Blog

I flew out to San Francisco to demo Podium, a peer-judging platform I’m building at Hack Club. While it worked reasonably well, I was able to observe some UX issues that I plan to address.

A journey across Canada with some really cool people

Learn the basics of Docker including: running containers, creating images, and using Docker Compose

Video demonstration Background Nearly two years ago, in August of 2022, I began work on Cross Blogger . Cross Blogger was my first Go project. Originally, I used it as an opportunity to learn about APIs and hoped that I might eventually be able to make it useful. At the beginning of 2023, I stopped working on it, however. I moved on to other programs and stopped using Go. I left it in a state where the program was usable, albeit useless. When I was first learning Go, I had not realized how important splitting code up into a multi-file structure is. Thus, the project’s code was contained in a single main.go file. Eventually, I realized that building projects with large file-structures is simple and makes programming significantly easier. This provided me with some motivation to come back to the project. It also gave me a project to do for Hack Club’s Arcade Hour. ...

Motivation I’ve seen projects where people bring x technology to devices that existed long before the technology existed. For example, while writing this, I learned about Web Rendering Proxy (WRP) which renders websites as a GIF or PNG but uses HTML image maps to allow the client to interact with the webpage. Email is a technology that’s been around since 1971 and will likely continue to be prevalent. Thus, making an email chatbot that used Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate responses seemed cool. In addition, with various educational institutions and workplaces blocking access to LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, email could theoretically be used to bypass these restrictions. However, it probably would be more effective to just use another client that isn’t blocked. ...

The beginning I’ve been working on a project called Pystodon . Pystodon is a Mastodon bot that I started working on in August of 2023, nearly a year before writing this post. While developing it, I noticed that I had the opportunity to build it like a framework by focusing on customizability through code. This was my first time building a library-like program and I tried to focus on usability not just for people interacting with the bot but also anyone who wanted to customize it. ...

Setting up a (simple) bridge between Matrix and Signal

Running Synapse in Docker to self-host a Matrix instance

I started using Github Actions a couple months ago. While I’m not a power user of Github Actions, I still find it to be powerful.