Inexpire DevDiary – Spam

It’s a constant across the Internet: if it’s accessible, it will be attacked. And of course Rails is a pretty well known technology at this point so bots are very easily able to create accounts. I ran into this with Inexpire but I didn’t want users to have to confirm their email and go through that kind of friction during…

Inexpire (again)

To-do list… with prerequisites. Way back in 2021, I started a project I called Inexpire. This was meant to keep track of food and supplies we had stocked up on during the pandemic, to make sure things did not expire before we had a chance to use them. The app took on many iterations since then, including a brief foray…

The Future of IT With AI

People ask what the future of programming (and other IT tasks) looks like with tools like Chat-GPT and Github Copilot. My take: AI is basically a summer intern. Horse Whips and Buggy Factories The trajectory of technology is always Manual effort -> Partial automation -> Full automation -> New careers built babysitting the automation. Information was remembered and only communicated…

Shiprekt – an orca simulator game

You’ve seen the stories about orcas attacking ships and wreaking havoc in the ocean, right? Well why let the orcas have all the fun?! Now you can swim through the ocean and sink ships too! I was bored so on Saturday I installed the Unity engine and Visual Studio and started learning C#. On Thursday I launched Shiprekt on itch.io…

Inexpire is back on serverless

If you’ve followed my project Inexpire, you’ll know I originally was building it using a React static site backed by AWS DynamoDB and Lambda. After a short while without making any significant progress, I switched back to my comfort zone (Rails) and hammered out a working app using technology I was more familiar with. Well, I’ve given it another shot…

Reading JSONL with Rails

A year or so ago I mothballed one of my projects by dumping the database to AWS DynamoDB and throwing a static JS site up on AWS S3. This allowed me to still query the data, but only pay for it when I was actually using it rather than keeping the $20/mo server running 24/7. Recently though, I’ve decided to…

Moving away from Gitlab

A few years ago I switched my “business” code from Github to Gitlab. The reason for this was… well, I was bootstrapping a business. Every dollar counts, and Github’s private repos were $5/mo while Gitlab was free. Unfortunately almost immediately after I switched everything, Microsoft bought Github and started offering free private repos. I should have switched back immediately. But…

Inexpire Hobby Farm Management

In a massive update to Inexpire, I’ve added tracking tools for my hobby farm. If you are unfamiliar with Inexpire, I wrote about it in a recent post. Inexpire was built to track canned goods and other long-life-yet-perishable items that I might forget about until after they’ve gone bad. I built this tool partially because we stocked up on food…

Inexpire – Personal Inventory Management

Recently I launched a new web app called Inexpire. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for about a year but finally got it out the door. Since I’m a fan of “build in public”, let’s walk through the app. What is Inexpire? Inexpire.com is a web application designed to track expiration dates and inventory numbers of things in your house.…

Is Heroku Still Relevant?

Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010. What have they done since then? To be fair, I started using Heroku in 2015, 5 years after Salesforce bought them. But the last time they updated their pricing was 2015, and the last new notable feature was 2015. What have they done in the last five years? This article is mostly sourced from Hacker…