4025-01 In Review

• I could have done 14 at EOM if I maximally prioritized this, but that is unlikely.
  
• I'm getting faster at making demo videos.
  
• The hardest one was Emacs Guide for PHP Development in 2025 and Beyond as it was pretty long, and I also recorded gifs and videos.
  
  • It is also the most comprehensive Emacs for PHP Development guide I've seen. I read through a few long time PHP hacker's blogs who also used emacs.
    
  • Technically started the article back in Dec, but at the time, I did not get dape working through a docker container. Earlier this month I did, letting me complete it!
    

• snd-selectric-mode is a remix of selectric-mode. Writing it gave me the groundwork to drive snd from emacs.
  
• sndd.el generalizes driving of snd, for any emacs client. I wanted to use sndd.el for other projects.
  
• hella-sounds.el abstracts the emacs advice mechanism as a declarative datastructure and wraps calls to sndd.el. In the future, hella-sounds should support other ways to drive audio.
  
• I wrote so much lisp for just these three projects. I debugged a lot.
  
• I didn't have enough time to do creative writing pieces in each readme.
  

Technically I started this project in December, then left it off because debugging was really hard. I had to fight to make this project come alive. Oh and, because I'm on free tier, when you visit it likely will spin up cold, and take ~ 50 seconds to serve you the first request, but after it should be quick. Until it gets cold again.

Milestones:

• I used el-node, and started with basic serving of requests. I later added graphql libs and esxml so I could do html templating in emacs. (el-node has a way to do html templating, but I didn't want to figure out if it was broken. Plus esxml has more usage.)
  
• Elnode is ~ 2010 years old. Some of its documentation is wrong. I had to struggle to realize it wasn't accepting requests on 0.0.0.0.
  
• I containerized emacs, and got emacs to run as an fg-daemon, so docker wouldn't quit out. This was the first major struggle.
  
  • Why did I do this? Because I couldn't find any cloud platforms that would let me ship an emacs app for free.
    
    • "emacs app" aren't really two words you see together much eh?
      
    • But I did find render.io, which lets me ship docker containers for free.
      
  • Cloudflare, despite rescinding an offer that would have changed my life, would have been my first choice still. I wonder if it would be possible, since they technically support C right?
    
• Debugged through all the broken web requests happening for some reason when building the container. I had serious intermittent connectivity issues. Sometimes downloading an emacs package would fail.
  
• I couldn't connect an emacsclient to the unix socket through the container. I gave up, and this was a wise move. I could try a TCP connection next.
  
• I got comfortable with SQLite. It was either that or PostgreSQL. SQLite was easier because I make no money and can colocate the db more easily in the container with less moving parts.
  
• I hydrated the DB with all the records I could find. Leetcode doesn't list problems earlier than 2020-04-01, using the endpoint dailyCodingChallengeV2(year: $year, month: $month).
  
• I implemented features for data consistency.
  
  • auto-backfill on startup for the app, so if startup succeeds, the data should be correct.
    
  • implemented a timer to fetch the new daily problem. This was surprisingly easy. But then I also needed to make inserts idempotent. (Why did sqlite diverge in syntax from other DBs for upserts?)
    
• Implemented cursor based pagination!
  
• Do you know what it takes to implement this at the backend application level for arbitrary sort keys and directions? I'm proud of this.
  
  • I read through a blog post to help me: https://brunoscheufler.com/blog/2022-01-01-paginating-large-ordered-datasets-with-cursor-based-pagination
    
  • I used recursion to build up the SQL query.
    
• Now I need to clean up the code, make the repo readme better, and make it visually prettier.
  

• I'm working on a critical bug right now.
  

• I massively scaled back my goal of 1 unit / day. But I think it's worth it to have more time doing projects and watch less ads.
  

• but I do wish now that I was doing something else. I'm really close to a 365 day streak.
  

• It's a pattern from video game programming.
  
• I want to colorize my cursor more reliably based on state. Managing a ton of state is hard. State charts is like using a finite state machine pattern, but more powerful and flexible.