Coding updates
I recently leveled up my development process for web projects. Don't tell anyone but I've largely been operating without a dev environment. When you're coding for yourself and it's low risk, it doesn't really prove much of a concern.
Recently I finally began to implement the dev server on the local laptop within an Ubuntu WSL sandbox. And I've been slowly migrating projects into it. This blog was today's migration as I came back to working on some things.
5Flix was the first one I put in the WSL sandbox as I wanted a better ability to tweak its design and admin tools without risking messing up my friends' streaks and such on the site.
My latest personal project is one I'm calling 'Alchemy' - I haven't said anything about this one yet. It is a bespoke organization system that I use in my daily work, which combines a kanban board for my ongoing task lists, and then an Eisenhower matrix for my daily organization, with a few other aspects thrown in. Like Glowbug (my blog's homebrew CMS) I expect Alchemy to remain a personal tool and not be something I share more broadly, but we'll see.
Another small project that I have going, I call '2ndmon' as in 'second monitor.' I found I wanted a news hub for a second (or third monitor) and couldn't find what I wanted. So I put together a simple tweetdeck RSS reader for a few news feeds, then added some other small features like a set of global time clocks, and weather, etc. It's super lightweight and easy. Right now I use: NPR, Al Jazeera, and Factal. And before anyone asks it's because they are the best RSS feeds I could find without jumping through too many hoops or dealing with too much noise.
Lastly I have my ongoing personal tool for generating my top movie list simply called 'MovieRank.' It's an overengineered movie battler which puts movies into an Elo driven ranking system. It automatically pulls newly released movies in and if I happen to watch something not in it, it can quickly pull the movie in. It also lets me slice and dice my movie rankings into groupings by: director, lead actors, genre, release decade, studio, franchise, etc. It's largely stable at this point and I haven't made any sizable code changes to it in a few months.
As for how I program, these days I program inside VSCode and make use of Claude Code. Love it or hate it, it is very good at many things. I still review all changes and code and do a fair bit myself, but I cannot deny that it is helpful to me as a hobbyist coder.
In some ways Claude has changed how I enjoy coding as a side hobby, I compare it to someone who was a whittler buying a lathe or something. It gives me a lot more power and capability to do things faster than I could before.
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