Many years ago before notification center, there was Growl . It was widely supported by many different MacOS applications, and had many nice customization options for the toaster popups. Eventually Apple released notification center and Growl slowly faded away, but I still appreciated the ability to send a remote notification and continue to use prowl for many of my projects.

One frustration of being a developer is becoming fairly opinionated on how one thinks things should work. When my family have tech issues, if they cannot figure things out in a short time, they will often accept it as-is and move on. Being a developer, I often experience an irrationally large annoyance and spend more time than I should trying to figure things out or trying to change things how I think things should work.

This is an old post. I have written an updated post on django packaging .

Our goal when packaging up a Django application, is that we can use it as part of an existing application, or we can run it by itself in a standalone mode. To this end, I have over time, started to package my django applications in the following way. You can see diffs of all the commits in the example-django repository.

Recently I’ve started to be interested in activitypub and how it connects projects like Mastodon or Pixelfed as alternatives to centralized services such as Facebook and Instagram. For my blog, I’m generally fine with things such as atom and rss (though there seems to be a way to bridge a feed to activity pub) for something like quickstats it may be nice to consider how to federate.

Last year, I switched to vscode and as part of that, have become interested in how the language server protocol works. As part of my worklog project, I’ve been building various tools and scripts around hugo to manage my notes and day to day tasks, and building a language server to handle some of the formatting tasks may be an interesting way to implement some of the required functionality.

This week I gave a presentation at LINE Developer Meetup #47 in Fukuoka entitled Automating deployments from GitHub using SaltStack .

Partly inspired by apps such as NotePlan or the friends project, I’m intrigued by the idea of using Markdown as a database. The popularity of static site generators such as hugo and jekyll already forgo using a database by having the main content as a Markdown document with metadata contained in yaml frontmatter. My own worklog experiment is built op top of jekyll with some scripts to parse out the frontmatter. I suppose the biggest worry would be dealing with merge conflicts depending on if something like iCloud sync was used or building on top of git