This post will be short but baffling.

The other day, a concatenation of circumstances led me to thinking about the lousy state of sending formatted text to Slack. We have a bot called Synergy at work, and the bot posts lots of content. Mostly it’s plain text, but sometimes we have it send text with bold or links. This is for a couple reasons. Our bot supports channels other than Slack (like SMS and Discord and the console), so we can’t express everything in Slack-oriented terms. But even doing so would be hard, because of the APIs involved.

A couple weeks ago, I had to test a printer, and the first text file I found to test-print was this, quazza-purchases.txt:

Quite a while ago, I wrote some Spotify code that would find places when my Discover Weekly playlist would intersect with those of my friends and coworkers. This was fun. Every once in a while, I talked about other things that might be fun, along those lines. I tend not to do too much with those ideas, because the Spotify API is often missing exactly the method I want, and I can work around it, but it becomes too much of a pain. Also, I’m a little lazy when the project will need other people to be interested, unless I’m sure they will be. Who wants to launch a flop to their friends?

I’ll be quick, this is just an update to my last post!

In my last post, I wrote about how I made dzil workflower to install GitHub Actions into my Dist::Zilla-based dists’ repositories for automated testing. I also said I’d been reading O’Reilly’s Learning GitHub Actions. This week, I applied some more of what I learned from the book, and it was good.

Starting ages ago, once in a while somebody would show up and offer me a commit that would add some automated testing system to my open source repositories. I liked the idea, but it always felt like a free puppy. I didn’t know how it worked, I didn’t know how the YAML file (always YAML!) was put together, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do when something went wrong.

Every time I store an API token in a plaintext file or an environment variable, it creates a lingering annoyance that follows me around whenever I go. Every year or two, another one of these lands on the pile. I am finally working on purging them all. I’m doing it with the 1Password CLI, and so far so good.

Years ago, I found an iOS app called World Uncovered. I used it for a while, then forgot about it, then started using it again. It’s pretty cool, and I keep telling people about it, so I thought I’d write a post about it.

One of the things I wrote at the first PTS (back when it was called the Perl QA Hackathon) was Module::Faker. I wrote about it back then (way back in 2008), and again eleven years later. It’s a library that, given a description of a (pretend) CPAN distribution, produces that distribution as an actual file on disk with all the files the dist should have.