What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

My wife is one of 6, so they have a secret Santa every year. Including spouses, it's up to 9 participants now. When we first got married I didn't like how they were doing the selection, so last year I wrote a script to generate the assignments and send emails. It worked well and I was proud of a thing I did.

When I opened it the other day, it was a mess. Why would I write something that required so many changes to test vs run (oh and also run for the group of 5 cousins). I refactored it and by the end I was even more proud that I made it more organized!

I have this aspiration that I'll make tiny improvements like this every year until it's a little website people can go to and it keeps track of previous year assignments to ensure a better selection year to year.

All that to say I really enjoyed the 3 hours of coding and it's been too long since I did anything like it. Anyone have any suggestions for other projects I could do? I have a hard time with motivation unless it's immediately useful.

I can't say that I made all that much progress on it this week, but I did in the end manage to get my personal fanfic archive project out onto GitHub for the perusal of anyone interested.

@cinereus and anyone else, you can find it here.

I've been building an ultra-simple version of HTML/CSS in Lua. The syntax is just Lua literals.

https://codeberg.org/akkartik/luaML.love

I'm also building this as a live program following the demo I shared a few weeks ago.

I have been exploring AudiobookShelf a lot more. It is basically a self hosted audible alternative. I don’t like the current iPhone app (it is very barebones), but the server software is top notch. I am now using it for all my audiobook tagging and organization needs. I still use Plex for hosting the books, because that is the only server compatible with the Prologue app, which is spectacular. This is all hosted on an oracle cloud free ampere instance, and the files are stored on my school Google drive account, which gives me unlimited storage.

I also like using custom audiobook covers. Most of these are sourced from /r/audiobookcovers. My process up till now has been entirely manual. Audiobookshelf supports searching for book covers from a variety of services. I am attempting to organize and repost everything from that sub in a way that can be integrated as a book cover search provider in Audiobookshelf.

I started by building a server (a separate oracle free tier VM) using python flask. Ideally it would just return a json snippet with the url of the files from Cloudflare r2 (s3 compatible service with 0 egress fees). Once I had it fully working, I found a tutorial on Cloudflare about making a rest api with workers and a fauna database. So I decided to ditch everything and start again with this setup. Cloudflare workers and fauna have been super easy to work with, and I think I can stay within the free tiers of each service.

I also need to integrate this api with audiobookshelf. This part has actually gone very well. I have it fully functioning as a separate provider. I want to add a way to link to the Reddit thread to provide attribution to the creators (or curators) of the covers. That part is going to be pretty tricky, because I don’t really understand how the client software works.

I also want to add a feature to my api. Currently it can only search by isbn or asin, because that is way simpler to implement in a database. But I would like to allow search by title and author. I am thinking of calling to the Google books api, getting the isbn of all results, and using that to return results from my database.

The last part is going to be importing the data. I think it is going to be a pretty manual process. I was thinking some selenium python script to help automate the data entry and collection. But I don’t think I have the skills or time to automate it completely.

It has been a fun project so far, and I have learned quite a bit. It’s my first time using JavaScript, and I actually like it decently so far. I still like python better, but the flexibility of using the same language for everything from bookmarklets to server and client software is pretty cool.

I've wanted to improve my knowledge of CI/CD and deployment for a while now, and I finally started working on it. I'm more using it to practice particular concepts than truly implementing a passion project or something, but I figured something like a PBBG or virtual pet site would be fun while allowing me to do basically whatever in order to practice.

The whole point is to overengineer it, so I plan on having a handful of back-end services (I want to split out a chat service at least) and a monolithic front-end.

So far I've learned an absolute ton about docker and docker compose. I have everything all nicely containerized and set up for development - well mostly, there's still one annoying issue I'm dealing with - and have started writing a bit of the base app. Working on permissions and user accounts first, followed immediately by an admin panel.