Status update, June 2020

Published on July 01, 2020

It’s now been one month since I left my job. I decided to start doing status updates, at least once a month.

I brought my personal email inbox down to zero. While at it, I wrote a rust cli tool to back up all of the messages I received. The next step is to add an incremental backup option. I played around with email parsing to get some statistics out of it. I would like to get this to a state where I could have it running in a cron job.

On the topic of email, I created a trial account with Hey, an email provider and client. I don’t think it’s for me, since they don’t support custom domains and don’t expose emails via IMAP, forcing me into using their proprietary client. I found email service provider recommendations by Drew DeVault that might be useful when picking an alternative to gmail.

I started using The Old Reader again. Most of my old subscriptions are either gone or not receiving updates. I added a few personal blogs, some webcomics, and RubyFlow. I subscribe to Hacker News, which turned out not to be great. There are more than 100 entries per day, and I skim through them, reading only a dozen or so per day. I’ll start tagging the articles I open to see if there’s a pattern. I may replace it with lobste.rs, and tilde.news which have considerably less traffic.

I have been collecting some resources on self hosting a RSS reader. One feature I think I’d appreciate is to remove duplicates (so I could subscribe to multiple from aggregators), and be able to transform some feeds (so I could preload some webcomics). I’d also like to publish a feed of favorited articles.

I am rewriting the web platform that runs my college’s alumni mentorship program. The previous version was powered by a rails API and a react frontend, and I’m rewriting it into a rails only application. I am looking for portuguese hosting solutions, and expect to have this live by early next week.

I have two episodes of Conversas em Código in the pipeline. One of them is practically done and I intend to publish it this week.

To edit the episode, I rewrote the command line audio editing tool I built a few years ago. I want to write about how the new version of the tool works. It’s written in C, but I am thinking about porting it to rust. This tool is mainly an excuse for me to learn about audio. I want to implement a frequency filter, so the next step there is to learn how to convert the PCM stream from time domain to frequency domain.

Lua 5.4 was released, so RLua needs to be updated. I accidentally started this task last year, unaware that I was using a beta version. I can finish this now.

That’s all for June. Let’s see how July goes.