Well, it's been the last week of summer holidays, school starts next week — great for the kiddo who is rather excited.

Micro.blog

This week saw me working on getting Docker set up with the development flow for first timers — and I gotta say it works an absolute treat. Historically I avoided Docker because it brings my computer to a crawl, however I found OrbStack, thanks to the power of the people I follow — and I couldn't be happier. It just works and doesn't bog down your system.

It's been a great learning experience even if I don't understand everything that's happening — however it just works. I'll let my brain handle the background job of understanding it better.

There is more here we need to do, but feel confident we'll get there and let's see if this ultimately makes its way to production also. Funny enough, the docker set up is pretty similar to how it's run. One puzzle piece I want to figure out is to also get the static pages building locally so that everything just works (and can be tested).

Anyway, happy with the progress and the learning done! Even if it's just Manton and me working on it right now, it'll be super easy to get set up for anyone else.

Apart from that... I reworked the way push notification registration works on the Micro.blog app and hope that'll fix a few issues that some folks had. It also introduces a new "Push Permission" prompt — instead of when the app first starts, it'll only do it when you're navigating to the Mentions tab. A good quality of life improvement.

Shameless Plug

Apart from the new logo, which is fantastic and certainly anything better than I could ever come with, with Sublime Ads, I made a conscious effort to replace some of the React code snippets, that some parts use, with just a pure Turbo Frame. The effect is great and hope to make more progress on that as time progresses. The ultimate goal is to remove any React based code.

On top of that, it's a much better experience for users that can be brought across the customer portals also — excited to see where I can take that. Not to mention developer happiness.

Whilst not mentioned before, I completed the billing implementation that I took from all my other projects and adapted it to Shameless. Happy with the way it works. We're using Lemon Squeezy for handling payments.

Because of my new found love for Turbo, now that I have a somewhat grasp on it, I'm hoping to pepper this across a little bit to check for usage and update you on how you're doing with the free API usage credits you get.

More to come.

Scribbles

Over the weekend I introduced auto-saving... and I think it's pretty awesome. When you start writing a new post it'll start auto-saving it, so that when you loose your page, or disaster strikes, it'll be available to you in drafts. You can read more about it and watch a little video I made here.

As of today that works across new and draft posts, plus a few fixes have been made where sometimes it did the wrong thing depending on the blog settings.

There were many other little changes and bug fixes that I worked on — one of them is the functionality to stop you from posting your post if you're still uploading your image or video... that had happened a handful of times and I'm super happy to have this in there now.

There are some abstract ideas floating in my head on what to add next, so colour me excited for when my brain finishes the background process.

Thank you all that have given me feedback on auto-saving — it means a lot!

Other stuff

I'm having problems with Apple Development, especially Xcode — it's horrible and slow. In contrast, Android Studio just seems to work these days. Android Studio built the Strata production build in less than 10 seconds after I loaded it up yesterday. Colour me surprised! However, for no good reason and zero changes, everything just failed to load on the Apple side — no simulator, no projects.

I was so frustrated that I installed the Sequoia beta to see if it would fix anything. Upgrade went smooth. The OS is good and feels stable — I had zero interruption to web development and Android dev continues to work. Xcode beta seems to launch faster, so kudos for that. Before that it was a 30 second wait time before the little project picker came up. I'd say it's less than 10 seconds now. However, still issues remain, but happy my simulator is running now.

Anyway...

I've been feeling super inspired after listening to Lex Fridman interview Pieter Levels (@levelsio). Great episode and worth a listen. It inspired me to do the following:

• Drastically simplify my server and business needs (already made great progress this week — going from 5 to 3 servers).
• Drastically cut down on beer and alcohol (starting yesterday).
• Get back into shape (as it's on and off for me, although I am quite fit as is).
• ... just ship!

Oh and I'm feeling inspired to bring more videos and "how-to's" across my projects. Nothing concrete yet though.

Thanks for reading.

— Vincent