I felt like having a small break from my main project this month, so I'm giving myself some weeks to try out other ideas I've been putting off. Just happy coding of open source MVPs for various ideas I've had for a while. I'm giving…

I travel a lot and try to carry as little stuff as possible. However, having a second screen is a productivity booster when programming, so i'm carrying a small no-name 15" screen with me. I was looking for a way to get the productivity boost…

I've been working with smstools3 which uses a folder and its subfolder as its state store. Instead of running "tree" manually in the /var/spool/sms folder, i'd rather have it be done automagically whenever the files change. I've used inotifywait for that, which needs to be…

Spotify was a bit buggy on my laptop a while ago so I stopped my premium plan. I used the excellent soundiiz to transfer my playlists over to youtube (in small 200 tracks batches), where I had a premium account. The thing is, youtube music…

Why no galaxy ? My main app (https://ciboulette.net) is a meteor app. I love meteor, and I'm glad it's recently received some new funding and new updates. However, the official way to host a meteor app, meteor galaxy, is super expensive for a small indie…

Why start an SMS "farm" ? SMS messages are super expensive in France. 0.06€ / message on Twilio, Vonage, etc... So I've resorted to sending SMSs using private phone plans. They are super cheap in france, 2€/month for unlimited SMSs. I'm using one such plan…

I had some TODO and FIXME instructions in random locations in my code that served no purpose, as I was never looking for them. I also use "console.log" for temporary debug logs that should be removed in production. I sometimes forget some console.log statements, and…

i3 is nice. End to end tests are nice. Chromium is nice. But they don't get along so well by default. When you run you e2e script with nodemon, each run opens and closes the test browser window. By default, that window appears right by…

I have a few users for my app, and 1000's of ideas on how to improve it. I've been tracking my work in trello, on a public board (my app is still closed source, but i'm as open as possible about the processes of my…

My app has 4 main collections in mongo : - A user has many weeks and clients - Each week has many orders, one per client, where the order content is stored (can be empty if the client didn't order that week). Initially, my documents…

I've switched over from Spotify to Rhythmbox today. Spotify was a bit unstable on my system, it sometimes even struggled to playback offline playlists. I'm back to the good old "music" folder with files of long forgotten origins. The default ubuntu music player, rhythmbox, seems…

I don't really play much those days, but I've had some great gaming experiences I felt like sharing today. This strategy game is free, ad free, and has an amazing replay-ability thanks to the user generated levels. It's easy to learn, and not too hard…

I added a few of my projects to those "Pages under 1MB" websites. I'm not sure what for, but eh, it's free link estate ! Anyway, while most of those lists are comprised of boring, barely formatted text pages, i stumbled upon a nice one,…

I have a setup to know when my main app, ciboulette.net, is down. It's based on statuscake, which pings my marketing site every 5 minutes, and also my main app. It used to ping a third endpoint, which was an order form deep inside my…

I'm setting up e2e testing on my Meteor app, ciboulette.net. I had done it in the past but after large UI changes i just removed the tests as they were completely stale and generally painful to work with : I'm trying again, this time using…

I have 3 playlists on Spotify I always come back to , thought i'd share them here Deep house as a background music for lightweight tasks, and as a loud playlist for festive events. Psychedelic trance when I need a motivation surge for a tough…

I really like the look of the default Publii theme, however some modifications weren't quite working using the in-app options. I wanted this website to have a very low level of interactivity, i don't need a mobile hamburger menu for 2 short entries (code &…

I've been living in Vladivostok, Russia, since the end of February 2020. I'm a student here, learning the Russian language. I'm a bit older than the average student but my life is still very student-like anyway. I really enjoy the energy of younger friends and…

DO + MUP = 💙 I've migrated my main project, https://ciboulette.net, from Heroku to digital ocean, with the help of the awesome meteor up tool that's still actively maintained. I wanted a way to automate the backups of production to my own computer. In meteor,…

Working at virtualQ, it happened a few times that I'd start a project with unclear requirements, then presented it to the rest of the team just to see everything needing to be changed or canceled. To avoid such disappointing outcome, I tried to make more…

Back when I was working at virtualQ, I had to do some documentation. At first I didn't quite enjoy it, feeling like this was a chore. But documenting a system can be a very interesting task. I also had to explain our systems to new…

It all started about 7 years ago. My mother got laid off and had to find a job. She already had a large garden and decided to make a living selling vegetables. She invested little capital as the activity was supposed to last only a…

This is really just an excuse to try displaying a few photos in Publii

As a web developer, I've created some websites for family and friends. My default tool for that was WordPress, because you could easily set them up, pick a theme, mess with the CSS a bit and let them write the content. But hosting a wordpress…

This was one of my first project with the main focus on page size and bundle size. After learning a bit more about Webpack at virtualQ, i wanted to see how small a modern we app could be. The main problem I was trying to…