Post-Summit

WebSummit is over and done with, at least until next year.

It was a busy week–I ended up spending a lot more time at WebSummit than originally planned for, which took its toll on my feet (as expected), but had a number of positive highlights that ranged from to meeting old friends again.

Getting Back To Real Life

In between , a few things that and a lot of catching up work-wise, most of my personal projects have been on hold for a number of weeks now, which I find terribly frustrating.

It pains me, for instance, to realize that the project I wrote about last March has essentially been dead for a year, and that the ramp-up back to where I was is going to take me at least a few evenings (which I don’t have, not until vacations swing by again).

So this weekend I started small: a few tweaks to (mostly cleanups and a little more testing, some of which will find its way into a follow-up post), automated a couple of my day-to-day tasks in on my (Pythonista is amazing, all the more so when you tap into its bridge) and started working through this site’s To Do list (which is still fairly extensive).

Metadata Is A Pain

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do (besides a proper blog archive) is add OpenGraph support to allow for nicer automated sharing in social media, which given the site’s plaintext back-end requires some extra parsing and indexing to take place (I need to figure out if there is a leading image, get its size and type info, etc., as well as figuring out a few extra things).

That is fine and good, but it also needs to be pushed up the stack until rendering occurs, and stored along the way in a SQLite database I use for indexing. Since I already had a simpler/legacy take on metadata, I’m refactoring it as I go along and removing unnecessary bits, so if the site breaks later in the week, then you’ll know there was something I didn’t account for in testing–but it’s going OK so far.

Down To The Metal

Since I spend too much time dealing with online stuff (including cloud infrastructure, DevOps flows and data munging), I’m looking at doing a few more hardware/IoT(ish) things for myself for the sheer fun of it, and after tossing around a few ideas I decided to go for a low-latency image processing trick that I want to try out on the .

It’s going to take time, of course, but hopefully I’ll have something to show after Christmas.

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