Happy last Friday of January!

How's the start of 2018 been for you? If I'm honest, I've really struggled to get back into a working rhythm, and February is around the corner already!

The upshot of bad rhythm is that I've been tinkering on all kinds of mini projects with varying success. The big focuses for me have been working on nodemon and jsbin's refactor. Both have gone from near zero maintenance to active development again, which I'm happy with, but doesn't pay the bills!

On the blog

I've kicked off 2018's blogging with a few more technical blog posts. To gist and back again and A clean exit are both concerned with command line tips (and the gist blog post uses jq - a really powerful JSON manipulation command line tool).

(Aside: if you use jq, please hit reply and let me know any favourite jq recipes you use - I'm compiling a list for a blog post next month ❤️_)_

The last post of the month focused a lot more on open source and the burden of support and how to make feel better about the process. In my particular post entitled Open source with a cap in hand I talked about what I've changed to nodemon (adding a github issue bot and an installation banner asking for donations). It's a tricky subject, I think, because a lot of individuals believe that open source should be voluntarily supported. I'm not so sure. But have a read if you're interested.

Mini side projects

Here's a short URL dump of the mini side projects I've published - some may be useful, some/most won't be, but you're the first to see a list 😁

  1. jqterm - a web based jq playground (alternative to the original)
  2. Oliver - a github bot that asks for "more" once a github issue is closed
  3. A devtools-like autocomplete plugin for CodeMirror - as seen in jqterm (type "to" in jqterm)
  4. Tali - I needed to bundle an ES6 project and test in another web site, so Tali will try to automatically bundle a script, and it will serve it over http for local testing (yes, I'm sure something like this exists, I just needed to quickly solve a problem!)
  5. Haiku - I needed some test content for github issues I was testing with…!

Monthly recommend

I saw The Greatest Showman earlier in the month, and although I wasn't completely blown away, I went on to listen to the soundtrack (on spotify) and then I listened to it some more…then some more…and more. I think I've enjoyed the soundtrack every__day since I saw the film, and went on to see it a second time (which…as a parent with young kids, is nearly impossible to get out to the cinema that often!).

Suffice to say: it was a great film, and some really solid (family friendly) entertainment 👍

Until Feb, I hope you've all had a great start to the year.

– Remy 👋