Nik Kantar

Monday, August 9, 2021
2 min read

Project Directions

Some of my projects are languishing and need rethinking.

Hi. I’m still in the process of ingesting and digesting this hard to swallow pill, so please bear with me. :D

Here’s my GitHub activity for the past year, as of today, Monday, 9 August, 2021:

My GitHub activity

As you can see, there was a flurry of excitement in the first two months of the year, and, uhh, well not a whole lot since—or before. I’m currently in the acceptance stage about the fact that I’m just not that dedicated to maintaining a bunch of low impact projects. The reality is that I also enjoy a lot of things that aren’t software, and my day job is v. awesome and fulfilling.

Which begs the question of the futures of my various projects. Libraries and command line tools are already in a good place, effectively being in maintenance mode, so there’s really nothing to cover there. Some of the web apps I have are also fine as they are, but two in particular are in need of serious rescoping: Starminder and Microblot.

Starminder

Starminder is currently a woefully outdated Flask app, with dependencies last updated…nevermind. I recently rewrote the whole thing in Django to consolidate my projects around a unified stack for consistency, but have since realized that’s still not good enough. I’m currently working on an implementation that would deprecate the web app entirely for the price of some extra user effort.

Microblot

Microblot isn’t launched yet, and at this point I don’t think it will be in its current state. The current (tentative) implementation is designed as a multi-tenant SaaS web app for me to run for everyone, and I’ve recently realized that would be a full time job in its own right, except for the lack of a paycheck. I’m still not quite sure what I’ll do with it, but one good option is downscoping it to a single-tenant web app everyone could run for themselves. The parts relevant for that are actually mostly done, amusingly enough.


Tags: projects

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Older:
Quick and Dirty Python: HOWTO
Newer:
Starminder v2