Catchup[1]

What I've been doing as of late

I have this habit of pouring my soul into projects for long, consecutive stretches of time, and then abandoning them for various reasons. Sometimes, I run into a show-stopping bug and decide to scrap the whole thing. Other times, I can't come to a consensus with myself on how to implement it, and lose interest while I'm trying to come up with a solution.

With my website, it's different. I created it during a one-month coding spree, which is quite a long time by my standards, and continued to pour effort into it for quite a while. It was a trial run of technologies alien to me, and as I continued to work with said technologies, I understood them better and employed better practices for working with them at a larger scale. Looking at my website now, I see a hard to maintain mess, and I refrain from touching it. Alas, that is but the learning process at work. If I ever return to it, I'm most likely going to rewrite it. Yes, again.

But! There is one part of my website that I use almost every day. The playlist page. If you were to check the deployments, you'd see that I rebuild the website every few days.

Cloudflare Pages deployments

I have a good reason to do so. Due to the nature of static sites, and since I avoid using a backend as much as possible, the only time my website can fetch the playlist data is during the build step. Hence, every time I update my YouTube playlist, I have to rebuild it for the playlist page to update. In fact, it's an action that I repeated so often that I created a Raycast command just for it.

Raycast command

Oh right, I'm supposed to be writing about what I've been doing.

Graphic Design

Lately, I've been using Figma more and more for designing websites, interfaces, and just as a general purpose graphical tool. I've built it into my process to first design the interface before diving into the code.

Programming

While floating around the ether, I've worked on programming, on occasion reaching out a spindly appendage and releasing it into the world. While nothing really huge, they've been pretty fun projects. Here are some cherry-picked projects:

Accelerant

Accelerant

Most likely my most recent published project, Accelerant is a browser extension for tweaking Nitro Type. It's open source on GitHub.

Nodewal

Nodewal

A private project I made, reimplementing pywal in Node.js. Why? Control. And fun. But mostly control. Additionally, I also wrote a auxilary VSCode extension to support theme generation for it.

I have a love-self-consciousness-getting-the-best-of-me relationship with publishing. If I keep things unpublished and private, I won't get judged on the internal structure of my code and won't have to maintain it or provide support for others.

Birdseed

Birdseed
Figma mockup, subject to change and/or abandonment

I don't like talking about potential projects before I publish them, since I may not even finish them. Birdseed is one of those. It's a modern RSS reader, and my first time making something proper with Rust and SolidJS.

It's provided a wealth of problems, such as dealing with 10+ year old format and it's bizarre specification, having to write an RSS parser, (which was somewhat easy via the DOMParser api,) and wrestling with browser styling and accessibility differences.

Majoram

Majoram

After friends actually started to care about the quotes page on my website, I decided to improve it and extract it into it's own separate website, and actually implementing a database. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon or brain scientist to figure out the URL, given I don't purchase domains, but I'm not going to share it here.

Music

As I alluded to above, I've been listening to a lot of music. My taste is still heavily dominated by EDM, with Camellia still being my favorite EDM artist. As for changes, Magi introduced me to METAROOM, with God Race and Pink Origins getting stuck in my head for days. I've also been listening to more Vocaloid songs, and found some wonderful old Lemon Demon songs, namely While My Keytar Gently Weeps and Every Time You Stifle A Sneeze.

I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I listen to all of these songs unironically. Yes, even ETYSAS.

Notes

Oh, and I've been debating whether to mention this or not, but due to the success of my Blooket cheat, I was able to mostly fund the purchase of a wonderful MacBook around half a year ago. It's been my daily computer since. Thank you Ben!

       />\,-----/^\
      /:::/:=/=:::::\
     /:::|::::/|:::::\
    /::::|::/  //‾\:::|
   /:::::|:/ .   . |:/
  /:::::/‾ \    w  /
 |::::::| /‾\_/‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾/
 |::::::|(==O/ MikuBook / click!
‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾\/__________/‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾

Other than some things going on in my personal life, that's mostly what I've been up to.

Cheers, Basil

Nya!