weeknotes 9

argument parsing

I’ve been looking at argument parsing for budget-sync with yargs and I’ve been finding it really challenging to parse (ha!) the documentation. It dives too deep, too fast without explaining the basics, and it’s not as recursive as I hoped it would be. The library’s named for pirates, but it could equally be named for the frustration involved to create anything non-trivial…

It also turns out that Monzo’s tokens only last a few hours before they need refreshing, which I thought would make it difficult to keep running as a GitHub Actions workflow. But it wasn’t a massive pain in the end, thanks to a creative solution. I now have a second workflow set up to refresh the access token and rewrite the GitHub secrets as a “database”.

I don’t hate it as a solution. It does make the initial set up a lot more involved now for other people (and not very documented any more), though, but I’m also pretty sure nobody else is using it, so it probably doesn’t matter!

entertainment

We finished Fringe season 5. Nova’s been watching all of Netflix’s crime documentaries while I’ve been working, so we’ve mostly been letting them spill over into the evenings, but this week we finally got to the final season of Vikings (which was a very nice end to the saga). That gave me an itch to pick up Crusader Kings III again, so I’ve been playing a bunch of that this week while we move on to the latest season of American Gods.

roleplaying

Friday evening was the third session I failed to do anything but the most cursory prep for. I can improvise a session worth of stuff fine, especially with the party out in the wilderness, but it does make it hard to give them a sense of progress, which they’re wanting (we do Stars and Wishes at the end of every session). So I’m determined to spend some time actually preparing the next bit, as well as throwing out some of my sketched out events to let them see story progress sooner instead of setting up yet more plot hooks. We can come back to them. I’ve got a new skeleton but I need to flesh out Something Interesting for next session. Maybe that will happen this weekend?

Last session, we also tried out a new (old) thing, which was a Miro board as a sketch map to help ground the visuals of combat. The players self managed it, and it seemed to help with the “where am I again?” questions, which is good. Plus we ended up with a sketch map of the events of the session, which includes the usual in-jokes and friendly banter the group enjoys.

This is the longest I’ve ever stuck with a campaign as a GM, and I think the group that I play with has a lot to do with that.

Having said that, I’ve played a lot of fantasy games recently and I have an itch to do some sci-fi roleplaying. I bought Technoir a while ago (thanks to Friends at the Table) to run a murder mystery, cyberpunky thing. I even commissioned a piece of art for it! So maybe I’ll run that when we’re done. Or let someone else in the group have a turn running something.

union rep training

This week I had part 2 of my union representative training with Prospect, focusing on how to handle personal cases (like accompanying people to disciplinary or grievance meetings). I now know more about employment law than I ever thought I’d need to.

I feel ready, if a bit daunted by it all (especially the impact of getting it wrong), but I think that’s probably healthy.

alfred theme

I had some fun making Alfred look like this site. The theme lives here if you’re interested.

svelte vs react

Svelte for Sites, React for Apps

This site is built with Svelte, and I’ve been really happy with it as an HTML superset. It’s pretty effortless to work with, so you can focus on the bits that actually want some attention and not worry about complicated APIs, lifecycle hooks, or the rest. Most of the time, a page is some HTML, a <style> tag, and a couple of import statements.

animations

I added animations to page transitions on this site, and it was almost effortless thanks to built-in behaviour in Svelte. Every other time I’ve wanted to do something like this, I’ve spent hours evaluating different libraries, and writing custom code that doesn’t exactly do what I want, and then fighting it for a while. In Svelte, I added 2 lines of code for the base effect (and then tweaked and refactored):

<script>
	import { fade } from "svelte/transition";
</script>

<div transition:fade>I fade in when I'm created and out when I'm destroyed</div>

The actual commit for the basic transitions is here if you’re interested.

I really like Svelte (can you tell?).