February 2019

Notify

There’s a bunch of work happening on Notify at the moment. I’ve basically taken it out of being “frozen” and back into maintainership. I do not want to spend any significant amount of time on it, but I welcome anyone else to develop features, fixes, improvements, etc, and I’m doing the actual maintainer thing of review, advice, guidance, merging things, running rustfmt, keeping CI going, and generally being an active project once again.

A lot of Big Names use Notify now, and it’s honestly cool. It was mostly background radiation for a long time, like people used it and some people contributed features, but it was very quiet, very passive consumership. Now there’s a lot of good energy and good people doing great work on it, and I’m in a much better place psychologically, so I think it will regain some shine!

As part of this sorta soft reboot, I went through the entire commit log and backfilled the entire changelog down to the very first release, which was fun (if a bit menially tedious). Notify started pre-Rust-1.0, and that must seem like quite a strange period for people who haven’t lived it, or even for me, now. The past is weird!

Kai

A project I’ve been wanting to do for ages, but it’s also deceptively big and really I just put down very minimal bones and some notes and not much else.

The idea started as a “flexible curry recipe generator.” Basically input what ingredients you have, and it walks you through it. But then I started wanting to integrate a lot of other things, most importantly something radical: a slider of “how much time do you want to spend here.”

So the recipe would have all those parts that are timed and possibly ranged as well, and would cut down the recipe steps and time based on what kind of timeframe you’re looking at. Sure, caramelising onions makes for deliciousness, but you can skip it, and in fact you can skip the onions entirely if pressed for time or if you don’t have onions right this moment. And cutting onions as fine as possible is an excellent way to caramelise them to perfection, but it also takes ages, even more without practice, so just a rough chop will do nicely if you just have to get to it. And that’s just onions! There’s so much more.

The slider would be at the very top, and it would grey out meat/veggie choices that you just can’t do with that kind of time. Carrots. Potatoes. Some meats. Etc etc etc.

You should still have a fair amount of choice and diversity at the extreme-low of the scale. There are some really quick ways to cook a spicy meal that looks like a curry. But I didn’t want to limit myself to just that, so I called it ‘Kai.’

Purple Sky

Yay another project!

Actually this one is fairly older, and I’ve been slowly working at it. I’m ramping up research and prototyping, and some people know what this is, but I’m also keeping it way under wraps for now. This is something that might actually turn into something profitable! So that’s exciting.