Status update, October 2020
Published on October 30, 2020
October is known for Hacktoberfest. Last year I organized a couple of local events to promote contributions and help folks get motivated. This year, I limited myself to attending a portuguese online event: Interruptor x Hacktoberfest. In the morning I watched some talks, and during the afternoon we worked on a project that displays how cultural facilities are spread throughout the country. My main contribution was a webpage that uses leaflet to display data dynamically fetched from wikidata:
I also built a dashboard to display how many hacktoberfest-qualifying
contributions each participant had made. With all the fuss this year of how
hacktoberfest was disregarding maintainers by making projects opt-out instead
of opt-in, I had to rewrite this when Hacktoberfest changed the rules. The
dashboard itself was hosted at hacktoberfest.hugopeixoto.net, but since I’ll
probably tear it down now that the event is over, here’s the internet archive
link. The source code is available on my github
account:
This dashboard was written in rails, and I was growing tired of following the setup instructions described in a previous post, so I built a rails template repository. that can be used whenever I need to start another app from scratch. I wrote a very short post about it, but here’s the link to the repository:
I edited and published the 30th episode of my podcast, Conversas em Código:
In september, I had written a couple of posts about using Bevy for gamedev. These posts were featured on the This Month in Rust GameDev newsletter. Having spent some time experimenting with Rust for gamedev, this month I spent some time experimenting with Rust for webdev. I wrote a simple file sharing website, first using warp, then using actix-web:
This was a relatively simple website, so I didn’t even bother with setting up a database or using html templates.
Another thing that happened this month was that Rocket.Chat announced that they will be limiting the number of push notifications that self-hosted instances could send through their gateway. D3 uses Rocket Chat, and we’re way over the 5k limit, so I spent some time figuring out what we should do. I wrote a blog post about an unrelated bug we found in their React frontend:
One alternative we considered was switching platforms. One thing led to another and I spent a week learning about Matrix, the main company behind it, the protocols, their processes, different implementations and clients, and how hard it is to use a search engine to find anything related to it. I don’t think they’re ready to replace our Rocket Chat instance, but I’ll keep an eye on them.
In other random news, I finally took the time to stop using The Old Reader and started using a self hosted instance of Miniflux. I was using their free tier, and I always had the feeling that I would lose my unread count if I didn’t login in time, so I decided to switch. Setting Miniflux in my dokku server was easy, since they have instructions to get it deployed to Heroku. It’s also nice that it’s written in Go: the app itself only consumes around 11 megabytes of RAM.