An amusing thought came to me after reading Gruber’s post on Facebook and TikTok. Here’s Facebook hiring a strategy firm that is considering mediums other than Facebook to try and sway people’s opinions of TikTok. Maybe they should try getting their message on to TikTok. 😄
Scene: work.
Team: here’s the tasks we need to do, here’s how long they will take, and we’ll probably get it done on 24 April.
Managers: OK, I’ve taken that list, pulled out half the tasks and cut the estimates by 50%. Can you get it done in two weeks?
😠
I’ve been racking my brain trying to best work out how to organise the code for awstools. My goals are to make it possible to have view models composable, have state centralised but also localised, and keep controllers from having too much responsibility. I started another tool, which browses SSM parameters, to try and work this all out.
I think I’ve settled on the following architecture:
- Providers and Services will remain stateless
- State will be managed by controllers
- Operations in controllers are only available through tea.Cmd implementations.
- Updates from controllers will only be available through tea.Msg implementations.
- View models (i.e.
tea.Model) will only know enough state to be able to render themselves. - There will be one master model which will coordinate the communication between controllers and view models. This model will react to messages from the controllers and update the views. It will also react to messages from the views and launch operations on the controllers.
We’ll see how this goes and whether it will scale as additional features are added.
Credit to Apple for the work they did to get x86 working seamlessly on the M1. It’s only just now, after 6 hours of use, that I realised I downloaded the x86 version of Go when I should have downloaded the ARM version. I finally cottoned on when I tried to spin up the debugger.
My theorem regarding email: the chance of me reading an email from a sender is inversely proportional to the number of messages received from that sender per day.
Supporting evidence: seeing 300 unread messages for GitLab that will be immediately marked as read. 🗑
The subject here is photography but I think it can be applied to any other creative endeavour out there. Resonated for me as well.
Meetings really take it out of me. I had 4 hours worth of meetings today and now I’m really drained. And it’s not just because they were virtual. I would have been drained if I had them in person as well.
More work on the AWS tools, mainly rebuilding the UI framework. Need to rip out all the Operation type stuff, as BubbleTea already does this using messages and commands (see tutorial 2). Also taking some time building some UI models that I can reuse across the various commands, including a few that deal with layout changes.
Also tracked down what was causing that delay when trying to create a new list. It turns out during the call to list.New(), a bunch of adaptive styles are created, which includes a test to see if the terminal is in light or dark mode. This calls some terminal IO methods which were blocking for a significant amount of time, we’re talking in the order of 10’s of seconds.
The good thing is that this check is only made once, so what I did was move the check into the main function. Some preliminary tests indicating that this may work: the lists are consistently being created very quickly again. We’ll see if this lasts.
Doing a lot of terminal UI app development recently. It’s not easy but I’ve forgotten how much fun it is. Requires a fair bit of thought, not only to make usable UIs using only characters and colour, but also to keep the code from descending into a giant ball of mud.
More work on Broadtail this morning. Managed to get the new favourite stuff finished. Favourites are now a dedicated entity, instead of being tied to a feed item. This means that any video can now be favourited, including ones not from a feed. The favourite list is now a top-level menu item as well.
Also found a useful CLI tool for browsing BoltDB files.
An idea for that micro-bulk-image tool: instead of prioritising uploads, maybe prioritise processing of already uploaded images. Things like cropping, optimising, etc. after the upload, and then re-uploading it.
New AWS Tools Commands
For a while now, I’ve been wanting some tools which would help manage AWS resources that would also run in the terminal. I know in most circumstances the AWS console would work, but I know for myself, there’s a lot of benefit from doing this sort of administration from the command line.
I use the terminal a lot when I’m developing or investigating something. Much of the time while I’m in the weeds I’ve got a bunch of tabs with tools running and producing output, and I’m switching between them as I try to get something working across a bunch of systems.
This is in addition to cases when I need to manage an AWS mock running on the local machine. The AWS console will not work then.
At the start of the week, I was thinking of at least the following three tools that I would like to see exist:
- A TUI browser/workspace for DynamoDB tables
- A TUI workspace for monitoring SQS queues
- Some tool for reading JSON style log files.
As of yesterday, I actually got around to building the first two.
The first is a tool for browsing DynamoDB tables, which I’m calling dynamo-browse (yes, the names are not great). This tool does a scan of a DynamoDB table, and shows the resulting items in a table. Each item can be inspected in full in the lower half of the window by moving the selection.
At the moment this tool only does a simple scan, and some very lightweight editing of items (duplicate and delete). But already it’s proven useful with the task I was working on, especially when I came to viewing the contents of test DynamoDB instances running on the local machine.
The second tool is used for monitoring SQS queues.
This will poll for SQS messages from a queue and display them in the table here. The message itself will be pretty printed in the lower half of the screen. Messages can also be pushed to another queue. That’s pretty much it so far.
There are a bunch of things I’d like to do in these tools. Here’s a list of them:
- Queries in DynamoDB: There’s currently no way to run queries or filter the resulting items. I’m hoping to design a small query language to do this. I’m already using Participal to power a very simple expression language to duplicate items, so as long as I can design something that is expressive enough and knows how to use particular indices, I think this should work.
- Putting brand new items in DynamoDB: At the moment you can create new items based on existing items in a way, but there’s currently no way to create brand new items or adjust the attributes of existing items. For this, I’d like to see an “edit item” mode, where you can select the attribute and edit the value, change the type, add or remove attributes, etc. This would require some UI rework, which is already a bit tentative at this stage (it was sort of rushed together, and although some architectural changes have been made to the M and the C in MVC, work on the V is still outstanding).
- Preview item changes before putting them to DynamoDB: This sort of extends the point above, where you see the diff between the old item and new item before it’s put into DynamoDB.
- Workspaces in SQS Browse: One idea I have for SQS browse is the notion of “workspace”. This is a persistent storage area located on the disk where all the messages from the queue would be saved to. Because SQS browse is currently pulling messages from the SQS queue, I don’t want the user to get into a state where they’ve lost their messages for good. The idea is that a workspace is always created when SQS browse is launch. The user can choose the workspace file explicitly, but if they don’t, then the workspace will be created in the temp directory. Also implicit in this is support for opening existing workspaces to continue work in them.
- Multiple queues in SQS Browse: Something that I’d like to see in SQS Browse is the ability to deal with multiple queues. Say you’re pulling from one queue and you’d like to push it to another. You can use a command to add a queue to the workspace. Then, you can do things like poll the queue, push messages in the workspace to the queue, monitor it’s queue length, etc. Queues would be addressable by number or some other way, so you can simply run the command push 2 to push the current message to queue 2.
As for when I’ll actively work on these tools. It will probably be when I need to use them. But in the short term, I’m glad I got the opportunity to start working on them. They’ve already proven quite useful to me.
Woke up expecting today to be long and annoying, but it turned out not to be as annoying as I anticipated (or as long). I guess the lesson here is not to presume how good or bad a day will be until you’ve lived through it first.
Got my copy of Bloch’s Effective Java out today for the first time in years, in order to prepare for an interview. As far as books about programming languages go, this is probably my favourite. Very informative and easy to read.
No day trip to Warburton this year: too much to do at work unfortunately. I’ve got a day in leau owed to me so we’ll see if I could make it in April.
Wondering if there’s a way where I could quit my job and spend my waking hours building text-based UI applications. Not sure there’s a lot of money in such things unfortunately.
Doing some tool smithing at work to make my current task a little easier. Using Bubble Tea to build a TUI-based SQS message browser. Early days so far but already showing promise. Anything which will save me clicks around the AWS console is always a plus.
Even more work on Feed Journaler. Still trying to tune the title removal logic. Will probably require a lot of testing.
The “Explore Repositories” sidebar on GitHub’s home page (if you’re logged in) is a bit strange. Why am I getting recommendations for projects that I either don’t need, or haven’t sought out? Am I expected to just pull in any bit of code people are publishing? Really weird.
Hmm, I’m wondering if Broadtail needs a mode for downloading the audio of a video only, and uploading it to a podcasting service like Pocketcasts. I did this twice before, and now wish I can do it again. Third time is when a pattern is emerging.
Also, a bit of a deviation to finish the current work outstanding for Feed Journaler. Much of it is trying to get the Markdown translator working with Write.as post, mainly to deal with posts without titles, and to strip any hashtags that appear in the first and last paragraph. The code is a real mess. I should probably spend some time cleaning it all up.