. 2018 Year in Review, Part III

Rick Carlino

Personal blog of Rick Carlino, senior software engineer at Qualia Labs, co-founder of Fox.Build Makerspace. Former co-founder of FarmBot.

2018 Year in Review, Part III

Projects

Below is a list of projects and articles I hope to finish in 2019. I intend to finish at least 15 of these projects. Ideas on this list are intentionally vague. I do not want to spend so much time writing descriptions that it takes me away from the project itself. I am using a public list (rather than a private one) as a form of commitment device.

Because I have suffered from “side project A.D.D.” in years past, I will not change the contents of this list in 2019.

Complete

  1. Finish the media lab at Fox.Build
  2. A project written in Gambas BASIC
  3. Guest sign-in kiosk
  4. Finish the 386 restoration project I started in 2018: Part I, Part II
  5. Add “recent articles” Instapaper fetcher for my blog.
  6. Weather station
  7. A blog article that discusses the problems associated with streaming and cloud computing and the advantages of offline-first computing (see my SSB feed).
  8. Restore FBJR to its former glory.
  9. An article describing the history of CGI scripts.
  10. A Dog collar that converts barks to text messages.
  11. A list of tools useful for hobby projects. Eg: myjson, placehold.it and friends
  12. (Partial, continued in 2020) A project that applies SSB concepts to a practical software package.

General Software Topics

  1. An article that lists useful offline-first applications that exist today.
  2. A video or audio blog that covers the topics I learned during my SSB deep dive in 2018.
  3. A tool to find the best subreddit or hashtag for a particular article using naive bayes algorithm.
  4. A webhook gateway. Eg: translate a Webhook request to MQTT, email, SMS, etc…
  5. A “Build Server” for non-javascript tooling ecosystems
  6. A blog article describing the Typescript unknown type
  7. An SVG quick reference
  8. A GUI based RabbitMQ config builder
  9. An article explaining how to write tests for your typescript project in 2019
  10. An article describing how to get involved with an OSS project.
  11. A toolkit for static site owners

Retrocomputing and Forth

  1. Write a networked windows 3.1 application on real hardware
  2. An article documenting my peculiar habit of reading old computer science books in modern times.
  3. Forth stack juggling as a competitive game, possibly using the Ramen game engine.
  4. A survey of user definable software methodologies
  5. A project like this one (or this one) but for JS or Ruby ASTs.
  6. An article that takes a deep dive into FlashForth interrupts.
  7. A Forth-compatible visual programming environment
  8. A real-world application of ShiftForth or similar project.
  9. Run RetroBSD on a real device.
  10. Build an RC2014, Maximite, Fignition, PE6502 or similar CPU

Fun and Art

  1. A hardware punch clock
  2. A tutorial on how to start a makerspace.
  3. A Maslow CNC cart
  4. A retro-inspired Raspberry Pi case.
  5. A Metal detector add-on project
  6. Writeup about Arduino sonar project I built years ago.
  7. A “printer” farmware farmbot landscape printer
  8. Basic Ruby class as requested by members of fox.build.

Misc and Meta

  1. Get off of twitter and explain alternatives such as TLDR, SSB, etc…
  2. Clean up the blog, possibly migrating to Publiii / SSB viewer for better photo management.
  3. A “listening first” spaced repetition system.
  4. A better desktop MQTT client.

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