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Ben's Thoughts
The Writer’s IDE, part 4: Pagination and blocking the main thread.
Table of Contents 1. Where I've Been 2. My First Steps 3. Pagination 4. But my UI Where I've Been It's been quite awhile since I wrote a blog post. I had not even started working on the code the last time I wrote. I've not only started, and now it's more than 10k lines long The progress is slow at...Ben's Thoughts
Do the People Who Put AI in Everything Study Philosophy?
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Good 3. The Bad Introduction I've been working on my NPM library, and I was going to write about it. But then I saw this YouTube video about AI and YouTube, and I realized that I wanted to write a blog post about it. There seems to be two ideas, one that...Ben's Thoughts
A Little JavaScript Library I Published
Table of Contents - Why Would I Do This? - So It's Really Efficient, Right? Why Would I Do This? Let's start with two premises: 1. Programmers have to work with lists lot, and 2. Newer programming languages tend to have better features for programming. Or rather, let's go with this premise: 1. I...Ben's Thoughts
The Writer's IDE, part 3: Researching popular document file formats
Table of Contents - Introduction - Word - Pages - PDF - Open Document - LaTeX - ePub - Partial Formats - Where I'm Going Introduction I have had time to relax a little bit after finishing my blog changes. By the way, I continue to be really happy with them. No one will probably enjoy them, but I...Ben's Thoughts
Triumph and failure: the long road of this blog's redesign
Table of Contents - Introduction - Updating Dependencies - Removing the Unnecessary - Revamping Search - Changing Cards and Filters - Getting Fonts to Load - Modernizing Theming - Fixing Block Identification Introduction I wrote my blog originally around the end of 2021, shortly before I got hired...Ben's Thoughts
The Writer's IDE, part 2: A Latex parser
- What I've been up to - What is a WSIWYG editor? - The LaTeX Parser What I've been up to If you've been following my blog closely like I know you have, it's been quite awhile since the last update. I shouldn't say that since there's usually at least a month or two gap between "timely" posts. I've...Ben's Thoughts
Where I Have Been - Future changes
Over a month ago, I wrote a post about starting the Writer's IDE. At the end of the post, I implied that I would shortly be writing about something else that was upcoming. And then, I didn't. It's been over a month. So what has happened? I got busy, real busy in multiple ways. My youngest son began...Ben's Thoughts
The Writer's IDE, Part 1: Writing some Git functionality in Rust.
Table of Contents 1. The Larger Project 2. The Scope 3. Objects in Git 4. Packfiles 5. Next Steps The Larger Project I had an epiphany while working on other things: I miss writing. But every time I write, I don't have the tools I am used to don't exist. Programming is colorful, but writing, the...Ben's Thoughts
I have finished encryption on the chat app, and what a journey it was.
Table of Contents - Introduction - Building the app - Architecting Persistence - Encrypting Messages - Reading Messages Later - Storing Data Securely - What's Next Introduction When I first started this project, I said that it would involve e2e encryption. The basic requirements of it was that I...Ben's Thoughts
Resource Pagination and Sunk Costs
Table of Contents - Introduction - The Problem - Sunk and Operating Costs - An Example Introduction As I (very) slowly progress through my project during weekends and free time, I've implemented a lot of features that I only faintly knew about. I've learned and adapted to a lot of new techniques...Ben's Thoughts
How I use cookies for auth
Table of Contents - Introduction - Authentication - Login/Register - Refreshing the Token - Silent Login Introduction I know I said I'd talk about some of my troubles/discoveries with Phoenix, but I spent a lot of time working on dealing with issues arising from SSR, and I thought I'd talk about it...Ben's Thoughts
The backend is done; back to the front!
Table of Contents 1. What Have You Done 2. What's Next 3. Today's Topic 4. The Schemas 5. The Schemaless Schema What have you done? I completed what I thought I would never get done for one reason or other - I completed the backend for my chat app. I always thought that Elixir was too complicated,...