Thinking of Atari Writer

Where I have fond memories of AtariWriter

AtariWriter is like a time machine

My first job doing computer work was for my Mom, who worked at a doctors office. They didn't have the means to easily send out dunning letters, so she recruited me to use AtariWriter to do a mass mailing of dunning letters with addresses and names.

AtariWriter was totally cool, you could spell check, mail merge and the file didn't disappear when you turned off the computer, if you remembered to save the file.

This weekend I had some LLMs generate the whole thing, including a bunch of cool accessory features to try to make it useful.

I will probably have to do a lot of manual tweaking to find the right mix of retro and modern usability.

Did I work on the right kind of side project?

Did I work on the right kind of side project?

Choosing a side project:

December just wrapped up and I didn't get done nearly as many professional side projects or portfolio projects as I'd hoped, I got the flu instead.

My career happens to be almost entirely "Business Computing", helping large organizations capture data, do something with it, search and aggregate it sometimes.

Those projects are huge, multiyear projects that take 10 people to create it, another 3-5 people to maintain it forever.

I have maybe 4 hours to do a side project, maybe 20 spread across a month. So I've been doing small python libraries and CLI tools and I go out of my way to avoid incorporating server products or databases.

On one hand, I have built up a portfolio of side projects that are complete, but none of them are interesting to hypothetical recruiters for "Business Computing"

So I'm pivoting to trying to do more mini-websites. I still don't plan to host a live 24x7 database, but I can make

• a local first experience
• generate a static website
• record a YouTube video of what it does because no one in my target audience will clone my repo and do the 20 steps to install
• blog about it with some screenshots

Now I just need to time travel back in time and reallocate all the time I spent on my past portfolio projects.

Side projects

Github and ChatGPT experiments, learning about mono and polyrepos

Migrating my docker images to github.

I find Github's pricing guidance bemusing, but it looks like I can host more public images on Github than I can on Dockerhub (many more than 1 vs 1). The limits are on bandwidth per month (1GB) with no obvious guidance on how that is calculated.

Anyhow, my Stackoverflow novelty build tool and my text editor novelty are both available prebuilt.

The most challenging part was learning about Github secrets.

• I used a recommended workflow file that logs into Dockerhub and Gitlab
• I had to realize GITLAB_TOKEN is automatically available and I don't have to create such a secret.
• I had to create an environment
• Set that environment to "all branches"
• I had to edit the workflow file to explicitly name a environment: NAME_OF_MY_ENVIRONMENT

Next I guess I will experiment with pex/shiv and other ways to package a

Monorepo and polyrepo build strategies

I just started looking at this stuff. They both appear to be alternate ways to deal with dependency hell. If you read up on the sort of solutions for monorepos, you get ideas for doing the same thing with polyrepos, e.g. builds that trigger builds in other repos, making changes to many repos at the same time as a sort of "transaction".

So far, I've found tools like gita which run the same git command against many local repos. The build server part depends on your host, but API for github, gitlab, etc, would simulate the build-script-of-build-scripts. Anyhow, cool stuff.

Playing Toca Boca on ChatGPT

My 6-year-old daughter and I have been playing Toca Boca with ChatGPT. It is difficult. You prompt needs to:

• Get it to stop saying, "Oh, I'm just a model, I can't do anything"
• Get it to stop saying, "Oh, I'm just a model, I have no wants"

If you tell it to write at a 6-year-old's level that helps.

Another challenge is that Assistant can't cope with arbitrarily messed up English. Humans can just sound out a 1st grader's text and get it, but Assistant just can't cope. It isn't sounding out word, it can't hear.

Meta and stuff

Whatever man, I don't know.

Telling Assistant to translate python code to Go

Yesterday was spent hacking on ChatGPT. I almost got it to convert pymarc to golang. The key is to strip down the source code to the bare bones so that it can fit into Assistants memory.

I tried python-minifier but that didn't really help, I think it made it worse by nearly obfuscating some code. If I can't read it, Assistant probably can't either. I think it just needs comments and docstrings stripped out. Assistant really also can only see things as one document, so if you got 10 files, it needs them merged to one, in an order than tells a story.

Chasing Markdown down a rabbit hole

A while ago I tried to create a markdown build script. Markdown is such a weird thing. It is English, so it needs spellcheck, grammar check. It is a templating language so it can benefit from linting. It also an input to a lot of CMS's that all did different things to handle Markdowns limitations.

Here is what I made:

• A build script
• A pre-commit script

I also had the pre-commit hook call the build script adn the build commit call pre-commit run and wondered why it took forever.

And cloudflare fought with me until I wrote this script to deploy it.

• Cloudflare pages deploy