2023 Week 4 in Review
planted on in: Week In Review, Old Web and 11ty.
~488 words, about a 3 min read.
"We mature with the damage, not with the years."
— Mateus Williams
This week started with my interest in macro photography being rekindled by incredible photos of sealife inside drops of seawater (see notable articles below.) I ended up going down a bit of a Rabbit Hole with this one resulting in almost purchasing Canon's new 100mm RF Macro Lens.
As soon as I had surfaced from that hole, I re-donned the programmer socks and dropped into another with node-canvas, PHP-GD font rendering and a deep drive into the #OldWeb , Web Rings, Blogrolls and Hit Counters. The result of this was that I almost completed porting Blogtimes, the second WordPress Plugin to node as a plugin for #11ty and had my first viral post of 2023 with https://notacult.social/@carbontwelve/109761251911342104 blowing up my notifications!
On the programming front I wrote a new plugin for Eleventy: @photogabble/eleventy-plugin-tag-normaliser, this came out of code I wrote to programatically add tags to posts a featue that will deploy on Monday if all goes well with this pull request to add post tag parsing and I remember to merge it on time.
Outside of side quests my day job has been rather interesting as well! I have been working on integrating a new partners API for picking up jobs they offer us and providing them status updates as the jobs pass through our systems. That doesn't sound interesting I hear you say, well, this API is via SFTP. That's right, we connect to a SFTP server that serves two folders: inbox and outbox. We read csv files from the inbox and write them to the outbox.
This is the first time I have worked on an API like this, everything up until now has been REST (or REST-like.) I hear this kind of system interoperation is quite common in other industries, finance for example. The fact that the SFTP is updated once an hour only between 7am and 8pm makes me suspect that there is a mainframe in the mix somewhere. In either case it's been a refreshing change from working on node non-stop for the past 11 months.
Joke of the week
Question: Why do bees have sticky hair?
Answer: Because they use a honeycomb.
Notable Articles Read
- Jennie Rothenberg Gritz (Smithsonian Magazine): These Gorgeous Photos Capture Life Inside a Drop of Seawater
- Trys Mudford: Linear Interpolation Functions
Notable Videos Watched
- Peter McKinnon: Canon’s NEW 100mm RF Macro Lens
- Look Mum No Computer: Modifying a 45 Year Old SWTPC To Play Synthesizers