New Side Project Release: Slate

I make a lot of things, usually all at the same time. If you’ve seen my now page, you probably realized that already, considering that at time of writing I’m working on 3 games and an entire framework.

I’m extremely not good at telling people about project updates. Part of that is because I’ve never been a good at journaling: somehow, my brain always thinks that the time spent reflecting would better be spent on continuing to make things.

Today, I got the suggestion that if journaling was difficult, maybe the correct way to do project updates is to automate them. And there’s already a medium by which I log all the work I do on my projects: I use Git as version control for (practically) all of them, and I tend to write verbose commit messages.

One thing led to another, and by the end of the night I had created a tool to post my commits on all my projects onto a public feed – in this case, a Mastodon account.

The project is called Slate, which is a name I got from doing a thesaurus walk off. It’s a crudely put together web app, and it’s the first time I’ve ever worked with Webhooks, but it works. The feed of all my commits (starting from when I created Slate) can be found here.

There’s still some work to be done: right now, the tool pulls every single commit, which will become problematic for repositories with more than one owner (since I really only want my own commits). Also, it works with Gitlab only, and some of my projects are instead on Github.

Will this actually be useful for me? I’m not sure, but it’s worth trying for a bit. I’ve made a few bots in the past to update my calendar or crosspost between Discord and Tumblr (for some reason), but I have never managed to maintain them. This one’s on Heroku, so hopefully even if I forget about it, it’ll keep running and I’ll have a nice feed of updates.