
## Recent Changes

There's a big gap in the commit history for this website.

On March 17, 2022, I added [a new blog post](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/f0824e094b89dcf4acb0ec8b02ed79de72bb0eb9). You can read the post, titled ["Elegant Multi-Line Shell Strings"](https://www.awwsmm.com/blog/elegant-multi-line-shell-strings), here if you like.

Then, I made no changes for almost an entire year. I merged two dependency updates in [January 2023](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/8c44b9d826a72051f266b0f978b23293d4928a77) and [February 2023](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/8c7d627562ac7d476307e1bc14c2f1132db566e4). The next substantial changes I made were [on March 3, 2023](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/compare/8c7d627562ac7d476307e1bc14c2f1132db566e4...1a9879460df80b23a770326f3e22e5c34d9624b5), where I bumped a few dependencies and rewrote a bit of the codebase which had always bothered me / felt a bit clunky to me.

Over the past two months, though, I've been on a roll. I

- added new [`/blog` and `/projects` "home" pages](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/6120cbd7e83fe23d7371d541b2b46ed556477799)
- [configured Dependabot](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/77a247259be66eb2fb97bd834bf2625c66e86a7f) to keep my dependencies up to date
- [learned a bit of GraphQL](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/f6260bbc9bd1d181fbf3f613a73008f1cfe53e4c), using it to minimize the amount of data I request from GitHub
- [wrote a new blog post](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/d6f9309fce056d8aef741fbf7dc4e5e7f9f8c12f) about my experience trying to keep the project pages up to date

I also [organized my to-do list](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/9818c5a61429f80fdbbfd241819e33896ad8dce7), crossing off lots of small things which had been sitting there for a while, like

- [adding my old favicon back](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/0ab63bfb72cfcfd8f01370f5c3325690ec9a0763)
- [making code blocks less ugly](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/f5c22e448beaf7f0fc402ee827cbe938f8f993b6)
- [linking to interactive demos](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/932fe4bef5319e66bf63e61a7b5c24dc34e62618) on project pages

...not to mention all of the small quality-of-life development fixes I've added: restructuring the code for ease of maintenance, upgrading dependencies, clarifying docs, and just generally making my development workflow a lot easier. (I've still [got a lot to do](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/issues), but I'm making good progress.)

I then ported over some old blog posts from [my Dev.To](https://dev.to/awwsmm) blog to test the [new Markdown rendering and CSS](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/8d5c08f846bda031f34031387fad807f10b9c5d6) I added, and to have some data for [Vercel analytics](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/f599298058d9d13fd8255e108b90ca277ea56dcd). These are some of the posts I'm most proud of, including

- ["20 Intriguing, Unusual, and Goofy Programming Languages"](https://www.awwsmm.com/blog/20-intriguing-unusual-and-goofy-programming-languages)
- ["Managing Your Python Project with Git and PyBuilder"](https://www.awwsmm.com/blog/managing-your-python-project-with-git-and-pybuilder), and
- ["101 Bash Commands and Tips for Beginners to Experts"](https://www.awwsmm.com/blog/101-bash-commands-and-tips-for-beginners-to-experts)

Finally, I also added [social buttons](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/540cefdd7bf136ca91c9ab01b3b832d88dfb05b3) to the bottom of blog posts to make them easier to share, and set log entries on project pages to [collapse when they're at the bottom of the project update history](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/e95822a7342eacaf62683d1066e271af5e5d768b), because I've now got too many commits and my last log entry for awwsmm.com is all the way at the bottom of the page -- the victim of my own productivity.

## Roadblocks

March 2022 to March 2023 was a busy time for me. I left my job, moved out of Ireland, got married, went on a two-month honeymoon road trip around the U.S., moved to Canada, started a new job, and survived my first Canadian winter. It's only now that I'm really starting to recover from all of that, and starting to have a good chunk of time to work on my website again.

But that being said, before all of those big life changes happened, I had set the bar very high for myself to keep this website up to date. It was definitely over-engineered. Cleaning up the confusing stuff, removing roadblocks, and making the path to developing and writing straighter and smoother have led to a huge number of improvements over the past few months.

I hope to keep that momentum going with more log entries, blog posts, and project updates in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Incremental Progress, No Matter How Slow, Is Better Than No Progress At All

Slow and Steady Wins The Race


Boy have I learned a lot over the past few days.

As you can see from [the recent round of commits I've made](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commits/master), I have been working on a few things...

### Requiring `Commit`s to have a defined `date`

[This commit](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/2b7c742d264a5571efb76c10b88fe8cc71d742e1) moves from a `Commit` with a `date: string | undefined` field to one with a `date: string` field.

Originally, I tried to make my model class (`Commit`) match the GitHub API as closely as possible, and since [`GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/commits`](https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/commits#list-commits) can return commit objects with possibly `null` `author`s as well as `committer`s, it's possible for a commit returned from the GitHub API to not have a date at all.

That... seems unlikely, so I now assume that all commits will indeed have dates, and throw an `Error` in the `Commit` `constructor` if `date` is `undefined`. This can be tested during development, and (combined with the next change) means that I've removed all explicit `undefined` types from the current codebase.

### Require `CommitGroup`s to have at least one `Commit`

[This commit](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/cb8eb7b1b2c902a4d66cd454152e3dc3641fb4ff) changes a lot of things. Firstly, it requires that `CommitGroup`s have at least one `Commit` in them. It does this by throwing an `Error` from the `constructor` if an attempt is made to create a `CommitGroup` with an empty array of `Commit`s.

This is really helpful because if a `CommitGroup` must have at least one `Commit` and (from the last update) if a `Commit` must have a definite `date`, then `CommitGroup`s can have definite `start()` and `end()` timestamps. This means that `start()` and `end()` can have type `Date` rather than `Date | undefined`. That change removes the last explicit `undefined` types from the codebase. This means we shouldn't have to do much more "`?.`" / "`??`" checking.

### Ease serialisation by moving from methods to fields

The reason I haven't updated this project in a few days is because I tried to do too much all at once (I fall into that rabbit hole sometimes). One of the things I was trying to do was to return `class`es (rather than plain objects) from the `getStaticProps` methods in my dynamic route definition files (`/pages/blog/[slug].md` and `/pages/projects/[id].md`).

I ran into some issues here (specifically around defining custom `toJSON()` methods) and everything went a bit haywire so I've backed that out of this group of commits for now.

Anyway, the point is: serialisation is confusing enough as-is without including a bunch of methods and custom `class`es. So I'm trying to store as much data in object fields, rather than in methods which calculate some value. To that end, I moved all of the methods in `ProjectUpdate` to fields in these updates, which means that `LogEntry` and `CommitGroup` also have these as fields now instead of methods (`start` instead of `start()` for example).

This made it easier to make the next change, as well.

### Make `CommitGroup` class immutable

As `start` and `end` are now fields of `CommitGroup` rather than methods, and as `Commit`s are themselves immutable (containing only `readonly` fields), it made sense to try to make `CommitGroup`s immutable as well.

> In general, immutability of objects is something worth working toward. It makes the state of an object easier to reason about and can eliminate race conditions in multithreaded environments (so, not JavaScript, really). However, immutability can make your program less performant, as you have to create an entirely new object whenever you want to update a field.

This was easy enough -- just making the array of `commits` `readonly`, and making `add()` return a new `CommitGroup` rather than mutating the current one makes the class effectively immutable. We just need to remember to save the result of `add()` to a new variable when updating a `CommitGroup`.

### Try not to hit the GitHub rate limit

Finally, I made one small band-aid kind of change, where I don't query GitHub for commits when in development mode. This is easy enough to check in Next.js

```js
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === "development") {
  // do development stuff
} else {
  // do other stuff
}
```

so I simply return an empty array of `Commit`s when in development mode. A better solution here would be to

- query GitHub for commits
- save those commits to a temporary cache file
- don't query a second time if a cache file is present
- delete the cache file on a `git push`

This would give a better idea of what the site will look like when it goes live, but it's a bit more involved, so I'll do that later. For now, I just return an empty array.

### Potpourri

Finally, in [this commit](https://github.com/awwsmm/awwsmm.com/commit/e31fdc8274f2e131fd3f8b0ec508f90930b3144d) I did some refactoring, moving some classes around in a way that seemed to be a bit more organised.

And in the last few commits this round, I hit a bug where I was trying to use `String.replaceAll`, but I was targeting an older ES version which doesn't support that method.

So, all in all, lots done here, but lots more to do.

Projects