I remember the first time I had to integrate myself into a new community. It was right after college. I had started my first job which was in a new specialization of my industry. I had to come to grips with a life transition, learning how to work with a new team and new software, learning about the ins and outs of the industry around me and those interactions, et cetera. It is a very unsettling position to have orders of magnitude more things to learn than time to do it. No one expects someone to pick it all up instantly but in me there is a drive to “come up to speed” as fast as possible. When it comes to contributing to the Fediverse I am feeling the exact same thing right now.

While I’ve been writing a ton recently about my software development progress it was the topic of quantified self, longevity, and personal fitness experimentation that started this whole blog. As this year rounds out I once again looked at the state of my fitness over that time. Just as with last year while I have only been at most intermittently focused on what I would call a healthful lifestyle I have continued to be meticulous with measuring my daily food intake, how well I adhered to my five goals, and ancillary observations from there. Let’s see how 2018 was in an absolute and a relative to 2017 view.

“Dogfooding” software is one of the best ways to wring out any problems with a design or implementation. The Diaspora API was designed with a wide variety of uses in mind including something potentially as grand as being the replacement backend for a revamped website. With the actual API now “in the can” and waiting for the real PR review I decided to try to use the API for an actual purpose and start dogfooding it. I had several ideas but the first one I decided to latch on to was a blog discussion timeline feature.

We’ve finally done it! Frank and I were able to get the last of our internal reviews done and the API code is now in the “real” code review for integration into the main Diaspora development branch. That alone is an amazing thing but I have a second piece of big news related to the API as well. Today I was able to stand up a first version of a blog “Discussion Browser” that uses the API to pull all comments and other interactions for a blog post that is associated with a specific Diaspora post. I’m going to be doing a write up of that in more detail later but as a first cut it worked pretty well and showed that the API design and the code itself is functioning pretty well.

Some people just can’t leave well enough alone, I swear! When last I left Spring Boot world everything was going great. The project bootstrapping was pretty straight forward. The documentation pretty much matched the actual behaviors. The actual behaviors were pretty well laid out. Today I tried to create a project from scratch. Between fighting Java version hell from the online generator, to fighting gradle dependency hell both there and in IntelliJ, to then wrestling with some new fucked up syntax for something as simple as reading in the configuration file I have wasted two hours and gotten absolutely fucking nowhere!

I was so excited when I finally got a real pod interacting with the API that I knew I’d have to get it written down before I could get to sleep. However before dropping right to the interactions itself I decided to take some time describing how a piece of software would be allowed to do anything with a server. In Part1 I laid all of those details out to get across some very important points:

• We are using a standard (OpenID/OAuth2) protocol for doing this
• Users have to give explicit permissions to an application, including being told what it is and is not asking to do
• There are security measures once an application is granted permissions as well.

This article essentially details the very first communications and gives people a feel for what the Diaspora API specification looks like in practice not just in theory.

Okay I’m obviously over excited about the fact that something which I knew should work actually did work. However all the previous API usages were on servers on the local machine, not behind an HTTPS link, and not being shared with the rest of the fediverse. This one breaks through that barrier. I have therefore decided to document it in excruciating detail. For the first pass all of these interactions were manual using cURL and FireFox RESTClient plugin . The next step, which will be coming up very shortly, will be creating the very first server to use this for a real purpose (I’ll document that as that happens). This document goes over the nitty gritty details of the whole authentication piece. The next article will go into the calls themselves. If you don’t care about the nuances of the authentication steps then just skim or skip this and go to the Part 2 . So without further ado, here we go…

As we begin to wrap up the year we also are beginning to wrap up the API getting ready for the “real” pull request for the API code. We are down to one last code review of the final clean up pass before we have it looked at by the core team. I think the code is pretty solid but it will of course have problems that are discovered during the review and the testing. Ah the testing, real world testing that we really need to do. To get there we need to have a test server. Thankfully that’s all taken care of now and we’ve had the first data interactions with a pod.

As I get more and more fed up with Facebook while also getting more and more embedded into the Fediverse I’ve been considering the whole #deletefacebook campaign again. I turned off Facebook earlier but never deleted it. As the new year approaches the thought of shutting it down appealed to me but then I went a step further thinking I should just blow away all of my data as well. There are lots of posts with lots of data and lots of associations that I want to keep though. Thankfully Facebook provides a mechanism for extracting your data. Unfortunately if you assume all of your data is there you’ll probably be wrong.

I’ve been blogging on Wordpress since 2013. For a long time I had wanted to blog and tried LiveJournal and sites like that. It wasn’t until 2013 when I was deciding to embark on a personal fitness experiment that I finally bit the bullet and created the N=1 blog. The original premise was exploring the whole area of Quantified Self and longevity for my own purposes. It was going to kicked off by a grand experiment of living various different fitness lifestyles for periods of time to see if any made a dramatic difference, positive or negative. I never really got too far into that experiment. Then the blog became my ramblings on the topic. Over time I had less interest in that and more in software engineering. Rather than create a whole new blog I decided to just add new categories. As the boundaries of what I wanted to post became less clear it really just became my public journal on all topics interesting to me.