Vincent Ritter

Thoughts

My thoughts, micro blog style. Usually short showing off ideas, screenshots and other things that might be on my mind on the day.

Trying out a new seating arrangement at the desk. I feel the chair drains my energy a lot and also doesn't give me room to... well... move. Anyone else using a gym ball as their chair? It's still weird and new, so I'm going to have to stick with it for at least a week or two.

I spent nearly all day exclusively on Gluon. It's at 3 days to go until the last TestFlight runs out. I'm feeling somewhat pressured. I'm thinking of shipping of what I have on Thursday evening or Friday morning. It will have lots of features/functionality missing that is in the last build, however I think it's for the greater good in the long run.

I was thinking about this the past few weeks as it dawned on me that I will never have it ready in time with everything I had. Probably not the best thing to take away features/functionality...

After that, I will keep shipping updates as and when they are ready. All my TestFlight slots are full already, so I want to thank everyone for using Gluon! I'll be opening more spaces in a few weeks to give me some space to add a few more features/functionality.

I'll write a blog post about progress in the coming days. This, however, was important to say.

Taking my girls (daughter and wife) on a mini trip over the weekend, starting today. Trying to bring some calm to our lives. Had to stop working before falling into a never ending cycle of burnout... good decision.

I'm thinking of using TypeScript in future, instead of JavaScript. I think it would save a lot of headaches.

17 days to go until the last build of Gluon runs out. No pressure! Hopefully I will have good progress over the weekend. Let's see.

The app already runs at least 3 times faster than the old one, so I'm pretty happy about that. Although I'll have to start adding all the features, that the old build had, back in. Worth it in the long term.

What a week! Monday and Tuesday was really busy getting something live. Then I've been ill since Tuesday until now. Couldn't do anything except stare at my screen and write one or two lines of code. We were all ill this week, so we were probably just passing it to each other.

Now to see how I can catch up for missing 3 working days... so many things on my list, so many things on my mind. Perhaps I'll just take it easy. That's probably the correct approach. Next week is another week to fight.

Sooo... after spending countless hours and one late 05:00 AM headache to get a websocket (Rails Action Cable) to run on a production/staging server with Passanger... it turns out all I had to do is set my allowed domains in the production.rb file:

config.action_cable.allowed_request_origins = ['https://some-domain.test','https://some-other-domain.com']

Any NGNIX experts out there that can point me the correct direction to secure a web socket connection which is being served by a Rails app? The app is already secured under 443 but getting the 'wss://' to work is proving difficult.

Made a few tweaks to my "Code Challenge" page. As I seem to be working on several projects at a time I wanted to show them off a bit more nicely. I renamed the section to Projects too as it seems more fitting. You can click/tap on a project to go to the specific project page. I need to do a bit more work here to display specifics like URL's, TestFlight links etc.

Of course, redirects are working nicely so no inbound links that I know of are broken.

I seem to prefer the dark mode part of my site, so I might make it the default. It currently switches depending on the local time... or you can manually trigger it in the sidebar...

And to celebrate, a secret project that I started last night just to scratch that itch again... more on that next weekend though.

When you load up a website and want to have a look at it... to then immediately be harassed by their Intercom or other real time chat widget... "Hey, got a question?". I didn't even read your page, how can I have any questions? Close page. </rant>

Instead of gaming last night we watched The Hobbit (part 3) last night. I did open the laptop but I felt immediately bad just sitting in my chair... It was a good decision.

"Development cannot be enabled while your device is locked" says Xcode with my unlocked and plugged in phone. 🥺

It's Friday, and to celebrate I'll work on a few bits and bobs for a client project (Vorto) and will also mainly be concentrating on a few things on this (my) site. Also planning to get started on Gluon again tonight.

One of the great perks of being self employed: My daughter is supposed to be back in Kindergarten today, but she's sound asleep and looking comfy. I'll let her sleep. No pressure to get her there. She can stay. It's worth it.

We noticed you tried to play Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Unfortunately, this is an interactive show that is only compatible with newer...

Then don’t show it to me! Stupid... what do these people think sometimes?

I just registered a new domain name... the second one this week 🤨 I promise that they're both justified!

For giggles I imported all my posts from my current CMS (Craft via RSS) to a Jekyll based blog... hmmmmm. Life of this site started on Jekyll. Might return to it if I find the time.

I'm going to give BBEdit a run for its money for the next few weeks. Having used Electron based apps over the course of the past years, and also Sublime Text, I hope I can make it work. It's certainly different already, but everything has its own quirkiness and ways of doing things.

One week of unplugging myself from news and social. See you on the other side. Have a great holiday.

"Say no to node" - that should be a thing... Ok, I'll stop now. Frontend world we happen to live in...

I just cleared out 5GB of node_module crap across a few projects that I didn't touch in a while... there should exist a tool that does it automatically.

When you load a website in the fastest browser available on the planet (Safari), on a top spec computer, and the site is so full of Javascript that everything comes to a crawl when you open a slide in menu. "I'm... going... to... open this... sl... ide... in... menu". Where did this web world go to? Do people actually think about this stuff?

It’s getting harder and harder to get our daughter to go to sleep. It’s approaching 23:00 and she’s still up. We read her endless stories in bed... but no luck. She doesn’t want to give up.

Ruby on Rails questions:

  1. Any suggestion on a multi-tenancy database flow? For example, create a new database per user account (can't remember what this is called - I think Basecamp do this?), or should I reference data by just the user_id (I did this for Simple Schedule)? I'm sure I've seen something like this in a gem - can't remember what it's called.
  2. Is there a library that can accept multiple subdomains and route the app correctly? So for example if I had subdomain.railsapp.dot, this will go to my main Rails app and in turn load user data for "subdomain" etc. Then another subdomain will load another user and so on. Just like Slack would load a different login screen.

Any help or pointers would be appreciated 😄

I wish you could disable the video trailers at the end of a movie or TV Show on Netflix... it's really annoying. This is one reason why I always prefer to just buy a movie on iTunes.

Two years ago I left my full time job, working for "the man". The year after was incredibly difficult. I'm thankful that mid this year things have started to look much better. Looking forward to the next year of my adventures.

The amount of times online and offsite back up has saved me: 0. The amount of times Time Machine has saved me the past years, including my family (Hey Mom!): billion times.

Rewrote my About page. Less "blah blah blah", more "hey, this is me". Hoping to make more changes, especially with wording, around the whole site in the next few weeks.

I was looking for really great Christmas jumpers yesterday at the mall. No dice 🥺. They're all dark (colour wise) and not very joyful. Need to find a place online.

I've been using my laptop on battery power... all day! I mean... 7 - 8 hours and most of it was coding related. That's pretty cool!

Working on a Ruby on Rails project at the moment... falling in love with the simplicity of Ruby again! Inspired to get into it way more now.

I went through 1Password last week and logged into every service I could find that I'm not using, followed by trying to delete my account with said service. Some were easy to delete, some you had to email and some are just a right pain. I thank the companies that make everything a breeze!

I'm working on a few things to get ready for the new year... that includes planning a new code challenge (well, coming back to another one), perhaps even two, consolidating outgoings with things I use for work purpose (online stuff) and a general declutter of how I'll go about my day to day client work. I'll write about it more this week.

I go to the gym 3 - 5 days a week now. I stopped tracking my activity on the watch. I turned off any reminders about standing up or the nudging of "Hey, you can STILL do it!". At the end of the day it is how I feel that is the most important metric. If I feel good, then that's a win in my eyes.

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