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.
Socket Programming
Socket programming is something I’ve been interested in since I first learned about WebSockets. Since I got into programming as a web developer, without a background in computer science, it’s a pretty strange concept for me. I’m used to the request/response cycle of HTTP, obviously with a bit of AJAX mixed in to make it feel more interactive. I understand the concept behind sockets and have made a couple small projects with WebSockets, but actually building a custom socket-based application is a bit different.
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).
That Conference
Last week I went to That Conference. It was a great time, meeting other developers, getting some new ideas from the talks, and talking to other people in the industry.
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.
Back to Sublime Text
I was really happy with Vim for a long time. In fact, I just last month learned how to use “vi-mode” in the ruby console. I have tried various editors vim emulation options, but they never quite feel natural. Visual Studio’s VsVim was the best I had found, it actually supports a vimrc file you can use with standard VimScript. VS Code, Atom, and Sublime Text all have their own vim plugins or settings, but they’re either limited or buggy. Part of it is my own dependency on plugins, some of which I still haven’t found decent alternatives for. But really, if I can’t navigate using the home row keys through my file tree, buffer, or panels, it just doesn’t feel like vim anyway.
Linux Development Environment
I’m back on a Linux dev environment. Well, I never completely left, because I’ve always had Linux servers running my Rails apps. But I only ever had Linux as my desktop for a little while when I started working in the Surgery department. It had a few unfortunate errors that may have been related to the hard drive of that computer, which ended up being replaced. But I ended up switching back to Windows, as suggested by our sysadmin. Continue reading “Linux Development Environment”
Alternatives to Angular
Back when Angular, Ember, and React were first gaining popularity and Single-Page Applications(SPAs) were less common, I chose to learn Angular as my SPA framework. Continue reading “Alternatives to Angular”
cototal.com
This website is currently built with WordPress. I began my web development career with PHP and I was just getting into WordPress before I switched to Ruby on Rails. Continue reading “cototal.com”