i have many projects and i must scream

My computer science degree has no relevance to this, but the fact that I started programming at age 8 does. Writing code is both a hobby and a habit and sometimes, well, you know how cats will do this thing in the middle of the night where they need to run up and down the hallways for unknown reasons? I get that but with programming.

Anyway I wanted to start a blog to talk about what stuff i have going on in case anyone's interested and also to scream about my agonies.

The Projects™

Homemade Jam

@veryroundbird.house/homemadejam

templates for self-hosting game jams (or any other kind of jam tbh)

After the whole debacle with it being deeply unclear what major game distro platforms could or would host I know a lot of people have been worried about the future of deranged game development. So I wanted to use my powers to make a template for running game jams that people could host easily basically anywhere, with whatever level of technical expertise they have.

This turned out to be somewhat of a sprawling project since I decided that I wanted to adapt it to 3+ static site generators as well as Wordpress. The Wordpress one is the real motherfucker because I wanted it to be standalone/not require any plugins, but damn is it hard in vanilla wordpress to put additional fields on the posting page. It is giving me some good practice with the new Sage framework tooling, though.

Spindle Service

@veryroundbird.house/spindle.service

spindles your spindle while you spindle

This is for people running their own build servers off of Tangled and I... need to actually put in a PR to add it to the official Tangled core repo but also I know only a vague amount about Go so I need to figure out uhhhhh how it all goes together first.

Smallbird Social

@veryroundbird.house/smallbird-social

friendship ended with social-app. php is my new best friend

PHP is my most native programming language so to speak so I wanted to see if I could write a Bsky client in PHP; I also have a personal interest in writing stuff that is really easy for non-technical people to drop onto a server and have mostly work. You know, like Ye Olden Scripts where you'd download a .cgi file and put it in your cgi-bin folder and it would do something, somehow.

Also for some reason I couldn't get the deps to install for social-app on my local machine so I could mess around with it which was really annoying. Anyway once I figure out OAuth we are going to be COOKING

Other features:

Easily themeable, comes with 6 themes (maybe more) and 4 fonts (MAYBE MORE)

Choose your API endpoints; uses slingshot , plc.directory and constellation for certain records to reduce dependence on central Bsky infra

Set your home feed to anything and put a list of your default faves in the sidebar

JSON-based client-level bans and suspensions lmao

Incredibly ugly URLs

This one has also given me an interesting picture of the places where there isn't very much coverage as far as non-centralized record dependence. PDS-based data requests require authorization (that is, being logged in as an account) for everything, so at present the only real public API for things like full user data (with numbers for followers, following, and posts) or feed contents (getting the posts themselves; afaik constellation backlinks only get things that link to the feed) while logged-out are via the Bluesky AppView. You can however make a lot of it work without that, as for example Red Dwarf has demonstrated.

On a related note I've also been collecting these things:

List of Independent ATProto Network Services

I know some other people are working on AppView projects, though, so maybe that'll change...

Selfhost All The Things

I keep thinking it'd be interesting to self-host a relay for ATProto (probably using the rsky codebase?) and maybe set up a feed generation thing? Skyfeed looks like a really good tool even though I'm garbage at Rust. (I want to get better at Rust because it's really zippy but unfortunately when you need to unwrap vs. not gives me a headache. Maybe if I just do the Rustlings course it will all be revealed to me.)

I also kind of want to run a Constellation instance but I keep having trouble getting rocksdb to build because it's. Chonky, apparently.

I also want to set up an instance of PDFDing to organize all my PDF files that I've just accumulated over time either via asking academic friends to grab me papers or hoarding zines and papers or archive.org-ing and pdfing articles I am sure I won't like so I can avoid giving them the clicks. The main problem is the documentation is kind of annoying on how you do the config since the only install instructions are via docker? pls

The other thing I keep thinking about doing is operating a managed hosting service for friends where it's like cheap and I just run a VPS or two for people to put HTML files or wordpress on. HestiaCP looks like a good option for a dashboard but obviously that's kind of an involved project.

IDK what are you guys doing

tell me in the comments!! what are your hack projects