Post-Summit

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 making new acquaintances to meeting old friends again.

In between a short three-day trip to Edinburgh, a few things that spilled over into weekends 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 power meter digit reader 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 my home automation setup (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 Python on my iPad (Pythonista is amazing, all the more so when you tap into its Objective-C bridge) and started working through this site’s To Do list (which is still fairly extensive).

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.

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 Raspberry Pi.

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