What I've Been Doing Lately

The last several weeks have been interesting for my programming outside of work endeavours. I’ve:

  • Started this blog and an x / Mastodon account
  • Set up a network of agents to do my bidding
  • Started writing a book (TBD if that will ever see the light of day)
  • Switched terminals (👋 iTerm2)
  • Made an open source contribution
  • Started a ruby gem to scratch an itch with an idea

All in all, it’s been quite fun. Here’s a short summary of each:

Blogging

I started getting into writing because I had been doing it at work for a little while now. I like to share my programming stories with my coworkers and they seemed supportive, so naturally I wanted to share my stories out with a bigger audience, thus the blog. I’d say the hardest part was trying to pick a platform and figuring out what made the most sense for me. I just wanted to use something that wasn’t bogged down by plugins, but didn’t require me to have to really spend that much time to get my content out. In the end, I picked Astro and I’ve been loving it. I deploy my blog on Vercel and it’s been seamless. My favorite part is how quickly I can get a post out and watching it go live.

Huginn

If you haven’t heard of the Huginn gem, I recommend checking it out. It’s been around for a long time with over 42K stars on GitHub! It lets you set up any number of so called “agents” (limited by your machine’s resources of course). I initially looked into using this gem to share my blog posts on different social media platforms, but after digging into the recent Twitter/X API fiasco, I decided to give up on that (at least for Twitter for now). Still, I was tantalized by the idea of this gem and so I ended up using it to build a web scraper and used that to pipe data into a Slack webhook to notify my friends whenever one of our friends signs on/off a game we like to play.

Book

One day I decided it might be a good idea to do a brain dump of all the things I’ve learned over the past 5 years working on a Ruby on Rails monolith. I didn’t want to write a book for beginners, but more so a curated collection of the tools we’ve reached for at my work and how we use them. I’m aware it’s not a novel idea, but I think it would potentially be useful for some. So far I’m almost 8,000 words in and have a lot more to go. If anyone is interested in this idea, I’d love to know!

Terminals

Very recently I decided to say goodbye to iTerm2. It’s been my terminal for the past 5 years. I got some great use out of iTerm2. I still think it’s a solid terminal, but after reading up on some of the terminals that have gained popularity, I decided to try out WezTerm and I have been loving it. I love that it’s configurable via a lua file, just like my NeoVim editor is. I will probably write more about it as time goes on and I tweak it some more.

Open Source

I made a small open source contribution to the pundit gem to allow its test helper to support the :focus filter in RSpec tests. I do like contributing to open source and I wish I had more time to do it. It’s not only fun to try and tackle new problems, but interactions with the open source community are humbling. There are so many smart people out there and getting a chance to work with them, even if it’s just in a very limited scope / PR, is very worthwhile.

Ruby Gem

I was bored one day but itching to work on a project so GPT gave me the idea to track idle time. I thought that was an interesting enough idea to work on so I took the opportunity to try and tackle that problem and combine it with learning how to create a Ruby gem. It’s been fun to work on even though it’s not exactly an idle time tracker and I’ve also been streaming some of its development on Twitch!

I think a lot of these things have been possible in large part due to my ever-increasing usage of GPT / AI. It’s so easy to get 80% of the way there on most things using the tools we have at our disposal lately, at least that’s how I’ve felt about it. I can’t wait to see what else is in store for us.