I’ve posed about some of these projects before, and I used to regularly post little overviews of the things that I’m working on. But I’ve not done a lot of this recently. Time to do some back fill.

I think it’s probably good to take a step back from time to time and inventory and evaluate the priorities of various projects. Not to mention the fact that I usually say “I’m not really doing much these days,” when this isn’t really true. Here goes:

Mango

This is a project that is private, at the moment, because its mostly useful as an experimental piece of testing infrastructure for work. The idea is to use the same underlying infrastructure to start, stop, and configure processes, but provide REST and command line interfaces for all of these operations.

We have a lot of distinct software that does this internally and it’s always fragile and limited. While grand discussions of code reuse are sort of silly, in this case, it’s a bit annoying that we’ve reinvented this wheel a dozen times… And have to make different changes to a dozen tools as configurations change.

This was also my first project written in Go, which means its been a great learning experience and the place where a number of other Go packages that have become useful in their own right.

Future work:

• Write all the tests.
• Make the REST interface feature compatible with one of the legacy tools it aims to supplant.
• Make a new REST interface that’s more sensible and might be easier to use in more circumstances.
• Figure out better ways to block for the appearance of synchronous operations, despite the fact that internally the operations are non-blocking.

Gimlet

Gimlet Blog Post

Gimlet Github

This is really just some convenience work to make it easy to build REST interfaces in Go, without needing to suffer through tools that are designed to support complete “full-stack” web applications. It’s built on the same Negroni/Gorilla Mux stack that I think everyone uses, and it’s very net/http compliant, but with an API that makes it easy (even fun,) to provide high quality JSON+HTTP interfaces.

It struck me, when working on part of Mango, that this chunk of the code didn’t have anything to do with the actual core application and was all about getting a REST-like application to happen. So I split that out, for everyone’s pleasure/suffering.

Future work:

• Documentation.
• More tests.
• Exposed API stabilization and versioning.
• Develop story for authentication, sessions and SSL termination.

Grip

Grip Blog Post

Grip Github

Grip is a logging package for Go that attempts to resolve my constant feelings of “I miss x feature of the Python logging package.” It’s not feature comparable with Python logging (but that’s ok,) and since I was working on writing a logging package, I got to add some nifty features.

Future Work:

• More documentation.
• Better examples, and potentially support for “print this message x% of the time.”
• Support for logging to conventional syslog sources in addition to systemd’s logging.

Archer/Dropkick

I’ve wanted to work on a tool to unify a number of personal operations and scripts in a single system and tool. The problem that I’m trying to solve is that I have a number of different computers that I use with some frequency, including laptops, desktops, and a number of servers, and test systems, and I want to be able to describe their configuration, and synchronize files and git data between machines with ease.

My first approach was getting a bunch of random system setup scripts out of a makefile and into a configuration file that a Go program knew how to read and process, and then to expand from there.

I haven’t gotten to the git repository management stuff, because I was working on the Gitgone project.

Future Work:

• add better support for creating and managing containers and images using systemd-nspawn and docker.
• support for setting up git repositories
• support for syncing automatically (i.e. dropox-like functional it -> dropkick).
• report status of repositories via a REST API
• triggering syncs on remote systems.

Gitgone

Gitgone Github

The idea here is to provide a consistent and full featured way to access and interact with git repositories from Go without needing to wrap the git command yourself (or worse, learn the ins and outs of the git2go). This is largely modeled off of a similar project I did as part of libgiza that does the same sort of thing for Python repositories.

The cool thing about this project is its build abstractly so that you can use one interface and switch between a libgit2 implementation and one that wraps the git command itself.

Future Work:

• complete implementation using libgit2
• write more extensive tests.
• add support for creating repository tags.
• provide access to the log.

Novel Project

I’ve been, sporadically, working on notes for writing a new novel. It’s not going anywhere fast, and I’m not even to the point. where I’m outling plot.

I’m trying to tell a story about urban development and how smaller local communities/groups participate in larger communities/groups. How does urban development in place a, impact nation building more globally, and what does this all look like to people as they get to work in the morning, and have to build neighborhood institutions like gyms and restaurants and grocery stores.

But there’s a lot of work to do, and while thinking about the project is fun, there’s a lot of work, and I feel like I’m not ready to commit to a writing project of this scope and, I’m not sure how publishable this project will be (and furthermore, even if its' publishable, will I be willing to do all of that work.)

Software projects are much harder to justify and prioritize than writing projects.