Software History

A few months ago, GitHub introduced a feature that lets you create a custom README.md that shows on your profile homepage. I have known about this feature since it was first released but because I haven't been using GitHub very much of late (well, the desktop interface anyway) I have not given the custom README.md feature much thought. However, it came to mind and I decided to try and create my own README.md for my profile.

In a discussion with a friend, I mentioned how easy it is to overengineer solutions to problems. This weekend, I have been evaluating what it is that I want to do with my personal website. What matters most to me? In asking this question, I realize that I have been guilty of overengineering solutions to problems that may not actually be problems with which I should be concerned.

I received an email yesterday from someone who has dipped their toe into the IndieWeb. They are not very active but they are a participant on the IndieWeb webring. This reminded me that the webring was what got me really interested in the IndieWeb. It is a directory of sites that adhere to IndieWeb principles. To be admitted into the webring, you must have a valid

I have had a commitment to not track analytics on this site. I believe that tools such as Google Analytics are verbose. They track too much information about users. I do not intend to change my policy on this matter. I did see on the IndieWeb wiki and on GitHub that some people have built their own analytics tools. Many of these rely on the logs that are collected by a web server rather than on a client-side script.

One of my favourite types of blog posts to read are

After a discussion with Tantek in the IndieWeb chat [1], I decided to do more work towards my

I have worked on numerous projects that involve finding all of the URLs in the sitemaps associated with a website. For example, one of the first steps the IndieWeb Search crawler takes when it starts crawling a website is to find all of the URLs in all of the sitemaps. Separately, I have written scripts that validate the status codes of all the URLs in a sitemap.

Of Monsters and Men are one of my favourite bands. Their lead singer, Nanna, has released a new solo album, How to Start a Garden. I have been listening to the album on train rides. The music accompanies travelling and seeing nature around you well. Here is a link to the album on Spotify.

At this week’s Galactic Homebrew Website Club -- a bonus meeting of IndieWeb community members sporadically held on occasional weekends -- we discussed site layouts. We discussed sidebars and having different layouts for a homepage and other pages on one's site. Myself and another participant, Jeremy, both noted how we have different layouts for our home page and the rest of our sites.

Yesterday I had an idea: what kind of art could I make by using random numbers and a series of rules? I decided to write down a few notes on what my

I like seeing what people call the root folder in which they store their source code. This is the folder where all — or a lot of — your projects are stored. In my case, my programming projects go in a folder called src. (Although I have a strange habit of nesting personal projects that are related to each other. I believe my source code files are in need of a spring clean.)

After I wiped away the tears from reading Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, I wished that there was a second book. I felt like I had been there as patrons walked into Funiculi Funiciula, the cafe at the centre of the book, travelled back in time, and came to peace with their pasts. From the story of one character going back to see the boyfriend who departed before they could say they did not want them to go, to the story of a wife who wanted to see their husband before he lost his memory, I was hooked.

In cafe Funiculi Funicula, there is more than meets the eye. I'm not talking about the persistent sepia hue in the cafe or how the cafe is seemingly always the right temperature. I am talking about how patrons can, if they wish, travel back to a moment in time. To travel back in time, a patron must follow a series of rules, each more stringent than the last, and visualise the moment in time they want to visit.

I had an idea that I wanted to do a blog post with a title starting with

Porridge Overflow is not a delicious tale about a variant of stack overflows. Rather, porridge overflow is what just happened when I went to prepare a bowl of porridge. With an episode of Frasier in the background, I prepared some porridge using the microwave. After the microwave had chimed, indicating my bowl of deliciousness was ready, I opened the door to find... A porridge overflow.

Over the last few weeks, I have went to a number of cafes and ordered decaf coffee. I often order decaf coffee when I am not at home, especially if I plan on visiting more than one cafe. This has become a habit of mine and it has stuck. Sometimes I don't consciously think

About two weeks ago, I started thinking about IndieAuth. I have implemented a few IndieWeb specifications in the past but IndieAuth was one that I had put to the back of my mind until recently. I was not confident in implementing an authentication endpoint so I decided to move on to other projects. I just came back to the spec and, with some encouragement from the people in the IndieWeb chat, realised that there was no reason why I should not try and build an IndieAuth endpoint. So I did. Now I have an IndieAuth endpoint that I can use to authenticate to any service that uses IndieAuth for authentication.

I wrote my first programs in PHP today (with a lot of help from the internet). It's always exciting to learn something new. I am getting excited because I like knowing how my programming logic -- how instructions combine to do something -- applies to different languages. It's cool seeing what features a language does have, doesn't have, and implements differently from those that I already know. For instance, I learned today that PHP doesn't have an explicit

sudo !! is one of my favourite bash command line shortcuts. The !! command executes the previous command. By appending sudo to the front, you can run the command you executed previously as superuser. Here's an example wherein I reload ufw:

I have had Rubenerd's

Jeremy Keith published an amazing article on how to install a progressive web application (PWA) on your phone. A PWA is a website that can technically be used as an application, as opposed to a regular website which is optimised only to be shown in a web browser. Jeremy's article is definitely worth a read if you want to install a progressive web application on your phone.

I participated in IndieWeb Create Day, an online event during which people in the IndieWeb come together to work on personal projects, this Boxing Day. I decided to start on a new project. I wanted to build a tool that would let me highlight specific pieces of text on my website and send those highlights to someone else for them. I have previously built a tool, fragmention.js, that lets you link to a specific paragraph of text, but this tool has its limitations: I can't link to multiple parts of a web page, I can only link to full paragraphs.

Whereas most coffee merchandise is focused on the barista and the final cup, there are few products that emphasise how coffee was produced, from so-called

The Manchester Coffee Festival brings together the dozens of businesses in the local coffee community for a two-day event focused on coffee. The event places a particular emphasis on creating an environment in which anyone, regardless of their background in speciality coffee, can learn about the industry.

There are three main types of filtration used in filter coffee brewing: paper, metal, and cloth. What features does each one have? Which one should I try? Those are the questions I aim to answer in my latest blog post for Steampunk Coffee,

Earlier this week, I thought to myself it would be nice to do a cupping at home. My last cupping was at the start of October, a guided online session conducted over Zoom. My first attempt at cupping was somewhat flawed, given how many parameters there are involved in cupping, and my lack of equipment at the time. I wanted to take another shot at cupping to: (i) remind myself of the cupping process and; (ii) deepen my understanding of the coffees I have in my cupboard.

There was a discussion going on in the IndieWeb chat yesterday about feed readers. One big point that I took away is that developers must abstract away from technical terms that mean little to nothing for those who might use a tool. Technical terms are useful for implementation: they help developers communicate. But end products should be as easy as possible for someone to use, requiring little to no technical knowledge.

I have been learning to reflect on the question

Earlier this year, I watched the first video in the FastAI Practical Deep Learning course series ^1. I should continue with this course as there is so much that I want to learn about deep learning, especially in the context of computer vision and modern NLP. During the first video, the instructor, Jeremy Howard, imparted two teaching techniques that have stuck in my mind ever since:

I was up early, eager to reach my destination at opening time: Parc Guell. I heard the destination is popular among tourists; busy, often. I ventured, from subway to subway, to get there early. I got on the wrong subway on my way there which sent me back two stops, if I remember correctly. Upon approaching back to ground level, I saw a church in the distance atop a hill. The building felt magical. Far away, beautiful. Above the city. I looked down at my map and figured out where I would need to walk to get to Parc Guell.