Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 13, 2020

WanderJest

WanderJest is going to be on hold for the next few weeks/months, as finding ways to gather in close quarters at comedy venues is nobody’s biggest priority right now.

• Officially canceled the scavenger hunt.
  • The obvious reason was COVID-19.
  • Outside of that, I was considering canceling anyway as there was zero participation even before people started caring about COVID-19. If my promotion efforts failed, I was debating just canceling to avoid paying $400 in prize money for a contest that had only 2-3 participants.
  • I refunded all the sponsors. There was one participant the night before I decided to cancel, so I worked out a prize with her that we both felt was fair.
• Continued working toward a self-serve UI for submitting shows
  • Currently, I have to enter all shows in manually because the current form is a pretty thin UI over the backend database and it’s not robust against bad data or mischievous users.
  • A self-serve workflow will allow users to manage the details of their own shows without relying on me to enter them in.
  • Added a performer picker UI control (with auto-complete!)
  • Added previews for image uploads
    • Trickier than it seems, because the temporary uploads go to a private GCS bucket. I had to figure out how to do generate signed URLs, and then work around the bugs in the library’s API.
• Implemented support for importing event data from Facebook and Eventbrite
• Populated more JSON+LD data for shows
  • Fixed all the warnings and added richer information for performers.
• Added support for marking events as canceled
  • Previously, all I could do was just delete them, which made it look like they never existed at all.
• Refactored some old code that got kind of messy.
  • Most of them look like the changes I’m similarly making to What Got Done
• Added a more graceful 404 page if the user navigates to a performer or performance that doesn’t exist.
• Met with a venue owner
  • This was on Monday, probably will be my last in-person meeting for the next few months
• Wrote a recommendation for Western Mass Junction
  • And then the next day, the show I recommended got canceled…

NERD Summit

NERD Summit is going forward, but it’s going to be online-only

• Continued working on my presentation

What Got Done

• Implemented follow/unfollow functionality so that What Got Done users can customize their feeds
  • Check out the Feed option in the navbar when you’re logged in.
• Added support for weekly entry templates.
  • Now, you can save the boilerplate of your entries if you use a consistent structure.
  • Go to Account > Preferences in the navbar when you’re logged in.
• Fixed daily backups, which I had unknowingly broken when I integrated the view counter.
• Did a bunch of refactoring so that Vue components no longer ever make HTTP calls (only via controllers)

Is It Keto

• Updated some dead Amazon Affiliate links

Misc

• Prepared my taxes
  • Or rather, prepared all the documents (hopefully) that my accountant needs to prepare my taxes
• Reached out to an investing blogger about a possible app idea I have while I wait to spin up WanderJest again.
• Negotiated down my Comcast bill by $18/mo by calling and threatening to cancel service