Projects, July 2024
What have I been doing even?
Another bi-yearly retrospective and project update. I feel like this is a good routine, and I’m going to keep trying them out.
Stuff Did
Freelancing, Consulting, and Stucco Software
Uppsala Universitet turned out to be a bust. The visa process took so long, that by the time I arrived at Uppsala Universitet for my first day of work, the only person who remembered hiring me or why had left his job there. No one knew who I was, why I was there, or what I was supposed to be doing. On top of providing no relocation support or assitance, they didn’t even on board me or provide me a computer. It was weird and bad.
I did a couple months of work as best I could, developed some systems and prototypes for delivering Jupyter python notebooks as web apps with CI/CD containers which was very fun and cool, but ultimately decided I needed to do something else. This ended up being more freelancing, and what was functionally a management consulting gig for the Design Systems team at a Swedish scale-up called Mentimeter while I ran down my Visa. It was weird, fun, but hard and exhausting.
But I did manage to create a studio identity and site at Stucco Software, as well as build a cute lil app called Super Imposer 3000
rdf.systems
My journey into RDF and using for real world problems continued apace, and I starte fleshing out some very very low fi and simple demos of the sorts of things I want to be doing in this world at rdf.systems. I hope to grow this into more and more educational and R&D content and work.
Octothorp.es
Ním and I had been kicking around this idea for years, but this spring it occured to me I could whip up an MVP in a day. I did, and it sort of snowballed from there. I’m icredibyl proud of this work, and think it has a lot of potential. It will be ready for prime-time soon, but it’s still rad.
Lego Prints
And of course, I did manage to make a single, large Lego print and I am very happy with. I felt like I finally started to realize the promise of the format with this print, and I’m excited for all my gear to arrive from Stockholm so I can keep making more.
Moved back to Portland
Oh yeah, “Back from Stockholm”. We moved back to Portland. I’ll be writing more about this elsewhere.
What’s Next?
So, for the next 6 months what are my goals? How should I see the rest of 2024?
More Octothorpes
Obvi, Octothorpes needs to get finished and talked about and used and changed. This is a huge priority for me.
More Prints
I want to make more Lego and more Riso prints, especially since some good friends opened a shop. I want to see if I can sell a print for the first time in years.
Get Job
And, ultimately, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into getting a job. There’s real work I want to be doing with engineering management – bigger problems than I can do on my own, and I really like people management.
Projects I’m Dreaming About
I’ve also collected a … rather large list of ideas that I want to take a run at. Obviously this list is way larger than I actually have time for, but isn’t that the way. Here goes…
Knowledge graph integrations for slack and discord
Calendar app for Mac that is also a deck of cards.
Ship shape sheep sailors
Kids book about sheeps who are sailors. Retelling of the Odysee with a focus on collective action and solidarity.
CV as projected structure from graph data. Create the ontology for what a cv is, create the data structures for the cv, then cast into unique and customized documents per each app. Like a computational rhetoric device.
Could do the same with the cover letter! Maybe make it a video build in public series?
Hiring is fucked.
- Autofillers for the big boards?
- Job board middlemanning?
- scrape em
- Package em
- Send em out
- Auto apply
- Is this just a middleman board or placement agency?
- Trade Association / Coop / Union for referring and making placements?
Real-time Robo Rally; like live coding but it’s a Robo race
Robo rally style battle tactics game, unit by unit commands from a hand of cards with basically no information
Movable Feast Machine running a game that’s Ceasar3/DwarfFortress city builder game. Basic ancient/early medieval style village and city
MFM Robo Rally race
Multithreaded movable feast machine for cellular automata: bonsai mountains. Forked from sand pond, sand stones?
Art archiving app for phone, snap photos and automatically add meta labels, maybe some image processing for quick tagging? Dunno. 30 line spec on this one. Different than photo roll with automatic picture labeling and atuff
Octothorpes zine
Physical decks of cards w. HTML and JS APIs, for composing sites and apps physically.
Street Protest Zine
- How to treat teargas
- How to treat wounds
- What Portland cops do
- How to stay safe
- What if your arrested
Plural App / Soft App built out like wasp or tails/laravel fullstack framework
Runbooks as text adventure games, assistants that run in the CLI or desktop app.
A vision for Oregon; we could’ve a Scandinavian style state with equal standards of living. Our resource base is very proportional to swedens. And we’re nestled in a federal system, like Sweden. Could start an information resource project to understand this and build a vision for our state
I want an app for making an IBIS and publishing it to a website. Like Notion or iA but for building IBISsseseses.
Windbreak CSS; a browser plug-in for identifying tailwind components and assisting with migrating them to Regular CSS.
What bits of tailwind are worth keeping? Where is it actually helpful? What are the areas where tailwind is NOT helping?
https://github.com/cezaraugusto/extension.js
Web development courses and live streaming taught by muppets. Sesame Street meets code camp.
- The front end
- The back end
- Project management
- People management
- Tech culture
Multiplayer interaction in web-based slides. Plugin for iA Presenter? Fosstimeter (free open source Mentimeter)
Mastodon server that’s cheap to run and doesn’t DDoS people
What are the ethical frameworks that an organization is organized around?
ActivityPub serverless comments section - sign in with your masto and leave comments on web sites. Comments hosted on your jawn
What could RDF on JS modules do? A module exports a function as well as its own predicate/object relationships. Modules become composable, exploitable, the program becomes a huge graph that it’s operator can traverse. What would that look like in a cli? Or a gui?
More people should have cool websites because websites are cool. Why can’t you post to your own website? Why run all that they instagram or whatever?
Decentralized (or many centers) federated micropayments infra w token purchased
Podbase: Firebase backed by solid pods. Use yjs with web sockets and y Redis, persisting to a solid pod?
Online shopping sucks. Need different ways to explore and understand what’s available. Shop by style and size for example. Shop by color and size.
Sveltekit activity pub client that stores everything in a users solid pod - like what I imagine activitypods does
Halloween family idea: Ronan is a racquets, Emile a ball, mama and dada a net
Ncase has a good little app called Nutshells - it’s exactly like my own rdfa powered previewer. Make and release a standalone project that uses rdfa for making nutshells.
While we’re at the above, make one for the up to date preferred label component as well.
Login.stucco.software as a consumer coop business entity.
Recipes and cocktails linked data on Nikolas.ws
SVG Pixel Art Standalone App, colors and animations and stuff
Plural App & Soft App project starts. Introduction to them run as a workshop.
Warhammer lookup tables
Every unit cross referenced against every other with every option and upgrade, every variation and every option and potential.
Multiplayer Conway a game of life No pause just go
Expanded to game of ecology Different organisms Different scales Different behaviors Different interactions
Add-free content with paid subscriber codes. Pay monthly, hey n codes, enter code on site to attach to machine. Roll codes to retire.
One time codes All day codes Forever codes
Pocket Budget is still a good idea for an app
Game of interconnected life N different levels of species, from 0. Each level needs to eat the level below. No food, they die. No friends, they die. Eaten by level above, they die. If a cell dies and wasn’t eaten, it turns into a level 0.
Level 0 don’t reproduce or die. They just hang out on the board.
When there’s abundant food, a cell will spontaneously become alive.