ejs

Trying to convince people to get kids outside for their eye health:

https://eyesoutside.org

&

Hardware for kids and parents to stay connected without screens:

https://readychime.com

I always thought it was an interesting story, drove out there one day many years ago when I lived nearby. It was a dreary day, which added to the strangeness of the place.

It's an interesting place because it's not that far from other towns, and you can drive right through it on a normal, maintained road. If you turn off and drive just a minute or two it's very different though.

I've been experimenting (over 130 test batches so far) with creating an all-purpose balm (lip, hands... stuff).

https://workingbalm.com

I wanted something more useful to carry than typical gooey lips balm full of petroleum and silicone.

Otel stuff always seems overly complicated to me, but it must just be the types of projects I generally work with. Feels like observability meets java.

I've dabbled in building a project that collects metrics from the logs for smaller projects. Everyone tells me it's a bad idea, but it seems to work well for me.

I built a system for collecting metrics via logs and has worked well for my apps when I don't want to set up a whole separate system for it.

I'm working on a tool to make tracking business metrics easy. [0]

I've always had issues collecting business metrics like "signups per day" in observability tools, but using marketing type tools comes with it's own set of problems.

[0] https://flexlogs.com/

Since this is a timescaleDB topic, would timescale not work? (With a basic DB and a few continuous aggregates running in the background?)

I've been using TimescaleDB for a while as a metrics datastore. It's really proven to be great for aggregating data without a lot of hassle (using continuous aggregates, retention policies, etc).

I recommend it when you don't want/need to have separate sources for account data and your metrics/aggregate data.

Yeah, understandable.

I’ve actually never been a fan of the “correct usage” that forgoes any spacing around it. I find it crowded and jarring.

I like to use a “thin space” around an em dash — it breaks it up without adding too much space.

I like using the em dash, but I try to limit it now—because chatgpt loves it even more. Maybe it's for the better, some people seem to have strong opinions about it.

As usual, isn't the next question... "What are you trying to build?"

I build most projects in Elixir/Phoenix these days, but wouldn't flinch at ROR if you are comfortable with it.

I love this, I've primarily been working in Elixir for a few years now and this is neat to see!

Yeah, unfortunately this is true. A street near my house has a limit of 40mph and people would regularly drive 60 mph+, sometimes someone would pass me doing 65+mph (it's a no-passing residential road).

Eventually someone died, and they added a lot of traffic-calming changes to the road. It's much nicer now, but a shame that someone had to die to change it.

I'm working on a solution for gathering product metrics and making sure applications keep running — when you don't want to install or maintain a lot of extra stuff. https://flexlogs.com

... also continuing to not add features to my (not-much-of-a) system for getting more done each week. https://carpeweekem.com

I've also been cautiously adding AI-powered features to my Heroku autoscaling tool (https://flightformation.com/) and a simple free-text time/date input has been the most popular (demo: https://x.com/ejschmitt/status/1893268742760448497)

Glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. For a small application when you just want some metrics and observability, it's a big burden to get it all working.

On my own projects, I send the metrics I care about out through the logs and have another project I run collect and aggregate them from the logs. Probably “wrong” but it works and it's easy to set up.

Yeah - that's my thought too, the service I use them for is not something people often log into. Sometimes never.

I usually implement the whole username/password auth flow, but recently used only magic links for a simple application.

Since the application only sends a weekly email (a markdown template for goal/task tracking) it seemed easier to just use a magic link, only.

I am happy at how much easier the auth code ended up, and fail to see much downside for such an application.

I'm not sure it would be a good system for more complex apps and services.

I had a sacrificial fence (wood) on the aluminum fence to reduce blowout. I had the aluminum extend to near the blade to reduce the deflection of the whole thing. It was too close.

Really, I should have sacrificed a crosscut sled for dado usage, but it really chews them up.

I love my sawstop, it's a great machine.

Often times when a product has some patent-protected feature, the product itself is substandard, but I have not found that case with sawstop. It's one of my highest quality tools.

It would be nice if the mechanism wasn't so destructive. I accidentally had an aluminum fence just a fraction of a mm too close, and it touched the blade. I was using a dado stack, and it did a number on the carbide teeth of the blades. Good dado sets are not cheap, nor is the sawstop cartridge.

Took too much time

This is great.

I used to avoid burl when I would make wood rings [1]. It's just very hard to predict how it'll behave if you try to steam bend it.

[1] https://woodaround.com

Maybe prefill it with an example?

It's hard to know at first glance if it's real or not. Many of these things end up abandon on the web, so it's hard to know the real ones that still work.

Thanks!

A bit of both, sometimes todos have to die I figure, so I just let them fall off the back.

Thanks for checking it out!

Yeah, currently I am just copy/pasting the Yearly Goals section over. I want to eventually add a feature to allow someone signed up for the email to edit that part. Then someone could modify that goal section and have it correctly emailed each week.

Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.

I made something to track those things easily.

https://flexlogs.com

And since it's Monday…

I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.

https://carpeweekem.com

Working on cleaning up my wood shop and trying to finishing my hand-tool wall.

Also building an easier way to add real-time metrics and monitoring to web applications: https://flexlogs.com

Also, this little side project for less overwhelming weekly goals: https://carpeweekem.com

I do the same, and I'll probably automate it soon since I use a fresh markdown doc.

The only thing that remains the same is the header has 'yearly goals'.

It's easy and I can jettison the previous week's unfinished tasks (hey they didn't get done so were they really important?).

Building this with Elixir: https://flexlogs.com

I've always found adding custom metrics and monitoring to applications to be a big hassle, so I'm experimenting with one that uses the log stream instead of agents/daemons.

I had these issues before for plenty of things, it just hurts the most when it's something non-essential. I've had outtages because silly system updates to slack broke and took things down. I run metrics and such out through logs these days because UDP don't care.

This is especially easy if you can shutdown environments that are only used for dev/staging tasks. With 168 hours in a week - how many hours do those things need to be running? I run a little tool for Heroku to make it easy to do this kinda thing.