I guess, from now on, I am writing weekly notes every weekend. I learnt about weekly notes from Thej many years ago.

Currently, I am at a early stage startup. I joined them early this year after quitting my startup Subconscious Compute (more on it some other day). I’ve been building them an EHR platform to collect responses and related APIs though I was hired to do something totally different. First, a summary of what I’ve been doing here.

I started with Vue3 and fastapi and learnt Typescript along the way. It started off well. I managed to launch a demo version in a month. Most of its users are not technical and this was the first time I built a web-system for non-developers. And quickly realized why there is so much fuss about designing UI for non-tech users.

• If you are a solo developer or a very small team, DO NOT split your frontend and backend — it creates more than 2x work. For a non-technical leadership (which might think they understand tech), it is a simple ask for adding or changing something trivial at UI, but for you it is migrating your schema, APIs and frontend models. And what is worse, you will make mistakes. You should only change things in one place. DRY and ensuring Single Source of Truth (SSoT).

• So I bit the bullet and rewrote it in PHP8 & Codeigniter4. DX is now much better. First, I don’t have to switch between Python and Typescript/Javascript. Second, the system now crashes if someone submit invalid value rather than accepting wrong/empty values. The database schema validates the value. Perhaps I’ll add validator in the form/UI using </> htmx – high power tools for html.

This week

• I explored a few server side qr code scanners. The most commonly used one is mchehab/zbar which doesn’t work well when image is tilted or rotated. Another tool rxing-core/rxing: cRustacean Crossing did a better job (it is in Rust). For example, in the following image, zbar detected no qr-code while rxing was able to detect two. Usually folks will do the qr code scanning using browser or camera at phone. There are some use cases where image needs to uploaded to server for QR scanning.

  

• I wrote a Gitlab job to create backup of PostgreSQL server. It runs every 4 hours, uses pg_dump to create a dump, compress it and then Use curl to upload files to S3 bucket.

• I found https://builtin.com/ on https://fosstodon.org/@ansate@social.coop/114707324371116735. It’s matches are pretty relevant. I’ve been updating my resume and thinking of reaching out to my network for opportunities.