tinyping month 2

Brian Hicks, April 1, 2024

Let's talk about tinyping. The thing-a-month project is meant to be a thing a month, full stop. But sometimes life gets in the way: between illness and a long-scheduled and much-needed vacation, I didn't have the time I needed to do a good job on tinyping in March.

But I really think it's a good idea, and not such a big one. It's also pretty close to being usable! So this month I'm going to double down on it, breaking my own rules about the "things" only taking a month.

So here's a quick status report, and where I hope to get to in April:

• Ping calculation can be distributed among multiple clients in a reliable way, which should keep the right distribution from the two posts in early March (1, 2)
• Style is... really not there yet.
• Neither is reporting.
• You also can't sync data anywhere, which is especially bad on mobile (and especially on mobile Safari, which will delete stuff in IndexedDB after only 7 days of inactivity if you don't pin the app to the home screen.)
• Nothing is deployed anywhere.

So here are the goals for April:

1. Get reporting working. This is a core thing—there's not much point entering the data if we can't get the results.
2. Get notifications on new pings. This is almost done, and just needs a little push to get it over the line.
3. Get some semblance of style. It's really rough right now, and nothing I'd want to show someone else.
4. Get syncing to a server, at least for backup. I might have to drop encryption to get this done in April; that's OK.

And the things I'm not going to do (unless I miraculously get the above done):

• Multiple tags per ping
• Bulk editing
• Integration into other systems
• Any kind of native or mobile app

My work's cut out for me; let's go!