Erik Schwartz -- Projects

It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Challenge

It takes more than 1 minute to write a blog post (not to mention that introverts need to prepare their brain to spaz out with the extros running around everywhere).

Solution

You receive a phone call. A friendly robot asks you an open ended question:

What’s been on your mind today?
What did you dream about?
Describe the mood in your city lately.
etc

Your 1 minute answer is transcribed and published to your blog.

[… transcription would live here …]

I like the idea of posting the audio as well as the text. I did some genealogy work recently and it occurred to me how much I would love to hear the voices of long-gone relatives. It would give such interesting insight into their personality and temperament.

So I wrote a simple application as a proof of concept.

Application structure

Actors:

The interstitial app hosted on heroku (app)
Jekyll blog hosted on github pages (blog)
Twilio (twilio)

Under the hood:

The app wakes up and tells twilio to call you with a question.
Twilio records the answer and hits the callback endpoint on the app
The app grabs the recording and transcript of the call
The app creates a jekyll-formatted post and commits it to the blog repo
The app deploys the blog changes to github pages and “hello world”

I’ve put together a proof of concept and will be posting the resulting interrogations here. Please feel free to run with the project on github. Contributions welcome.

tl;dr: introducing ducktail!

Challenge:

The life of a digital nomad/dork wanderer is great in every conceivable way except that it places limits on your screen real estate. When you have an office/apartment you can set up 2-3 flat panel displays and a monochrome crt news-ticker for the sake of conversation. Not the case when you live out of a couple of carry-ons.

With my latest test-driven development workflow I love being able to fire tests off to a second display without having to leave the editor. It makes me feel like a magician and it just so happens to boost my productivity quite a bit. Both are important, obviously, so I set off to enlist my old but wonderful kindle 3g as a secondary display.

Example Test Workflow with two monitors

I type , e in vim and it runs rspec against the most recently visited test file. The rspec output redirects to a log file that I tail -f in a terminal on my second display. There are a few bells and whistles that I’ll skip but overall it’s pretty simple (it’s also a great example of treating the whole OS as an IDE, which is a fun and empowering concept).

So one way or another the kindle needs access to that log file.

First Approach (rejected by management)

Root that bad boy, install a terminal, and ssh to my development machine. A totally valid approach that I still want to play with this someday. But then I remembered that the kindle comes with a weird little experimental browser…

Second Approach (approved by management)

Run a websocket server on my development machine that basically publishes tail -f test.log over the web. Turns out that the kindle 3g browser is happy to talk over a websocket so this approach works perfectly. I even hacked together a couple of libraries to create a utility I call ducktail to tail -f foo.file over the web.

It’s a fun project and a great lesson in the power of the web’s open protocols. The websocket approach instantly interoperates with most any device with a browser. Let’s say I change my mind and want to use a smartphone as a display instead of a kindle. Absolutely no problem. What kind of phone? Who cares.

It’s kind of amazing. I don’t have to do anything special to communicate with the entire world, just use an agreed upon protocol.

Erik Schwartz

Explorer, weirdo, developer of wonderful things.

Stay curious.