blog.tibidat.com

erli has been a great project to experiment and learn erlang and webmachine. In a way, its complete success as a learning tool has been the cause of its never ending ‘beta’ status: every time its state closed in on the ‘good enough’ mark, motivation to finish dried up. It would bit-rot for a while, until I found a new aspect of erlang to explore. This is the third time that I return to it in an attempt to finish it.

Now that erli is to play a central role in my newest learning endeavour, there is no way around that 1.0. The specific components that erli still requires to function as part of ‘Hœnir’ are:

• An API endpoint for a binary protocol, to be used by the dart & polymer based frontend
• Removal or isolation of the thumbnail generation component, since it has zero test coverage and is highly experimental
• Test suites for both the HTTP and binary APIs
• Configurable (and optional) integration with kafka
• A new resource for ‘key’ URLs. These should behave similar to paths without shared targets, no visit statistics and no discoverability. My current plan is to point ‘key’ URLs to a note with specific URL parameters or request headers (communication will be via HTTPS only) added. These params would be used to decrypt the note’s contents. I realize that this is not a secure design. A better solution would be to actually use the ‘key’ URLs as keys since this would avoid having any kind of relation between keys and notes. I haven’t decided on which approach to pursue, but it will most likely depend upon frontend usability.
• A release

I’m really looking forward to implementing these. The binary API endpoint should be especially fun.

So I guess the tldr of this post is: if you can’t get yourself to finish a pet project, try to incorporate it into a larger, newer, pet project.