It's funny, every time I start writing these I have to open up my projects and go through what I actually was doing so that I can write these.

Scribbles

Not much of front-facing changes here this week, however I've become aware of some speed issues that cropped up over the weekend — sometimes it took a long time to get to the site with up to 8 seconds of waiting. That's not tolerable for me.

The issue that was causing this is that, due to the nature of blogs, there were many requests being made to the blog feeds (the RSS/ATOM feed). However this wasn't cached so it would always happily just do its thing. Every. Single. Time. Multiple. Times. Per. Second.

So, quite simply, I put some caching in front of it all. It'll make sure your latest posts come through in the feeds, and if the same user agent (sometimes the same service requests the same feed multiple times) it will just return a "not modified" message to the client. When you make a new post, it'll invalidate the cache and return it as needed and then keeps it cached.

I made this change over Monday and Tuesday and I observed a CPU usage of around 120% before that date. It now sits at an idle 20% the occasional spikes (which are normal).

Happy with this and things are looking good.

Gluon, and personal apps

This week I dropped a little bombshell... I'm stopping work on Gluon. This has been on my mind for over a year now with discussion happening about this in the background.

I don't want to get too personal here, but know that Gluon has taught me so much over the years which ultimately allowed me to work with Manton on Micro.blog, and working on his apps and bring them cross-platform.

I am not just stopping Gluon though. My personal Apple Developer account expires in August, that means everything I have ever done will automatically become unavailable. It won't affect the client work of course... that'll continue.

I do feel a little sad about it.

The writing has been on wall for me for a while now, with a few blog posts in the past about it (I won't link to them because they didn't age well — and knowing me I probably deleted them last week)... and instead of saying that I'll stop personal app development over the past few months... I thought I should really just let go and finally say goodbye.

Just know that personally, native app development is off my table — I no longer have interest in creating apps for myself.

There are personal reasons for this also, but I'll spare you the details.

Other stuff

Kept it short this week as not much happened.

I am planning to take a holiday from personal projects for a few weeks, but if you know me... I probably won't. Although, there might be a small pause in these posts for July... but then again... probably not.

I love the web.

Thanks for reading.

— Vincent