Prototype wrapup #13

Last week I made 3 prototypes, and this week was 3 again. It seems much easier to work on prototypes when they happen to line up with a particular idea I'm working on (eg the Beyoncé numbers series or the medb ones). I'm beginning to think that one way to do more prototypes would be to have more prototype-sized problems. In other words, maybe it's supply-constrained and I could benefit from increasing the supply.

Tuesday

I wanted to work a little on my Automaintainer idea. It's already active on Github, but the rules aren't very discoverable (you have to go read a particular file). I wanted to generate neat badge images like the npm ones. So I started by figuring out how to do image generation using node-canvas. It was surprisingly easy after I sorted out some build issues.

Thursday

The next step was to build a web service around it. So this is just a simple Express server. I thought about building out the promserver/funserver idea from last week's prototypes a bit more, but I figured it would be better to get something that works sooner. I initially had a whole filesystem cache thing planned, but I ditched it because it was turning out to be more difficult than I wanted. Either I'll have to put that back in later when I deploy it or just put some other caching layer in front of it.

Saturday

I worked a little bit on a git visualisation idea. I've often thought that the DAG structure of Git makes it uniquely suited to graphical representation. Not for everyday use necessarily, but for thorny situations where you need to significantly reorder things or understand complex commit histories. I spent most of my time just getting NW.js going, but I got it listing a commit history for each branch, which I'm pretty happy with.