isn’t wasted from a higher perspective, although that is often how it feels when I look back at checkmarks of the day’s progress.
I often learn more from these events than I would otherwise at home, too. For instance, someone I’ve just met here, beginning to code, asked everyone: “Are you a beginner, intermediate, or expert coder?” I wanted to point out to him that this is an aggressive statement, and that it doesn’t encapsulate how coding works from my perspective. Coding is a practice, not a verifiable skill - and each expert in one branch may know nothing about the other. Talking to him, I also learned that he doesn’t know what GitHub is, and doesn’t like the design of it and doesn’t understand how it is used. I think that’s interesting. Judging a site before using it or knowing what problem it is solving seems, to me, to be naïve. There are some patterns he has that don’t match my own, and it’s interesting to see how different we are, and how I’ve been able to resolve or abstract away a few of those early questions I had a decade ago when i started.
With that having been said, let’s move on to what I need to do today. What are my priorities? That I don’t know unnerves me. I’m going to spend the next thirty minutes onloading this context; going through my emails, picking out urgent and important work, writing down priorities by hand, and going through my hand-written checklists from the past few months and picking out issues that I haven’t resolved. Back in a bit.
Alright. I’m incredibly tired again. I refuse to stay up until 3:00am tonight - I had a nice day of resting and trying to get work done, but I’d rather sleep now and be rested again tomorrow than force work now that I have some momentum with this up.
A quick post-mortem for the day: I did not get to as much things as I expected, but I am still content with the day. It was a long weekend; I found a way to rest; I slept in and got some good coding in; and I was able to figure out how to move forward for the next week (in terms of this blog, if not higher priorities). Overall, a good Monday.
A few small notes:
Firefox caching is not good for noticing DNS propagation. It consistently failed to show propagated websites which were formerly down, because I don’t know how to hard refresh like I’ve been doing in Chrome; my answer earlier was to just flush my entire cache. I didn’t like doing that, and should research how to hard refresh. People may not know. cmd+shift+R doesn’t seem to do the same thing. I may just be wrong. I’ve only recently switched.
Cmd+shift+N doesn’t open a private window in Firefox, but the last closed window. I need to get used to that.
To Do
Figure out how to improve the SEO tags for the GitHub Pages minimal theme. I need to add a Twitter Card and a Facebook OG photo - or, at least a photo. I’ve opened an issue.
Add a favicon.
Write about the goal of this particular blog, in terms of directed effort, and whether or not I am going to talk about private tasks (for instance, talks with companies or contract work).
Well, that was easier than I thought. I realized I didn’t have to make another rake task at all; I could just use my old rake post title="title" command, and add a bit where it reads my draft’s contents into the new post, and then starts a commit for me. I didn’t know how to do this in Rake - five minutes of reading the manuals tells me it can include shell commands easily. So, that’s surprisingly easy. Done.
I’ve rigged it to commit my post, too. I’ll need to add a tool that automatically tweets it if I send a flag. Or I could use IFTTT. Or I could just tweet manually.
While I was debating where my afternoon had gone, I realized that the main thing I missed from the previous few days wasn’t the goal of $2117.91, but the writing that I’d been doing - public, quick, to the point (more or less). I’d been able to very easily rubber duck myself by writing about what I was doing, and by making simple lists of things to help me along.
So, why not write this week, too? Even without a project, live blogging as I go along has proved to be helpful. This is different than journaling. I find that the latter tends to leave me getting too introspective, too fast, and it’s hard for me to tie up passages and make them clear for myself later. The feel is different. However, writing for others - even when I barely let my fingers pause between sentences, like here - is the way to go.
That’s what this blog is for. I set it up this afternoon, copying over the styles directly. Then I wasted an hour or so trying to get a subdomain working on burntfen.com, my default website. I don’t think it’ll work, after calling Hover and talking to them, and after continually googling how to do stuff on GitHub. That’s probably OK. I set up https://now.burntfen.com for people if they want to go to the most current project. My plan is to restart these journals either each week, or for each project.
For the past twenty minutes, I’ve been converting this template to be a bit more transferable for the next time I start one of these. There’s at least one bit in my process I don’t like - I don’t want to run rake post too long before I publish, because then it’ll be published with the timestamp of when I started the post, not when I ended it. I am writing this now in a _drafts folder in my .gitignore. I’ve just realized I can set up a Rake command called publish to automatically create a new post and move the draft to it, or to update the name of the file directly. I am going to do that now.