I'm still alive
The last dispatch was three months ago and there’s good reason for that. Life, mainly. My day job has been keeping me busy and the last thing I wanted to do at the end of the day is code more. Compounding that, I have smaller projects that need love as well. Never fret though, I haven’t just been playing Fortnite and racking up solo wins.
Architecture Change
In my day coding I am in charge of the documentation website and took the opportunity to experiment with frameworks I’d been curious about but never used. I have expressed my love for choo and fastify ever since.
There is a minor quibble I have with choo at the moment and that is its bizarre lack of redirect support. Even the official choo site uses a hack to get around that (a hack I have been unable to properly utilize). Fastify on the other hand, has been 100% awesome. It’s faster than Express and in addition to my quest to minimize found vulnerabilities in my project dependencies, I have begun to rely on it for all my projects. Just like my Feathers.js boilerplate, my Express boilerplate has languished. I think I’ll stick with fastify for a while.
All this to say, I’ve been working on updating the network with these new tools while refactoring along the way.
Random Learnings
Could be alternatively titled, “Socii Excursions”.
- I figured out how to make an Electron app with rollup (webpack feels bloated, to me) and choo. This is the quickest way for me to have the first version of a desktop app for Socii.
- You can save time on copying your eslint configuration across projects by creating an npm module. The one I created for all !NC projects is @inc/eslint-config on npm.
- Sass can be linted! I created a
.sasslintrc
file after about an hour of figuring out how I’d like my Sass to look. Hook that up with husky and you’ve got a surefire way to ensure your style code is consistent throughout your entire project. When applied to current and old projects of mine, I’ve found inconsistencies within my own code that made NO sense. I’ll find a way to share this config. Hmm, maybe with a new boilerplate? - You shouldn’t commit build artifacts into your repos. This includes generated CSS from your Sass files. No idea why I never thought of this before.
Basically, I’ve been improving my process.
Going Forward
I am struggling to keep a consistent writing schedule, even when I feel I have nothing to write about. Chances are, I do. I’ll work on this.
Some of you have asked when Socii will be out of beta. Well, I’d like to have image uploads, (better) notifications, harassment tools, and groups in place before opening the floodgates (that is, making any sort of marketing push). To put it simply, it’ll be awhile.
Thanks for tuning in and sticking with me thus far though! It seems like every other month there’s a new report on a Big Social company losing/exposing/selling user data. These breaches definitely make a case for Socii easier to make.