Old ways / New things
I just noticed I wanted to start this post with “Well”, which would make 2 in a row. So lets not do that. I did manage to get my Feedreader back under control, more details will follow but it was a fun little excercise in some XML parsing, some automatic checks, followed by some additional manual checks and dealing with a RealmDB (which was actually the first time I encountered this DB type, would have expected SQLite) to get a backup of all the Starred items. It was fun, nothing too complex, I do plan to write it up and try to replicate it using some LLM. Another fun little experiment.
The pipeline wrangling let me write a little Shiny app, I had used Shiny before to write a frontend for a Azure cost advisory tool I had created in R and Python but had abbandoned that frontend in favour of a Python Flask one, Shiny was a bit tricky with long running operations in the backend. But for this pipeline stuff it’s great, I just wanted to read in the pipeline data (which I have to get from an Excel file, since I don’t have any access to the Datawarehouse) and be able to find customers with which we have done certain projects and to see if any expected/related follow-up projects are in the pipeline (e.g. if we do a vendor funded assessment, are we at least logging an opportunity to help the customer with the actual implementation of the findings), basically free text search to get a list of customers with won opportunities, select one and then find other opportunities for this customer with a matching timeline. Once again, not too complex but fun. Been a while since I coded just for fun, still not very good at it but the step from not programming/scripting and being able to do something adds a lot of possibilities.
Another new thing with old ways, I have switched my personal PC (the first personal is supposed to mean non-work provided ;) ) from a self assembled Windows running system to a M4 Mac Mini, which means I have a unix based OS once again, which means I had new chances to think of workflows with shell scripting, as this blog is a static site generated by Hugo I have some commands I have to run to generate new posts. So now it’s just a single command to add a post and start editing it in Neovim, after which it’s just a git commit away, I know I could have done this on Windows but somehow just never got around to it.