Software Development by mm-dev on mm-dev

I went into RC with as few expectations as possible.

Never graduate After a batch at RC you are a life long alum.

RC is self-directed.

I knew there might be some extra challenges with attending remotely.

RC really is a beautiful thing to take part in; a very social experience, with lots of like-minded people to meet.

I wanted to take the process seriously, to give myself a fair chance of being accepted.

I’d not heard of RC until I was browsing Hacker News one day and saw a link to an article which I read and enjoyed, 3D printing my laptop ergonomic setup.

The Recurse Center (RC for short) is a programming retreat.

Issues with CSS dashed and dotted border styles CSS has dotted and dashed borders.

For this example we’ll make a block to display user testimonials.

Good I love that it’s silent Apple Silicon is as good as I’d hoped — the bang-per-watt is great for my circumstances with solar power etc The annoyances with not knowing when it’s turned on are largely alleviated with my scripts, as long as I’m using it on

The lid Removing the lid turns it on (hall sensors in the base are activated by magnets in the lid) Replacing the lid leaves the device visible on the network, but it can no longer be SSHed into (some form of ‘sleeping’) During a user-initiated shutdown p…

Now I’m past the novelty of plugging in monitors this is how I actually use the machine.

Macbook sitting on top of its lid.

One of the most difficult problems I’ve had with using this machine headless, is knowing whether it’s turned on or not.

The display was removed, things were looking clean.

Removing the display was relatively easy, but time-consuming.

Being an eBay purchase (albeit from a seller with good feedback) the first thing I needed to do was make sure that this thing was actually functional.

Despite its laptop-ness, I decided to think harder on the Macbook Air: It’s thin, light and particularly low-powered It’s fanless Although I’ll never prefer it, Apple (/my?)

The strongest factors affecting my decision were: Cost.

Macbook Air M1 Headless I don’t tend to enjoy using Apple products.

There are various ways of installing Vim plugins.

Follow instructions from https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/linux/android Download the flutter_*.tar.xz archive Unpack the archive into $HOME/.local/bin (creates $HOME/.local/bin/flutter/bin) At first I tried putting this at /usr/bin, but that c…

Getting the Android SDK set up manually can be tricky, I think the expectation is that most people will use Android Studio so not a lot of work has been put in to making manual installation user-friendly.

There are several components making up the SDK.

To get started I’m presuming you have a Linux installation of something like Debian/Ubuntu.

Given the choice, I’d rather avoid huge complex apps like Android Studio.

A nice compliment I’ve occasionally been paid is “you’re a perfectionist”.

If you’ve followed along with all of the articles in this series you’ll now have: A complete F-Droid build environment set up in a container A Telegram bot raring to go Now we’ll put it all together, add some bash scripts to make everything easy to work w…

If you’ve already set up a Telegram bot and added it to a channel, you only need 2 things to be able to write code that uses that bot: The BOT TOKEN - when you create a bot on Telegram you are given this A CHAT ID - this points to a specific chat/channel…

Create the bot This is done via the Telegram app, so we need to open that up (if you don’t have it installed yet you’ll need to do that first).

There are two main git repositories involved in getting an app listed on F-Droid, fdroiddata and fdroidserver.

I’m using LXC containers on Proxmox.

Building apps for F-Droid is a fairly complex process, involving: A couple of git repos (besides any your own project may have) Using docker Forking and merge requests on GitLab F-Droid’s specialised build commands F-Droid gives instructions on their proc…

Toolchain I enjoy using plain/vanilla JS where possible.

The Low Memory Killer Daemon - Official Docs.

Although this is all in relation to working on Android, the software I use is generally the same as if I was on a Linux desktop.

Hardware My favourite and most commonly-used device is my Samsung Tab S8 Ultra: 14.6" OLED display 2960x1848 resolution 16:10 aspect ratio 8-core, 4nm processor 8GB RAM The OLED (my favourite display tech along side e-ink) screen is gorgeous.

I get a lot of my development work done on Android devices.

I use Bluetooth keyboards with Android a lot, and often want to remap keys (eg swapping CAPS_LOCK to CTRL_LEFT).

Pipe Dream is a game you can play in your browser here.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra Tab S8 Ultra My main device, I use this for most of my coding work and it’s gorgeous for media consumption.

reMarkable reMarkable 1 (my drawing of John C.

Generally, I prefer my computing devices in a tablet format.

In recent years I’ve developed pretty strong preferences for a couple of display technologies.

I’ll never stop learning new things.

Sometimes I need to step up to the next level and use a desktop PC: Some development tools are not available for my Android system architecture (AArch64), namely Garmin Connect IQ tools and a small part of Flutter (which I use to develop Android apps) It’s