I’m becoming more and more energized by the climate debate every year. At the same time I don’t do anything practical about it at any point either. Do I reduce my consumption habits? No. Do I adjust my diet to make it more carbon friendly? As a side effect of eating more whole food plant based I do but it’s not the direct target. Do I do some kind of offsetting? No. So as much as I lament our global lack of action on climate change I fall into the same boat as everyone else. Just like everything in life I suppose I want it to be something automatic. I didn’t actively stop using CFCs to help fix the ozone layer but I did do it because the government banned CFCs. Hypothetically the same sorts of environmental policies could be underway for the past 20 years to help mitigate climate change. None of that has happened. So what can I do to do proactively address this problem? Actually the real question is what am I going to do to mitigate that? I’m going to take the same quantification and tracking approach that I use for everything else in my life.

I’m pretty stoked about what I was able to do in 2019 towards open source software. I’ve always contributed here and there but I took the momentum of contributions I did in the second half of 2018, in that case to the Diaspora project, and just kept on trucking. I spent a total of 653 hours on open source projects in 2019. A lot of that was new code generation but there is of course more to development than just writing code. There were lots of meeting times, some hackathons, documentation generation, tech support etc too. Some of these were projects I started as well as contributing to established projects. The five projects I contributed to the most fall into a relatively broad range of software (from highest to lowest number of hours contributed):

I started 2019 with my annual review of 2018, the second year in a row doing so. While I was down on myself for missing objectives before I did it upon reviewing the data I was pretty content. The same will not be said for my review of 2019, but let’s dissect that further with a health review of 2019.

Necessity is the mother of invention. I’m working on a project where it seems that storing and manipulating documents is the way to go instead of the relational database route. Maybe it’s too much time having worked with Mongo but it just feels naturally to me. The go-to embedded database is of course SQLite so I start up with that and some of the new document processing capabilities that it has. Then it occurred to me to ask if there is a NoSQL Document database equivalent to it. Sure enough LiteDB is one and it is built natively for .NET. After using it a bit it was clear I needed to inspect and manipulate the data stored in it not just in my app but on the side. While the website shows literally half a dozen ways to do it literally all of them are stuck to running only on Windows. After a few days of suffering through a Windows VM with that being the only reason I decided to take some of my newfound skills with Avalonia and build a client that can run on Linux, Mac, and Windows too. This begat LiteDB Portal.

I’m working on prototyping some new desktop and mobile applications. One of the things I want them to be able to do is the “infinite scroll” workflow that you see in social media timelines like on Twitter, Diaspora, and etc. It’s essentially when you almost get to the bottom of your timeline it automatically loads it with more informaiton. As usual my go-to framework for doing the desktop is Avalonia. I’m using a basic ListBox so my first thought was to simply look for scroll events and scroll percentages (or some metric like that). It turns out that’s not directly and easily exposed. The solution was to manually wire up similar event handlers using similar properties that are exposed in more raw terms. Below is a break down on how I did it. You can find the solution to this in this Gitlab Repository.

(I want to thank the Egram for writing their Avalonia-based Telegram client with an open source license and publishing it here. The way they handled more complex scrolling behavior interception led me to this solution). Thanks to MakcStudio for cluing me into the existence of this project and their source code.

** Note this is a second version with a cleaner implementation of capturing the events using GetObservable. **