Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 21, 2024

mtlynch.io

• Recorded guest appearances on two podcasts

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

• Announced my six-week live course
• Dusted off the landing page repo
  • Updated to latest version of Node.js
  • Added a package.json file
  • Updated date references to 2024
  • Added a Nix flake
  • Added a convenience script for serving the site locally

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Started integrating htmx
  • So far, it seems overall positive
  • I like that it lets me cut out a lot of boilerplate JS
  • I wish it helped more with error handling, as it seems to kind of punt on that
  • I wish it was possible to more easily hide and show elements in response to button pushes rather than having to pull new content down with a server round trip
• Simplified the base template
  • I thought that child templates had to include the base template, but it turns out that the base template can just define blocks for the child templates to override
  • Then I simplified even more by defining default values for template blocks
  • Then I simplified a little more by using block instead of template (block is a shorthand for declaring and defining a template value at the same time.
• Precomputed page templates
  • I realized I could compile page templates outside the handler function, which means that most template errors happen at app start time rather than at request time
• Inline template parsing
• Moved <title> tag population to the page templates themselves
  • I was doing it in Go and realized I didn’t need to
• Added -fullpath to my go test calls, as it produces better debug output
• Changed a few APIs that don’t return a response on success to return HTTP 204 No Content instead of HTTP 200 OK

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

• Applied some of the same templating cleanups from ScreenJournal to PicoShare
  • Simplify HTML templates
  • Define default blocks from base template
  • Precompute HTML templates
  • Add -fullpath to go test output

Misc

• Watched the Primeagen’s course on htmx + Go
• Bought a new chest freezer
• Converted leftover Euros back to US Dollars
• Sold an old desk
• Took a CPR class