After several months of dormancy in my software development activities I’ve started hitting a solid pace of getting back into the swing of things recently. As much as I wanted the next big thing for me to work on to be something Fediverse related, specifically Friendica, that has created a huge mental block for me. I wrote about that a lot in this post . I’m not a language snob, more on that below, but getting fired up about doing PHP work on that project isn’t happening. I still never got to the bottom of if it was more PHP or the inertia of getting started on the project. It doesn’t matter either way because I wasn’t getting anything done. I wasn’t sure if maybe it was a general lull. I think I’ve answered that question in the negative. So what is this looking like then?

Several years ago I wrote here that I was not going to go by any diet label. At the time I was more exasperated by the orthorexia of the whole thing. That was both internal and externally generated orthorexia. We can all say we don’t agree with labeling ourselves but it’s not a totally useless exercise. It’s a convenient way to compress down a lot of information into an easily identifiable and relatedable expression. Unfortunately it is also something which can lead to lots of false paths and lots of problems. In the past week I’ve run across several stories and instances which make me double down on that decision.

I took the deep dive into the Fediverse last year when I decided to bite off the Diaspora API development task with Frank Rousseau. It was a great experience and I had hoped to do a lot more Diaspora work. With a lot of the ActivityPub discussions and there being some really good questions about how that should work I had embarked on an experiment to see what a merged Fediverse Social Media experience would feel like. Friendica has tie-ins to Diaspora, ActivityPub, and many others. It was a great candidate for it. I am way behind on doing my write up but I have my notes. That’s for another post. This post is about a conundrum I’m facing with respect to my open source/Fediverse contribution conundrum. That conundrum is: I don’t know which project(s) I want to focus on any longer.

I remember the first time I had to integrate myself into a new community. It was right after college. I had started my first job which was in a new specialization of my industry. I had to come to grips with a life transition, learning how to work with a new team and new software, learning about the ins and outs of the industry around me and those interactions, et cetera. It is a very unsettling position to have orders of magnitude more things to learn than time to do it. No one expects someone to pick it all up instantly but in me there is a drive to “come up to speed” as fast as possible. When it comes to contributing to the Fediverse I am feeling the exact same thing right now.

While I’ve been writing a ton recently about my software development progress it was the topic of quantified self, longevity, and personal fitness experimentation that started this whole blog. As this year rounds out I once again looked at the state of my fitness over that time. Just as with last year while I have only been at most intermittently focused on what I would call a healthful lifestyle I have continued to be meticulous with measuring my daily food intake, how well I adhered to my five goals, and ancillary observations from there. Let’s see how 2018 was in an absolute and a relative to 2017 view.

“Dogfooding” software is one of the best ways to wring out any problems with a design or implementation. The Diaspora API was designed with a wide variety of uses in mind including something potentially as grand as being the replacement backend for a revamped website. With the actual API now “in the can” and waiting for the real PR review I decided to try to use the API for an actual purpose and start dogfooding it. I had several ideas but the first one I decided to latch on to was a blog discussion timeline feature.

We’ve finally done it! Frank and I were able to get the last of our internal reviews done and the API code is now in the “real” code review for integration into the main Diaspora development branch. That alone is an amazing thing but I have a second piece of big news related to the API as well. Today I was able to stand up a first version of a blog “Discussion Browser” that uses the API to pull all comments and other interactions for a blog post that is associated with a specific Diaspora post. I’m going to be doing a write up of that in more detail later but as a first cut it worked pretty well and showed that the API design and the code itself is functioning pretty well.

Some people just can’t leave well enough alone, I swear! When last I left Spring Boot world everything was going great. The project bootstrapping was pretty straight forward. The documentation pretty much matched the actual behaviors. The actual behaviors were pretty well laid out. Today I tried to create a project from scratch. Between fighting Java version hell from the online generator, to fighting gradle dependency hell both there and in IntelliJ, to then wrestling with some new fucked up syntax for something as simple as reading in the configuration file I have wasted two hours and gotten absolutely fucking nowhere!