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I set up a TiddlyWiki on Glitch for myself — prompted by watching this talk by Sönke Ahrens yesterday. I'm very much intrigued by the idea of digital gardens or the idea of a public Zettelkasten, but I'm neither experienced with this style of note-taking nor quite certain what all I should capture there.

Maybe the best plan is to have no plan: for now, I'll treat it as a “Today I Learned” (or “TIL”) catch-all for notes, apply tags indiscriminately, and see what comes together. I don't know if TiddlyWiki is the right tool for the job, but everything I've read so far is compelling.

More TK.

(H/T: Jack Baty)

#glitch #til #notes

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I kicked off a new weekly “development diary” series on Dev.to today.

This post is an entry in a weekly development diary on building a feed-aggregator-based blog on Glitch. Only a small part of building an app is code; the bulk of your time is spent planning, experimenting, making mistakes, getting frustrated, and making progress in baby steps.

You can read the first post here. The goal is to build a web app that takes as input an OPML file of your RSS feeds across various platforms, and automagically generates a blog with its own “firehose” RSS feed with that content.

I really found it helpful when I journaled daily while rewriting my iOS app. I hope you find it interesting too.

#glitch #devto #elsewhere

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Friday, March 6th marked three years of working remotely out of my home office. In prior years, I've answered a series of questions, but I've been struggling to write this year's post.

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I was invited to chat with [Anil Dash] about tech and self-care on the Function podcast's season 2 kickoff. Function examines the intersection of tech and culture, and I'm grateful to have been invited to share my thoughts.

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A couple of months ago, [Glitch] CEO [Anil Dash] got to interview Mindy Kaling at Twilio's [SIGNAL conference]. We built an [app] that let people text in their questions for Mindy, and it added a lot of fun interactivity to their chat!

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Ash Furrow’s blog is always a great read, and Monday's thoughts on learning from other developer communities was no exception.

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Today marks the second anniversary of my gig at Glitch (formerly Fog Creek Software). Last year, I wrote a retrospective on what the first year of working remotely was like; I thought it’d be fun to see how that’s evolved.

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Yesterday marked the end of my time working on [Manuscript], as the transition of the product over to its new owner is complete. With that, I'd been looking for a new contract, and today I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining the team at [Glitch]!

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My main social network these days is Micro.blog, where I post short updates, thoughts, and images, then syndicate those posts out to the big social media silos. I have a hosted blog on the Micro.blog service for this, but because I want this site to be the canonical source for all things Angelo, I wanted to pull in that content here.

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Glitch creates randomized project names when you remix a project, and they look something like adjective-noun.glitch.me. You can always rename these later, but oftentimes they’re just too amusing to bother (I’m looking at you, victorious-beer).

So, what if you decided that you were going to remix the node starter app, and then had to spend a couple of hours building an app based purely on the random name you were assigned?

Well, you’d end up with something like Therapeutic Caribou.

I’d been poking at TextBlob in Python over the weekend. Why not find an npm module that handles sentiment analysis to create a little app that takes in what you’re saying and replies based on how positive or negative the sentiment is. I’m using the wink-sentiment module to do this in analyzer.js, but it should be fairly easy to swap out any other analysis module in the rankSentiment() function.

And while we’re at it, why not make it so that you’re just talking to the web app, rather than typing? I’ve been working through Wes Bos’ JavaScript30 course and, as luck would have it, just went through the native SpeechRecognizer project.

Given that this is something that I threw together in a couple of hours, it’s very far from complete — our therapeutic caribou is a pretty lousy conversationalist, there are a couple of bugs around SpeechRecognizer events, and the design is… well, pretty unpleasant. Additionally, I’ve only tested this in Chrome, so I have no idea if it works as expected in other browsers.

With all that said, it was still a lot of fun to throw something together that let me play with a bit of both client- and server-side JavaScript, some neat native technologies like SpeechRecognizer, and some interesting concepts like sentiment analysis.

If you try playing the Glitch Project Name Lottery, let me know what you come up with!

#glitch #javascript #projects

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