Due to cabin fever (or whatever you call it), I’ve been working on a lot of oddball programming projects. I mean, I’m working way too much at the day job, because I can’t really leave the house, so I’m always on. But I’ve also been doing various things (and then not finishing them) mostly because I don’t have a basement where I can start building a boat out of matchsticks or something.

Anyway, here’s a partial list of what’s on the various back burners of my stove. If you’re really insanely curious about any of these, let me know and maybe I’ll actually finish them.

  • I’ve been messing around more on GitHub. I’ve been doing this at my job too, but I’m trying to make an effort to be more active on my personal profile. If you have the time and you use any open source software, I’d encourage you to do the same. Even if you’re not a programmer, it’s good to know how to complain about their documentation and maybe fix a few things if you find them. My personal profile is here: https://github.com/jkonrath
  • GitHub has caused me to dig up all of the various college coding projects and see if they’re worthwhile to post on there, just for kicks. They are all fairly horrible, so no. I’m almost tempted to post the first coding project I actually got paid to do, which I still have. It was for the USGS and it did something with well depth analysis, which I totally don’t understand. The code itself is an exercise on how to not to do what we’d call Big Data analysis now, and would probably be about ten lines of Python. Fun nostalgia though.
  • Just for kicks, I started writing a Markdown to HTML program, but decided to do it all in straight-up C, using C89 ANSI C and the standard library, nothing more. Outside of Arduino C, I haven’t done much C program in… a long time. I realized why when I started working with strings. I have a newfound appreciation for Python’s built-in string support.
  • I also realized, digging through the archives, that I know more XSLT than I realized. I posted a gist about this on GitHub, but I probably should make a whole project that’s a collection of all the dumb little building blocks I used constantly when I did this on a daily basis. (Like I always have to look up how to split one file into many files. I need to write that down somewhere.)
  • I found this giant XSLT I used at a previous job to chop up Doxygen’s XML output and convert it into something I could pull into a structured FrameMaker doc. Looking at it, I’m not sure how useful it is, because I was doing a bunch of arbitrary reordering of the doc because… well, let’s say just because.
  • I also started working on an XSLT to convert WordPress output to a Flare document. I really do love that Flare documents are just XML, and you can do anything with them.
  • I converted this blog to Hugo, but in the process I realized it’s faster for me on a site this small to keep it in WordPress, so I didn’t use the conversion. It was a fun learning process, though.
  • I’ve been messing with ArchiveBox, which is a neat idea. It’s a system where you feed in URLs and it archives them in various formats. It’s sort of a DIY Internet Archive. I’ve been learning more Docker by running it with Docker-compose, and complaining on their GitHub page about various minor problems. I should spend some time helping them rewrite their docs.
  • Another site where I should pay more attention is Stack Overflow. I’m on there at https://stackoverflow.com/users/99038/jon-konrath. Funny to look back at all the FrameMaker and Doxygen posts I was answering way back when.

Speaking of obsessively building stuff in your basement, this is one of my favorite videos ever: https://vimeo.com/166403522