I’m going to go a little meta here and just say that this post is me taking another shot at consistently writing in my blog. I’m trying to do it weekly, hence the name of the posts. These weekly updates are mainly just short snippets of what I’ve been doing technically and possibly not technically. I don’t go into depth, but it allows me to reflect on things that I’m doing. Any post without the weekly update name, is going to only speak about the said topic. I will do these, but it will be over the course of time, so as to provide some higher quality material. I stole this idea off of Troy Hunt’s security blog, which I think is a good one. At this point I want to get into the rhythm of writing and take the opportunity to express myself.
Time tracking is a thing for me
I got into some basic time tracking about a year ago and I feel like it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done. It allows me to timebox my efforts and really focus on what I need to do. Once I start the timer (entering a start time in a spreadsheet), I know that I’m on the hook for the task at hand. When I stop the timer (entering an end time in a spreadsheet) I know how much time I’ve spent on the task. I enter some notes, so I know what I can do the next time I sit down and work on something. This is almost good enough for me so far, but the best part is that I have a history of what I’ve done in the past and how much time I’m spending on something. For example, I can see exactly how long it’s been since I wrote a blog post and try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I can see that I usually spend about one hour to one hour and half for each session. I have never went over four hours during a session. This is my reality and it’s staring me in the face. I have a limited amount of free time at the moment and I want to make it count. Tracking my time this way helps me plan for the future.
Revisiting Firebase
A while back I played around with Firebase and thought it was pretty cool and had this idea to make, “Yet Another Minimalistic Blog Engine” based on Firebase and Firestore. I stopped for some reason. I think I may have thought that Firestore had some limitations, but I can’t remember. I also think I just wanted to blog, so I kept blogging here (what I built). Anyways, for my listings project I got past the point where I was wiring up authentication in Node with Passport, and now I had to create the part of the database that allowed users to sign up and give them permissions and all of that jazz. When something starts taking more effort than I anticipate, I start re-evaluating what I’m doing and if there’s a better way. I’m only one guy (at the moment) and I just want to get things going. I remembered Firebase and started looking into that and started experimenting with that and I think I’m hooked. I found a tutorial and it’s been pretty decent. Also, the whole idea of offloading authentication to a third party and not having to worry about something that isn’t a feature, which costs next to nothing (at the moment) is great. Hopefully, Firestore can take care of my database needs and then I think I can say that my site runs on a serverless architecture.
Rapid iteration
After revisiting Firebase, I believe I have a clear goal in mind. I want to set up a rapid iteration infrastructure so that I can start validating ideas technically, as fast as possible. The serverless architecture is ideal for this, because it allows me to focus more on the domain and helps me save money as well. If I start getting past the free tier for third party services, then that’s a really good problem to have.
My listing site
I don’t think I mentioned any details about my listing site project, so I will now. I’m building a SPA with Vue.js for the frontend and Node with Restify on the backend. The listing site boils down to me listing comedy open mic night, musical open mic nights, and theatre auditions. I want to build this and try to convince the community to use this versus posting stuff on Facebook and centralize everything so that’s it’s dead simple to find these listings and you don’t have to do a million google searches and pray. It’s one of my ideas and it’s something that I think I can get done relatively fast if I keep it simple. If people like it then I can continue to work on it, if not, I’ll move onto the next thing. We’ll see what happens.