Prototype Wrapup #12

After last week's decision to not commit to any particular number of prototypes, I wasn't sure how this week was going to work out. Maybe without the commitment I wouldn't bother to do any prototypess at all. Actually, it was fine and about on par with recent weeks.

Tuesday

I've had this idea for ages to make my Twitter profile auto-update with the current time in my timezone. I'd already checked out the Twitter API and the terms didn't seem to prevent it (they have a rate limit that works out to 1 request per minute). So I figured why not just hunker down and write it. I chose Rust because I thought it would be interesting to see how working with a REST API would work. Actually it turned out to be a pretty substantial pain in the butt, mostly because of OAuth. I tried to use someone else's OAuth library but it wasn't working and in the end I just wrote it from scratch. Works great though!

Wednesday

I wanted to do some more work on my promserver idea, but I wanted something with a bit more of a rigorous foundation. I figured it would be interesting to use Flowtypes to do that. It started to seem like more trouble than it was worth in a few places. Varargs and optional arguments basically just send Flowtype completely off the rails, and it was missing the types for some HTTP library internals that I needed. I still got something working, but it was way harder than it should have been.

Saturday

This was a bit more laid back and fun. I added two new MeDB plugins to look for the total karma this site has received on Reddit and Hacker News. I still haven't released MeDB even though it's basically ready, just because I still need to figure out how to make globally installed plugins work properly with Node. Still, my stats page now has a little bit more to look at.