It’s been a while since the last Status Update on November 2020 so I thought it would be good to have a catch-up post. Be prepared, this is going to be a long one. After all, I haven’t done one of these in 120 days.

Due to some bad computer habits, I end up opening and closing editor instances a lot instead of starting my editor and using it for the duration of the project. In particularly bad cases, I end up closing my editor for every code change to run a compiler or check some files in the same terminal.

Search engines are difficult to create. They are even harder to improve to a point where you get good-enough results to keep regular users. This is why it’s so rare to see decent search engines that aren’t front-ends to the Bing or Google APIs.

As I mentioned in the last Status Update, I was working on a small project that used Twitch data. The data I needed was not fancy or complex. I only needed the Live/Online status of the channel, the stream title, and the stream start time. As I am only looking for things that appear on the channel page, I thought I could parse the page HTML. To my disappointment, Twitch had turned their website into a slow, single-page application.

Some of my solutions to Advent of Code 2020.

I started working on a web front-end project. It is a compiler for web components. The compiler reads single-file web components similar to the Vue.js ones, and emits vanilla JavaScript.

Especially on busy times, it is possible to forget the projects I’ve been working on. While I tend to remember the big ones, some small projects slip away from memory. This is troubling when someone asks if I’ve been working on anything interesting recently, or if I feel like I haven’t been productive. Seeing how many thing I managed to work on can be a good morale-booster.

I occasionally need to SSH into my laptop, or use other services hosted on it, but my ISP gives me a dynamic IP. While it is stable most of the time, it does occasionally change.

To nobody’s surprise, the consistency of status updates have been less than perfect. But still, here I am with another catch-up post. Since the last update was a while back, this one might end up slightly longer.

This has been a fast and chaotic month for my life and career, and a rather slow month for my blog and personal projects. I severely underestimated the effort it takes to pack up all my belongings while figuring out everything about my future employment. Because of this, the status update is both later than I intended, and has less content.