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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

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Tags: ask.survey, recurring.weekly

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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  1. xk3
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    The code itself isn't that interesting, and it only works for content which shares the same parent tag (though perhaps I can extend this later), but it was really satisfying to add just a few...

    The code itself isn't that interesting, and it only works for content which shares the same parent tag (though perhaps I can extend this later), but it was really satisfying to add just a few dozen lines of code to extend the functionality of an existing subcommand so that something like this would be possible to add a bit more structure to text extraction:

    $ library text --firefox https://aaronson.org/full-moon-albums/ --select .album-artist,.album-title --sep ' - '
Way Dynamic - Massive Shoe
Scritti Politti - Cupid & Psyche 85
YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds
I Am Robot and Proud - Bird at Sunrise
Water from Your Eyes - Long Days, No Dreams
XTC - Skylarking
...

    Initially, I was writing a separate script that borrowed a lot of code from library text but once I had an MVP hardcoded for working with CSS classes I realized I could generalize it to work with other CSS selectors using Soup Sieve and at that point I realized it would be useful to have in the library text command.

    It's really satisfying when the solution to a problem is just a minor tweak. Last week I had a similar experience when adding archive.org/ghostarchive/preservetube as backup locations for when downloading directly from YouTube doesn't work. At first I felt dread because it seemed like something that would be brittle and difficult to add but after playing around with it for a bit it, a solution appears which turns out to be not so bad.

    Another satisfying simple thing that I finally sat down and made is a script to print out the layout of disks on my LFF r730xd. I've been buying cheaper-than-tape small-capacity SAS drives (3TB, 4TB, sometimes 8TB) from server farm surplus stores so I'm hot-swapping disks several times per week and relying on lsblk HCTL was growing a bit tedious as I don't want to accidentally eject a drive that's in-use.

    $ r730xd.disks
[!] sda   b9 | [!] sdh  x19 | [!] sdc  b11 | [!] sdj  b10
[!] sdb   b8 | [O] sde      | [ ]          | [!] sdk    d
[!] sdg  x18 | [!] sdf  x15 | [!] sdi   b2 | [!] sdl   b4

[O] = unmounted
[ ] = empty bay

    It's beautiful.

    1 vote