Weeknote 0: Happy New Year!
Posted 2023-01-01
Why 0? Because arrays start there, of course! And this is technically week 52 of 2022…
I suppose this is my Hello World of weeknotes. As one of my New Years resolutions (I think), I’ve decided to try out weeknoting to journal some of the stuff I get up to, mainly in the world of tech. So, here we go…
What have I been up to in the past week?
Open Data Scotland
For the Open Data Scotland project we’ve had a Christmas sprint on the go. I kind of wanted to get some tickets on the go myself but had been in a bit of a block as to what to pick up.
Nevertheless, I still managed to help out with reviewing one of our latest PRs to categorise our datasets based off keywords in the title and description. Hopefully this helps us to reduce the amount of uncategorized datasets we end up with on opendata.scot.
I at least managed to work through triaging our ever-growing list of tickets. Turns out we’ve got a lot of maintenance to do 😅.
Next step is to split up our tickets into different repos. Up until now, we’ve managed all our issues under a single repo. This made sense at the time when we spun up the project on the back of a hackathon. With the way the project has grown over the past year and a half and our issues being split between our back-end and front-end, it makes sense at this stage to split out issues into their relevant repos and take advantage of GitHub’s new project management features.
One thing’s for sure. We’ve got plenty of things to work on in the next year!
Other dev
For the past year and a half 2 of my friends and I create a weekly playlist where we contribute 5 songs each, usually resulting in an hour of songs. We started off calling this Trash Compactor due to our different tastes being mashed together into one playlist, but more recently it was renamed to Fantastic Beats (and where to find them).
Up until now this playlist would get discarded and overwritten on a weekly basis however, in a similar spirit to Spotify Wrapped I’d like to start archiving our playlists. Once again, time for my software dev skills to shine. Using a combination of Python, Jekyll and GitHub Actions I created a small app called Landfill in honour of the original Trash Compactor name. It can be found at landfill.jack.gilmore.scot and it should update every Friday as we create more playlists.
House stuff
Installed a smart switch in my office. Managed to not electrocute myself. ‘Nuff said.
In this case I installed a Lanbon L8 and integrated it into my existing Home Assistant Server setup. These lights control some colour changing LED bulbs I already had installed.
Christmas holiday laziness
Did the usual Friday night gaming session with my friends, except this time we played For The King for a full 4 hours up until midnight. Looked through my Steam Replay too.
Built some Lego.
Watched some films.
What I learned this week
When messing about with Jekyll to build Landfill’s front-end, I learned you could use the following command to create a blank site without any of the blog boilerplate attached:
jekyll new SITE_NAME --blank