6 months... My last post was 6 month ago.

The thing is, writing a simple article takes time. English is not my mother tongue and everything is longer when you have to check every sentence trice !

Anyway, it has never been about stopping my posts here. I try to accomodate my family life, my work and my many projects, and it leaves me about zero minutes to posts about all of this.

Today I found some time... I got a new dog and I don't like to leave her alone when I home. I already spend a lot of time home working in my office while she's waiting downstair. So, why not taking some time to write a bit, sitting next to her!

Her name's Lily ! She's a Continental Bulldog. A perfect breed! I'll probably make a post in pets lovers about her!

But hey, that's not the point !

What Have I Been Up To ?

As my title says, I have been working on many different projects in the past 6 months. Let's have a little look at those.

A Patient file for my wife

When I met my now wife, 7 years ago, she was using a piece of software one of her teacher gave her to manage her patients file (she's an osteopath). It was a kind of Access database, on MacOS. But soon after, a MacOS update broke the software and I decided to write a little soft for her. It started as a Mono project and she's been using it for almost 5 years now.
But recently, I found myself struggling to develop and maintain the software.
So I decided to rewrite everything using Electron.JS (the multiplatform ability was mandatory). This is the project that consumed so much of my time lately !

The baby's not nice, but it works ! (I hid the names on the screenshot cause they are real persons)

What did I learn :

• the use of npm
• the use of yarn
• promises in Javascript

An auto voter for Hive

Yeah, I know, that's not exactly the spirit of this blockchain. But I'm a tech enthusiast and I like to push my limits and try new stuff.

The system is quite simple but it took a long time to put in place.
Here's the conceptual architecture :

I use the HiveSQL service to retrieve posts and author informations with Talend and feed a MariaDB with the necessary data.
There's a simple machine Learning algorithm (random forest) whose job is to indentify the best performing posts.
Then a python script gets the latest post, enrich them, call the model for prediction and then decide to vote or not.

Once again, it works. It ain't beautiful, but it works !
All this is running on a Raspberry Pi 3, leading us to the next project.

What did I learn :

• More Python scripting
• Use of virtualenv
• The mess with the different versions of everything related to Python
• Declaring a service in Linux (that was actually easy !)

A Raspberry Pi server

Using an old TV box that was abandonned at my parents house I set up a little server for my personal projects.
Specs :

• Raspberry Pi 3,
• 32Gb Micro-SD card
• 250Gb SSD on USB
• a powerful transformer

I set up a static internal ip and port forwarding to access it through SSH with private keys only. There's a no-ip like service on the fiber box, allowing me to access it from anywhere.

The GPIO are connected to the front panel buttons, but I did not implement the necessary tools to take advantage of it, yet.

My dream is to finally find a Raspberry Pi 4 (4Gb) at the official price and boost my little server.

What did I learn :

• Nothing really new ^^

A VSCode extension for Terraform & BigQuery

I work everyday with Terraform and BigQuery at my work.
There were many repetitive and boring activities, so I began to develop a little extension to increase my productivity.

I'm rewriting parts of the code now, because my terraform locals analysis was not very efficient: it was limited to string, and crashed with integers and conditional formatting.

At the moment, it can dry run a BigQuery query, retrieve the format from a query, handle terraform workspace and replace terraform variables in a query.

It still needs a lot of work !

What did I learn :

• Typescript (I love it, so much better than plain JS)
• VSCode extension internals
• Many JS/TS tricks

Conclusion

So, that's it!
This explain why I could not post more.
I'll try to be a bit more active and share my future projects with you.
There's one in particular that could interest the dev community on Hive (I hope ^^ )

I'll be happy to exchange with you about those projects if you have any question !!