Working for a small agency I am fortunate to work on a number of fast moving projects simultaneously. For years I’ve failed to document what I do during the week but I’m going a little recap of my week. One part historical record, one part general interest. I’m posting it on my blog in the off chance that somebody reads it and, facing a similar problem will reach out I’m always happy to discuss what worked for me and what didn’t work. It also doesn’t hurt to put this stuff into the world to show that yes I actually do work; I haven’t always had the most active GitHub but most of my client projects a private/propriety. I’m easing into this, all week I was looking forward to this post; now, however, I realize I should have been working on this not cramming it in from memory on a Friday night.

This week was a balance between my ongoing Elixir projects and a newer (to me) Ruby project.

• For the past five years I’ve either supported, or been the lead dev on a large B2B ecommerce platform which handles a few million in daily sales. Over the winter the company began consolidating their North American and European processes which includes using said platform for sales in the EU. Although the hope is that the European process will align with the North American there are some relevant differences. For example in North America the client’s product is technically considered a “raw material” which means there is no “Value Added Tax” (VAT); however in Europe, depending on the country of origin and the destination VAT may be charged, other relevant changes are shipping across borders, truck loading calculations and different invoicing procedures. At this point we are still in the research and discovery phase but I’ve been working with another developer to scope this project out and write some preliminary tests as research.
• For another client I’ve been moving from a Quickbooks Online integration to Quickbooks Desktop, this is a multi-tenancy Elixir Phoenix app so I’ll be keeping the Online functionality and just adding a connection to Quickbooks Desktop. The API docs for QBOnline are fairly good, this is not the case with QB Desktop, it’s evident that Intuit either has the platform on life support or intentionally obfuscates the functionality to foster a consulting industry around the product. QB Desktop uses an SOAP XML type endpoint. Having wrangled fairly nasty endpoints with SAP I wanted to, if at all possible, avoid dealing directly with QB Desktop. I discovered a service called Conductor that does the bulk of the heavy lifting and allows you to hit a very concise REST endpoint.
• Since the beginning of the year I’ve been transitioning from primarily Elixir projects at the agency to a single Ruby based product. On that front I’ve been involved in an ongoing integration with BambooHR; partnering with Bamboo to pull employee data from their endpoint.
• On a personal front I finished the migration of this blog from Ghost back to markdown files. I still love Ghost but managing my own instance and integrating it with my Garden proved to be more management than I wanted.

I’ve been watching with admiration and humility as students around the world have set up encampments demanding their schools disclose and divest from Israeli/defense industries. While the situation in Palestine has been gut-wrenching; it’s been heartening to see the reactions of these brave students. Media coverage, however; has been less than favorable. Even fairly pro-Palestinian outlets such as The Guardian use incendiary language such as, “protest erupted” and the emphasis is generally on the concerns of the administrators, police, and potential safety issues. My reading of this coverage portrays these student activists, at best, as dangerous anarchists looking for a fight, at worst entitled white kids shirking summer internships.

When the encampment went up at the local university, The University of Waterloo, I rode up with my dad to take a look. He brought a few books to donate to the encampment’s library (I found it charming that amid the tents and living space the students had already set up a thriving library). The atmosphere was calm and cordial we were offered snacks and there appeared to be a lecture circle going on next to the library.

I found the atmosphere so tranquil and invigorating (a mix of being back at school and a yoga retreat). It was so enticing I went back the next day with Viv and Ruby. The entire day was planned out (they communicate their donation needs and the daily program via Telegram), we went for kite making and poppy planting - kid friendly activities. Ruby got right to work painting her kite, as parents Viv and I relish any time Ruby spends on her own working on a project so we sat back and tried not to hover. The care and concern that was shown for our daughter was remarkable. Over the course of half an hour multiple people approached her offering her water (it was very hot), a woman came around with bite brownies and asked if Ruby wanted one and if she was allowed. As the sun moved I helped a volunteer move the tent to provide better shade for the kids. This was a scene from a community picnic not an anarchist commune sizzling to the point of boiling.

As I watched the care and compassion shown towards my daughter as well as everyone else who had come to the encampment that day I couldn’t help but wonder why this wasn’t reported? Why is the media so hell-bent on making these students, out to be a volatile and potentially dangerous element? It’s a tired trope. Of course there have been violent incidents, counter protesters, police forcibly removing students there are many echos of the 1970 Vietnam protests but from my experience an average day in the encampment is calm, communal, even jovial at times. Everyone is gathered for a higher purpose, and it is a grave one, but even in the face of this genocide a community is being built and it is thriving. My hope is that their time is shortened only by divestment and not batons.

In conjunction with me finally overhauling my website I’ve decided to get on the blogging train. I’ve had a personal blog on and off since at least 2005. I started when I was 12 or 13 just adding text to a an HTML file and copying it into Geocities then Tripod then Dreamhost. Sometime around 2006 or 2007 I did the “Famous Five Minute Install” of WordPress and stayed the course there for a few years. As I’ve been reworking my site with SvelteKit I toyed with the idea of doing a Markdown blog. While I like this approach, in theory, I really missed the administration tools that a more full-fledged platform offers, drafts, the ability to post on the fly without having to run a deployment, etc. In the past I’ve solved those pain points with TinaCMS for clients but frankly it’s just more trouble than I’m willing to put in for a personal site.

So with that I’ve chosen Ghost. I’ve always liked the Ghost ethos, small, remote-first, transparent non-profit. I used Ghost a few years back to document my year of consuming less . I’m not a huge fan of the Medium-like editor they use but their overall aesthetic is on point. I’m not 100% positive what I’m going to post here. I’m a developer by trade so I may write some technical articles; but for the most part this is going to be a collection of my public thoughts and ideas. Mostly short-form with some longer form stuff peppered in. Moving forward I’m going to tweak this template to handle single photos and short form micro posts. The goal being, this can be the central repository for all my online life.