reaper's rants,notes and stuff
How we afford to merge N PRs per month There was a post by the founder of Bruno about our OSS stats in the past year. They are impressive but also not super high since I've seen smaller teams like Nuxt churn out more than this. LinkedIn A Few Fun Stats From The Last 12 Months Of Anoop M D There's 1 small reason for this: the test suite. Bruno as a project has a few parallel suites when it comes to…
How I keep hosting cheap If you've been around my portfolio a lot of things that I've hosted are either on vercel or on my VPS and I've had a post before that talks about how selfhosting might not be for you . Compute isn't free but it's definitely can be made cheaper if you do something similar. My apps or rather the delivery artifacts for most of these can be split into the following categories.…
The Relaunch of TillWhen I kinda announced this on twitter a few days back but here's a tiny announcement for the readers. TillWhen( https://tillwhen.barelyhuman.dev ) is back up and running. I don't have any of the data cause the time I shut it down I didn't really think I'd be in a state to bring it back up but life has been great and I have enough funds right now to keep it up. On that note, I…
The Fear Ahoy humans! I've not written for a few months now. I don't have anything to write about anymore. Nor am I confident that I'll become the cool developer I'd be if I followed the path I had laid out. The meaning of development has changed a lot, it's taken away the thinking, the control, the joy of solving problems. I put the problem down and it get's solved automatically. I'm not scared…
Don't forget the layers It’s easy to get tunnel vision when working on a codebase that you think is simple and straightforward. But there’s this sneaky layer that most of us ignore until it bites us: the abstractions. So, I was working on Ping. Everything was fine until, I see my resend account has been sending a lot of mails in the past week and I see that it's sending it to the same email…
Self hosting might not be for you I host quite a few things, both on Digital Ocean as droplets (their name for a compute instance) and on my Thinkpad for keeping things in my control. The post is for people who find things like these cool and would like to self host and provide apps for free to others. To summarise, it all costs money and it's not a small amount. Tiny example, I have a service…
Another one about build setups Part - II Hey, reaper back for Part II. So far we did UI composition, SSR, bundling, hydration, and a non-functional server and client router. Let's try to map things so they are a little more functional You can read the Part 1 here TOC Routing Client Sided Routing Developer Experience Routing Client Sided Routing You can actually skip this section for your setup as…
Another one about build setups Part - I Hey, the name's reaper. I work on various experimental solutions for working with web apps, ASTs, and generally play around with languages. Mentioning all this because I'm not some random dude who started working on the web yesterday and is teaching you things today. Moving on, I've advocated the use of custom setups and simple build tooling quite a bit on…
Store I've been building and sharing random tools, scripts, and experiments for a while now. Some of them get used, some just sit in a repo collecting digital dust. To add to that digital dust, introducing the Store. No, it’s not a Shopify clone or some drop-shipping hustle. It’s just a simple page where you’ll find things I’ve built—apps, scripts, maybe a zine or two—some free, some paid, all…
Migrating from Cloud storage solutions A few weeks back, I started getting the 99% storage notification from Google Photos, which reminded me that I had a PiGallery server running on my Raspberry Pi that I hadn't used in a while. Got me thinking about moving away from the dependency on Google photos as a backup server considering a small change in how the countries function would lead to me…
Thinkpad I should add tags to better organise things on this blog, but for now, let's get to the topic at hand. People have seen me advocate minimalism in design on this site, though that's not the only minimalist approach I follow. Out of habit—or due to the constant nagging by my parents—I'm also someone who believes in spending only as much as is actually needed or in short, frugal living. This…
State of Preact 2025 (Q1) by reaper While there isn't an official "State of Preact", here are updates since the last time I mentioned working on the ecosystem . The Preact ecosystem continues to thrive, largely due to the effectiveness of its React compatibility layer. While there's not much to discuss in that aspect, let's look at a few new tools that were built. preachjs/popper A helper library…
Low traction products I wanted to write a rant, but I guess we are going to be wholesome for this one. Firstly, I'm grateful for all the users that decided to try out https://ping.tinytown.studio and also to all the devs that use goblin.run . The side effect of building things for your niche use cases is that in most cases no one other than you might use it. I used to build with that mentality…
2024 Analysed Another 365 days done and I did a few things, failed at a few other things, figuring out some things and happy about some things. The biggest change was probably my day job this year, I moved from Fountane to NearForm which changed a few things, I now have more time during the day to work on OSS and it's a little less hectic due to time discipline imposed by the company. I got…
Reminisce Often think of things I've made. Things that made me feel cool. Things that made it feel fun. Life now keeps me busy and steals the fun away.
Thing's I've tried I often talk about things going wrong but let's talk about the things I've tried, no failure, no success, just things I found cool and tried to do. Note: Everything here is still in the realm of programming I don't know if I should do this in terms of a timeline or alphabetically by project so I'll just go with timeline. I don't plan to bore you by explaining how a to-do app I…
Announcing Ping Announcing Ping , a simple no sign up solution for uptime notifications. It's a micro app I built for my own use case but it's here for everyone to use. If you wish to understand why I built it you can read the previous post . I don't have a 100 word short essay to describe what it does and, doesn't do. It's a very tiny service and pretty self explanatory. The features were built…
remember Do one thing at a time Learn to listen and learn to ask questions It's okay to build things for yourself and not have any users Build for learning over earning Help people as much as you can Learn to obsess over quality Build at your own pace and be consistent about it
Managing Site Uptime and dealing with the state of urgency We've had a our fair share of down time with the side projects that I build and since there's not a lot of users the downtime mostly goes unnoticed unless I need the app for something. Recently, goblin.run started gaining some traction and it's become important to have the site running all the time. The number of users are unknown because…
One a Month This is a simple addition to the previous post Re: On hobbies, side projects, and money . The Ko-Fi page for barelyreaper also has 1 a month enabled so if you are someone who doesn't have a Github account and would like to support using something else then you can use the Ko-Fi page. Links Github Sponsors Ko-Fi Supporters You can find more details about this and the list of supporters…
Re: On hobbies, side projects, and money A recent post from Manuel Moreale (On hobbies, side projects, and money) made me realise that the boundary between side project and hobbies in my case is very thin. While a lot of what I write comes with the intention of "I'm building it for myself and it might help someone else out", the result of most of what I build never reaches to the masses or not…
Asahi Linux Fedora Checklist $ -> Normal user mode $! -> Root user mode Post Install Fedora Setup the root password for admin access for other tasks $ sudo su $! passwd If you wish to re-map the keys of the macbook, run the following $! echo 'options hid-apple swap_fn_leftctrl=1' > /etc/modprobe.d/keyboard.conf $! dracut -f # will get stuck for a bit, let it work everything out Edit GRUB to give…
Faux Javascript I wouldn't be the first to think of a language that could be functional and compile to JS and I probably won't be the last one. A lot of what's good about functional languages doesn't work well with Javascript when working with limited hardware. If you're someone who finds RAM and CPU to be very cheap today, this post isn't for you Let's take a tiny JS snippet and set a little…
The Pixel 3a No, this isn't a review for the Pixel 3a. Context If you've met me in real life, you've seen me with my tiny phone the 12 mini, and as much as I like the phone itself the battery degradation has gotten me frustrated from using the phone more than once and so as always I carry a backup phone. The backup phone has been the Nokia 5310 (2020) version which is a very powerful dumbphone for…
Making something
A Failure We talk so much about success and celebrating it and we forget that there is a big hidden part behind it. We all have different definitions of success and i'm glad we have that choice though I'm not so sure about how we all try to hide our failures. A big part of our life involves going through small and random failure and yet we decide it's necessary to keep it hidden to look good.…
The barelyhuman.xyz crash I don't know how long the site's have been down since I haven't had the chance to work on any of my public projects. If you are someone who uses any of the following for your use case or for learning and it was down, I apologize for the downtime and they are now back up. https://og.barelyhuman.xyz https://music.barelyhuman.xyz https://barelyhuman.dev…
Updates (May 2024) A few things happened this month and we are now done with whatever work I had outside of my development life. Since we are back, a few things have gotten attention and are being worked on, here's the log for that. jotai-form There's isn't a huge update here, just started fixing existing issues and adding a few more DX helpers, one of which is being able to use zod schema's to…
I rewrote Alvu Reader's who've been around might know about the tool that builds this website. It's called alvu and it was my little attempt at building a content generation system. Wasn't the first static site generator I built but is probably the last one since the idea has worked so well for the past few years that I don't think I need something else unless my needs for it increase. Alvu itself…
FossFox and it's shutdown The job market isn't a fun place for most people, I personally had a hard time looking for one before I joined NearForm and the fact of the matter is that it didn't matter what my resume had or how skilled I might be cause I didn't even get a single reply. I don't want to dig up what all happened but UpStash and Nearform were the only 2 replies I got from about 190…
Poor man's fuzzy search Been a while since I suggested how to do things or what alternatives exist for a particular problem. We are dealing with Search today. Why? Recently had to re search (no pun intended) about searching algorithms and various platform specific solutions for fuzzy searching. One of the requirements was for a large data set and the other was for mudkip The Problem You see,…
Updates April 2024 Haven't posted for a while now... Site Updates Moving forward, I won't have a twitter for a bit and all updates will be a part of this website. I don't plan on convoluting the Writing section with all the developer updates and instead will just have the same post index it always did. On the other hand, for people who'd like to follow the development update or read a feed of…
I circled back to Preact I've mentioned about liking arrowjs and working with it for simple and straight forward web apps with minimal interaction. The concept of being able to do it all without build tools sat well with my goal of plainjs The overall concept of reactivity as a primitive instead of the entire framework isn't new and is also something SolidJS has proven to be a good base to work…
My Framework Space 2023 - 2024 What is the one thing that the web dev worlds has too much of? Frameworks . It's basically (n+1)-d number of frameworks. d represents the humans who have mixed opinios thus reducing count and n is the original number of opinions. It'd be worthless to spend time finding an answer to that expression. Anyway, everyone seems to have a favorite framework and…
Personality In a Webpage Websites are a beautiful concept, being able to make art using digital pixels and content is something I really wish more people could do and a lot of people are working on making websites easy for people as well. I'd say Framer is one of the few services doing this today. Though, the post isn't about Framer. It's about the people who are really fond of working on websites…
The Decent Developer Over the years, this post has taken a different form everytime I wished to write about it. It's been written as a guide for other developers to read through. It's been a cry for help from a developer who wasn't able to achieve anything. There also was a version where I just felt I couldn't really produce any value for anyone anyway and was going to rant about not having a…
Announcing arrow-render-to-string It's rare for me to build something for the external world but here's a package I ended up building while working on another project which I'll talk about later. ArrowJS ArrowJS is a simple UI library which takes the most minimal approach at writing UI libraries. Something I truly wished I had come up with but I'm happy it exists. If you've seend my tweets/Xeets…
Programming Languages I like Disclaimer : Not going to declare a "best programming language" here, you can find that drama pretty much all over the web If you don't know me, short context about stuff I do when I'm bored. I pick up existing simpler projects that I can find or have built before and then build it again in another programming language that seems interesting. A lot of these projects…
Multiple XCode version on Fastlane This is a short write up on how to have multiple Xcode versions on your local CI without using vagrant images and virtual boxes. For context, I handle simplification of tech and automation at Fountane and the following is basically how we handle MacOS CI boxes. We've got 2 setup's, one is my own macbook and the other is a Mac Mini provisioned by Scaleway . The…
Hate and Responsibility Disclaimer : None of this is with regards to anything that has happened to me, I've just been a witness to it. Sometimes I wished I was famous so shit I said would get some attention, I'll rant about it anyway. The hate I've been seeing towards devs online has gotten worse day by day. People acting like OSS devs owe them something. No, we don't. The entire premise of OSS…
Moving from PM2 and Nginx to Traefik I use pm2 and Caddy or in complicated apps nginx to manage my personal projects. Simply because I can pretty quickly fix and update things if anything breaks and that's limited to my personal projects. I can't do this when I'm working at my day job since those apps are mid to large sized and it's not a good idea to not add in any kind of fault tolerance to it.…
Me and Numbers I announced rawjs.xyz the past week and well, due to the nature of where it's heading as a project, I had to add analytics to it. For people worried about privacy, I'm using plausible so, no, I'm not tracking you . Why do we need analytics though, did no one figure out a way to know if users are interested in your app, site without having to secretly pick up if the site is being…
Typing routine I'm no typing speed expert, nor am I the fastest typer in the world. My typing speed varies from 110-120WPM depending on amount of coffee intake. Anyway, I've basically setup a daily routine that helps me warmup before I start working and this has also helped increase my speed over time where 110WPM is a very easy goal for me to reach. I don't have any scientific tips but these are…
Announcing rawjs.xyz Tiny post. I made something: https://rawjs.xyz The goals of the project is to be able to help all kinds of JS developers while keeping the knowledge as unopinionated as possible, we also plan to let other contribute articles about topics that do need attention are not feeding the current hype. The current state of JS is widely dominated by libraries and frameworks which make…
Docker Docker has been a part of my life for about 4.5 years now, it started as an experiment to be able to run a simple postgres instance locally and not for it's intended purpose of creating reusable app containers. This has been a great experience when I used to work with it on Linux based systems. Since the virtualization doesn't need a new qemu instance and is mostly based off the…
An Imposter Most skills have an easier progression to start with, and as you get better the harder progressions get easier to pick up. It's no different with programming either. Though, the feeling of "I've not accomplished enough" is somehow greater and a lot more common in programmers. I can't speak for everyone but for me it does get to me, I stop coding for a while when it does and I can't do…
My Craft Every developer I envy has a particular craft, some like designing really cool interactions. Some are great at building layers of functionality that help ease work and some built entire systems like it's nothing. You can also bring in serial indie hackers and their craft is being able to ship ideas like it nothing. I've not talked about my history but I've tried to be one of each over the…
The Change I've always been the kind to be able to help others with things I understood and it's never profitable when you are of that mentality. I was fine with that since having a day job took care of the finances for my life and I didn't have to worry about them when writing open source tools and reference codebases. Most of what I've built is either a smaller reference to larger problems and…
Shutting down TillWhen 3 Years... TillWhen came into existence as an alternative to Toggl. It didn't try to compete with Toggl but just had to have the bare minimum features to be called a Time Tracker/Logger. It was a project where I experimented with designs I thought would look good, typography that would look nice, and in some cases also built internal libraries and tools. Overall, the project…
commitlog - A recap It's been about 2 years since I wrote commitlog#b0f1b1d2bc4265cb72b70b3ae5b60f8e65f47b12 and it's gone through a few changes from when it was first written. The post basically goes through things learnt during these additions. Reasoning The reason is same as what's written on the README, I built it as a replacement to commitlint and commitlint-changelog generator but for all…