7
votes
What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
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?
I've been making MonoGame libraries for a few years now. They help me create games much faster.
Built on the same API as MonoGame, there's now KNI that allows building games for the web. This week I ported all my libraries to KNI and they all worked on the first try. It's pretty cool to have all my games instantly work in a web browser.
I'm participating in a local gamejam next week so it should be fun to toy with this tech. I can write one codebase and release games on many platforms. The current platforms that I have tested are Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, web.
At work, I'm on the data plane team for a series of enterprise IPS appliances and me and a couple of other people have started research into implementing QUIC/HTTP/3 inspection via a MITM (this would be inbound/server-side only, at least to start). So far, I've mostly just been reading the QUIC RFCs, but it's been interesting to learn about. I've known of QUIC for a while and have had it enable on my home server for at least a few months, but haven't known too much about the specifics before now.
I've been working on wiring HotSync conduits so I can load up my Palm Pilot with internet content for offline consuming. So far I have a Wordle conduit that syncs the latest puzzle ID, and scripts for pulling articles from RSS. Want to write a VersaMail deserializer and conduit so I can sync email and send from my Palm Pilot's outbox. Have a couple other ideas I eventually want to get to as well such as a crossword of the day, daily weather (paired with a custom app), Gemini articles, Sudoku of the day, Kagi News (with a custom app), etc.
I love the idea of being connected in an offline, at your own pace, and this has been a great way for me to achieve that.
This is really cool. I know how hard it can be to stick to the things you enjoy (wordle, etc) and not veer into those you don't always enjoy (social media) when using a smartphone at times you should be relaxing. It sounds like you've found a great way to do that.
Thanks! Yeah, I really feel like a modernized Palm Pilot device would really make a killing nowadays as people are getting more frustrated with how distracting smartphones are. A e-ink style device with a month long battery and keyboard that syncs content with your computer every morning and has no WiFi/Cell/etc would rock
Until then, Palm Pilots are awesome and pretty cheap on eBay.
Yii3 finally launched and I've been going through the documentation and playing around with it a bit. I have been doing a lot of pet projects with a Slim/Twig/PHP-DI/Custom Domain Code set up and I am finding that the new Yii3 patterns are very similar to what I was bootstrapping myself. As with all these frameworks, there is a lot of overhead to learn but I think I really like the concepts that the Yii team has come up with for the framework. I am going to work on a simple application that will help me organize my contract audio work - Clients, Quotes, Jobs, Invoices, etc.
Along with that, I was recently introduced to the bhvr stack for JavaScript/TypeScript and I have been curious about doing something with that.
To continue my 3D printing journey I have been trying to learn more about ways to get more comfortable with the FreeCAD way of 3D designing things since it has a steeper learning curve than other software
The 3D CAD software market is pretty messy and with a lot of licensing models I do not like and companies I don't necessarily want to support, and FreeCAD is quite powerful if I can get comfortable enough with it, and then I'd no longer have any worries about licensing, even if I somehow was able to create a business out of 3D printing. It would just be nice to be free of any of those worries (similar to how switching to Linux has been liberating)
The only downside I see is that doing quick designs does take longer, or at least, the workflow is so different than something like Fusion or Tinkercad. However, after watching some videos I feel like one can get fast at FreeCAD, and the power available (especially for free) is actually incredible.
For anyone interested, and not used to FreeCAD or have struggled with it in the past after using other tools, I highly recommend Brodie Fairhall's videos which are a bit outdated (so things are better/easier in FreeCAD than even shown here) however, the superpower these videos had was making me feel empowered to use FreeCAD. It demystified a lot for me. I particularly recommend the "Fusion360 to FreeCAD" videos as a starting place.
I'm starting to seriously configure things in Home Assistant for the first time in over 5 years. A lot has changed, but a lot has remained the same.
I just finished the backup implementation I've mentioned previously. The only thing remaining is updating Syncthing across devices from the horribly outdated version they're all on, but on my NAS' side of things, everything is configured.
I'm also going to dip my toes into Grafana. I've been setting up Prometheus on applications that support it, as well as some of my backup tasks, and monitoring properly with a dashboard would be nice.