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Utility tool to help migration from Gatsby to Micro.blog
I wrote a little tool yesterday to help me normalize my markdown files from the Gatsby site to be able to import them into Micro.blog properly. Especially I wanted to have redirects setup automatically for all the old posts. My site had simple slugs like holgerfrohloff.de/power-laws. Micro.blog sets up the posts using the dates => https://holgerfrohloff.de/2019/03/01/power-laws.html
For that to work, I needed to have the permalink added to the frontmatter. That wasn’t the case for the majority of posts. I didn’t want to change this manually, so I wrote a script thingy to do it for me. https://github.com/5minpause/postsnormalizer
So maybe this could be helpful if you want to migrate a GatsbyJS site to Micro.blog. /cc @manton
Finally made the migration
I finally made the migration to micro.blog with my personal site https://holgerfrohloff.de All the posts and newsletters I’ve written are migrated. They are still being published so they are not styled, yet. Have to migrate all pages as well. And then the overal design of the site. I want it to look a little bit different and also showcase some of the functionality that microblog offers me now. Overall I am happy to be even more part of the IndieWeb now.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
Rückblickend
Ich schrieb ja, dass ich Bahn fuhr. Ich war unterwegs nach Werder (Havel) zu einem kleinen Hotel. Dort verbringe ich das Wochenende, allein und zurückgezogen.
2018 und 2019 nahm ich mir die Zeit auf das Jahr zurück zu blicken. Ich hatte ein großes Notizbuch (A4! go big or go home!) zur Hand und schrieb mit Stift meine Gedanken dazu auf, wie das Jahr lief. Was war gut, was nicht. Und was war dazwischen. Anschließend schrob ich den Ausblick auf das kommende Jahr; Machte mir Gedanken, was wichtig würde und was ich wertschätzen möchte. 2020 und 2021 machte ich das nicht. Am Ende von 2021 schrammte ich knapp an einem Burnout vorbei, wenn ich meiner Ärztin vertrauen möchte. Es fühlte sich zumindest auch sehr danach an.
Dieses Wochende werde ich jedenfalls wieder schreiben. Und nachdenken. Vor allem nachdenken.
Ich bin mit zwei Kunden, die ich ins neue Jahr begleiten darf, gut aufgestellt. Cashflow ist gesichert und die Perspektive gut. Mit Freunden evaluiere ich Ideen, was noch mögöich wäre, wie die nächsten 5-10 Jahre noch abwechslungsreich und spannend werden könnten. Da habe ich ein bis zwei Ideen. Aber erstmal werde ich nachdenken. Und dann schreiben und dabei weiter denken.
Wenn ich mal Bahn fahre…
Bin mit der Bahn unterwegs statt dem Auto. Will gar nicht weit fahren, nur ein bissel Regio. Aber der ist zu spät und verspätet sich während der Fahrt noch mehr. Schaffe meinen Anschluss nicht. Die Fahrt mit dem Auto wäre warm und schön gewesen und hätte planmäßig schon nur 50% der Zeit gedauert. Jetzt fahre ich fast 3h und friere. So macht das keinen Spaß.
Maintaining custom software
Jeena writes about the challenge to maintain a custom blog software.
I've neglected my rails application which runs my own website for many many years, mostly because it's a lot of work to keep upgrading rails especially when it comes to major version changes. Dependencies break and disapear, API's break, you need to rewrite a lot of code because new concepts and data structures gets introduced, etc. Anyway now I need to upgrade from rails 4.2 which was released 8 years ago to 7.0 which was released last year.
I still like to have written my own website because this way I can have exactly the functionality which I want, not someone else. But it's a lot of work.
I feel the challenge. I started rewriting this very site in Rails, to be able to include Webmentions and support other IndieWeb features. But sadly, I didn’t find enough time
recently to work on the project.
So cheers to Jeena and hopefully, he’ll be able to upgrade to Rails 7.
Once I’ve finished some more client projects, maybe I’ll be able to take the time to work on this site more.
MacOs 12 makes it harder to know the selected keyboard layout
MacOS 12.4 changes the display of the selected keyboard layout. Before 12.4 it used to be a country’s flag. I could discern the selected layout from glancing to the menu bar and recognize the flag (US or Germany). That was quick and easy. Now they changed it to show two white-ish letters or black background.
I have to read the actual letters to know the layout. I don’t think this really helps anything. It only makes things look more similar, uniform and boring. Maybe there is a setting to revert that back to colorful country flags, but I am not hopeful. 😑
GitHub Codespaces port errors
GitHub codespaces is a great feature by GitHub that let’s me work on an iPad way easier than it was before. It’s also cool for teams to quickly setup a new developer, of switch between branches.
I use it for Ruby on Rails development, mostly. Sometimes a thing happens that prevents me from continuing
my work and I had trouble finding out how best to solve this. Here’s what happens:
I start my codespace and want to spin up a Rails server, to inspect the website.
Once I type bin/rails s the server starts and I get the notification to open up the browser in a new tab.
When I navigate there, I see this screen:
It’s a message from nginx that tells me that there is a 502 Bad Gateway error when I want to access my codespace.
The solution that always helps me is to unpublish the port and re-publish it again. Here’s how that looks in the interface:
That should solve your issue and you can quickly access the website.
Something new
Changes!
I joined my last client, Edeka, in April 2020. Since then I am not freelancing anymore. My old Wordpress site ran on quite expensive hosting. Which I could justify as a business expense. But since those are gone now, I have to switch to something cheaper.
This site now runs as a GitHub pages site, powered by Gatsby. Which I love quite a lot. And now I am free to experiment with this site more, again.
Onboarding new team members
Tomorrow I will help a new team member onboard at my client. I am the acting tech-lead for the client right now and so it’s my job to make sure that everything is in place for this new member of the team.
The former tech lead onboarded me in September (not so long ago). He had prepared a list of tasks we had to do together. He even created a whole new Trello board, just for the onboarding. Did he do it because it was so laborious? No! In fact, the onboarding mostly consisted of joining the services and Saas applications we use and getting familiar with all the processes for running the show.
But it did help to be able to cross items off the list. We were always aware of which services were yet to join. We also knew what was missing until I was at 100%. That was certainly helpful.
When I am onboarded at a new client, I generally send them my onboarding survey beforehand. In it I ask questions that are relevant to the process and to me, and that come up with every client. Asking them these questions before I arrive, they tend to be better prepared.
I am really looking forward to having the new developer join the team, tomorrow. I bet he’ll do great. And to help him along, I’ll just follow my onboarding sheet. 😉
Do you use something similar?
Yours,
Holger
Why ist software so bad?
A couple of days ago I talked about the Akimbo podcast by Seth Godin. It was an eposide about opportunity cost and how that relates to livelong learning as a software developer.
This morning I was on the train to a dear friend who happens to help me with my financial retirement plannings. She helps me choose equity funds and all those things related. I decided to take the train instead of the bike, which is what I usually use to get around Berlin. Taking the train meant that I could write a few words that moved around in my brain. I also meant I could listen to music or a podcast. It just so happened that the latest episode from Seth was relevant to our topics here again. Its title is the same as this email’s subject:
Why is software so bad?
When I saw the title appear in the episode list in my podcast app of choice (Overcast on iOS), I just had to listen to it. In it, Seth compares the evolution of the development of cars to the stagnating evolution of software. I believe you will get a lot out of this episode. If for nothing else, you will at least get one or two ideas for a software startup you could pursue.
Here’s the link to the episode: www.akimbo.link/blog/s-5-…
See you next week.
Holger