Weeknotes: Claude

One of those weeks where you get to Thursday and realise you’ve accomplished next to nothing. The post-covid slump is real.

On the plus side I became a thought leader, and shipped the best thing I will ever work on.

A career high

For reasons unclear, Mrs Flinger wants to receive more iOS notifications. Specifically, she wants to receive a random quote from her collection at intervals throughout the day.

It occurred to me that you could cobble together a simple solution using My Notifier and GitHub Actions. It also occurred to me that this presented an opportunity for the greatest pun of all time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Missive Flinger.

Back to Hap

Not surprisingly, given my status as a vulnerable invalid, Hap has been neglected lately. Towards the end of the week, I found some time between coughing fits to work on it¹.

A quick refresher for those unfamiliar with the project: Hap accepts events via an API and provides the user with tools to sort, filter, and collate those events. You can use it to keep track of sales, support requests, production errors—anything you like.

The problem is how to present the information.

You could try a Twitter-style approach with a never-ending list of events. That’s great for a live dashboard but terrible for reporting. On the other hand, you could try a more traditional paginated approach, but that doesn’t work as a live event stream.

The answer, of course, is to separate the two. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t do this in the first place. As with everything over the past two weeks, I’m blaming covid.

Company of One

The book of the week was ”Company of One“.

In summary:

• A company doesn’t have to grow to be successful.
• You can use magical tools, such as “email newsletters” and “the internet”, to reach thousands of people without a huge marketing or customer service team.
• Try to be helpful, even when there’s nothing in it for you; people like that.
• Have a personality.
• Profit is good.

Imagine that spread across 240 pages, and you won’t go far wrong.

Claude

At some point this week I acquired a cat. I’ve christened him Claude because his preferred method of attracting attention is to casually insert his claws into my leg.

Being a cat, Claude doesn’t consider himself acquired, but that’s fine by me. On the rare occasion that he’s not pestering me for food, he does pleasingly cat-like things, such as sitting on the windowsill, looking majestic.

Good cat, 14/10.