From Derb to ReDerb, 2024-11-19

Moving my audiobook feed generation script from Derb to ReDerb
Just journalling stuff along the way

I’m learning Go ya’ll!
Once I finish this tiny real world project of mine, will try doing some structured DIY things from a book
Go the language I learned (in theory) seems to be very different from Go the code I see everywhere. Don’t know why. Python wasn’t like that. (until I came across typed Python that is). I mostly attribute all of this to my ignorance
Did a huge copy pasta of code from various sources and a couple of llms over the past few days
Obviously nothing is working.
Trying a code paste here just for kicks

print("Hello World")

Now what? I get dstracted so often!
This notes thing is an attempt to keep me focussed.
Reminder: I need to figure out Ansible asap, so I can get the posts to code repo to automatically deploy to blog via rsync pipeline working
So many things to learn! I’m going to go nuts for sure How do other people know what they want to do, and then focus on it?
So many good tech books to read and learn!
Python ~~plugins~~ libraries > Go ~~plugins~~ libraries
Rather, I think, they’re much better documented. Or maybe Go stuff is not documented for people like me. How do I get to be like them? Folks who can read the stuff that’s written and just grok it? How do I get from here to there?
It’s been this crazy fantasy of mine, that whenever I write somethingh it will be well documented. My own shabby scripts tell me, this is not the case. Future Jason is generally stressed and strapped for time. I should remember to make things easy for him
I need to implement search on the blog. I’ve gotten tired of searching my own words with DuckDuckGo and Google
Oh I need to get back to my script

All of Aditi “Dot” Saigal’s songs from the Archies Soundtrack on loop
Asymmetrical, The Dear Diary Tracks (June, July, September and October.)
And Plum Pudding, though she’s not on there (or is she? I don’t know)
I love the entire soundtrack! Though I just focus when I loop Aditi’s songs
Idea: I want to whip up some script to post these posts as an #mjbBabbles thing on my Mastdodon Feed
Ok going back to work on the script

Ok brief note. Why am I rewriting in Go? Or learning Go? Distribution. Easier to deal with a single executable rather than environments and other dependencies.
Update 2024-11-21: Apparently even Fabrice Bellard thinks similarly
Ok, now back to work in earnest

Still distracted.
Script related thought: I’m just going to duplicate what I did in Python in Go. However terribly. Idioms and Fluency are for future Jason to tackle.

figured out how to read in environment variables, all over again, because I forgot what I did yesterday and day before.
Note: my script does not like file names with spaces
I can wrap them in quotes and then it works
it’s miscellanea and dependecies

Got Dale Carnegie’s, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living as my guinea pig audiobook
Long time since I heard it anyway.
Puddletagged everything correctly
Note: Figure out where Go programs put their user supplied config and furthermore, how do they store their config
Hardcoding a location to put in my env files for now.
Ok Claude tells me I need to use Viper
so going back to read env files again. sigh
Note: Read some Viper docs

Did a quick and dirty read of the Viper docs and some Claude llm jugglery to figure out why it didn’t pick up my conig path
Got it working
godotenv is now replaced by viper. the idea is to give the user (me) a couple of logical places for the config to exit
Does it have to be an env file? Let me not overcomplicate this now
Enough for today. More work tomorrow.
For a solo autodidact like me, working mostly in isolation, llms are a boon. It’s like having a more experienced colleague tell you things. They could be wrong, but at least I have a general direction to point the boat in. I’ll try to be intentional about using it sparingly though.
Finding actual people who are willing to help is hard, specially considering the fact that I hate imposing on people. I found the Gopher slack and the Go Discourse Forums and I’ll try using them too. I use the Hugo Discourse and it’s a treasure trove of knowledge.