For my personal projects, I don’t really run into performance issues with the database. However, it makes sense to me that having separate servers for databases and applications is a good thing. So just for fun, I decided to set up an ansible script for a dedicated database server. It’s mostly pulled from my existing server setup scripts, but with the extra SSL steps and obviously nothing that isn’t required for the database. I put the code and some setup instructions on GitHub.
Running on Docker
I finally got around to getting this and my other personal projects running on docker. I still have a lot to learn about the operations side of things with things like swarms and Kubernetes, but for development I think I have a decent workflow set up. I’m sure I’ll find ways to improve on it as I go.
Project Update
I found a great blog post that gave a demo of how authentication can work between separate client and server apps using Socket.IO. I think it’s a really cool concept that creates a pretty slick interface. I’m trying it out on one of my projects that I’m working on using React and ExpressJS.
Project Template
I built a very simple node app so that I can mockup projects quickly using pug templates. It’s public on [GitHub](https://github.com/GinBlades/node-mockups), though I don’t really have any plans to make it more accessible for the general public to use it. Basically it’s just a static site generator, and there are plenty out there for people that need more features.
Workouts
I’m getting some practice with the MEAN stack by building a simple workout management app. It should work nicely as a SPA. It has a pretty small domain, so MongoDB and Express provides a quick solution for the backend.
I’m debating how much time I want to put into a custom design for it. I could easily apply one of the popular frameworks, like bootstrap or materialize. But since I don’t need to worry about browser compatibility, I could get some experience with the CSS grid framework.
Having spent the past couple months with Vue and React, getting back into Angular has been an interesting shift in workflow. Back when Angular 2 was in beta, I took some time to learn more about RxJS. I like the concept of working with “observables,” or streams, but it really requires you to dive in and set up your how environment to handle them efficiently. With Angular, it’s pretty thoroughly baked in.
Cars
Yet another Rails prototype for managing my own records. This time, I’ve started doing some car shopping and I want to organize the cars I’m interested in. My primary sources are Autotrader and the IIHS website. But I’m looking around local dealers inventory too. It seems like they end up with some cars that don’t end up on Autotrader.
Stocks
I’m working on a new app to help organizing my stock investing. I’m not actually doing any stock investing right now, but once I get this app up and running, it should help me get started. Continue reading “Stocks”
New Allowance Tracker
I had made an attempt to extract the allowance tracker from my “omniapp” many months ago. This was primarily just an excuse to get a project up and running in .NET Core. I think it turned out pretty well, but ended up being more of a hassle to configure hosting than I wanted. It’s running on a Windows Server using IIS and SQL Server. This would be a fine environment for a production application that is bringing in some money to offset the hosting costs, but for a development project it’s a bit pricey.
Task Organizer
I built and released my first Symfony app. A pretty simple project that I plan to expand with some more interactivity when I have time. It basically works like Asana or Pivotal Tracker, but on a more open-ended basis. It’s intended to help me organize my personal projects and learning tasks, so it doesn’t need to have rigid deadlines and quotas.
For now it helps me categorize all the things I’m doing in my free time, like video tutorials, books, and personal projects. In the future, I would like to have an interactive calendar with options for automatically spacing out certain tasks and setting up some flexible deadlines. It might be nice to have some more logging functionality, say I finished 20 pages in an hour or something, to help space out how long it would take me to finish some material.
I’m getting a little more comfortable with Symfony and PHP. I figured out how to use XDebug in PhpStorm, somewhat. Setting up an authentication system with Symfony’s included services takes some work. I’ll have to look into community developed bundles, I imagine there would be something like Devise (which I use for my Rails apps).
Allowance
A couple years ago I built an app for my wife and I to keep track of allowance. As a way to save money, any non-essentials that we want to purchase are recorded as allowance, and we get a limited amount of allowance each month. As a bonus, we can each set a daily task that will give us a little extra if completed.