joshcanhelp

You’re incredibly talented, Taylor. Their loss, sincerely. If they didn’t hire you, know that it wasn’t the right fit and you shouldn’t be there. Your talents are needed elsewhere.

I don’t love spending time on LinkedIn but I do love that you know what you’re going to get when you go there. There’s not some fake underlaying goal like “keeping people connected.” You’re there to promote yourself and your company, find a job, or hire a person. If you’re not doing any of those things you can just not go there and you won’t miss a thing. If you need a job after 2 years, get back in there, play the game, then log off when you’re done. IMHO it’s about as honest as a large online social network can get.

It's not. Give it a read and then decide.

Also, if it was, isn't that OK? You don't want discussion and debate on here? I do.

I switched from WordPress to Eleventy in 2020 and never looked back.

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

I currently host on Netlify because it’s free but you could easily sync the generated HTML files to a box you manage.

Location: Bainbridge Island, WA (near Seattle)

Remote: Yes, 1-day hybrid in Seattle OK

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript/JavaScript, OAuth and OpenID Connect, SQL dialects, PHP

Resume:

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/hire-me/ (summary of what I'm looking for and what I can do)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcanhelp/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i7YQNdmiomXHA4fNJyGitEti... (95% complete)

Email: josh [at] joshcanhelp [dot] com

I am a full-stack product engineer and architect who loves working in identity (CIAM focus), data, developer experience, and open source. I thrive in "bridge" roles where I can learn a system or technology and then bring that understanding to others. I've been able to do that in various ways from engineering and team leadership to in-person instruction to partner relations to systems architecture.

Karlicoss's HPI idea was one of my earliest inspirations here. I loved their idea of being able to somewhat "call" this database of information. The infra diagram is truly impressive!

Lots of prior art here so I knew I was not reinventing the wheel. I guess I just had to see what the challenges were first hand!

FYI, if you have control over the repo ... the URL on the sidebar, "lookerproject dot org" goes to a scammy-looking crypto thing, might want to take that down.

I love this and agree 100%. I feel like we, as a species, had to go "full internet" to understand the trade-offs of connectivity. First it was all local, then all internet, now it's feeling like the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Maybe I'm just in an echo chamber ...

I would love to hear the story of where your domain came from! I love it.

The idea behind Weave is something I would really like to adhere to. I take a lot of notes but get bored by tracking.

That said, the origin story you have on that page really got my attention. Around that year that's mentioned, I was going to 24 Hour Fitness and was pushed by a trainer to keep a food log. I did and ended up losing almost 100 pounds total. What I learned from that log stays with me today and I'm able to keep a vague log in my head when I need to.

I second both the sibling comments here but I'll add a few things:

- Having a detailed meeting and project history from work helps me during interviews, writing resumes, reminding myself of previous approaches. A lot of this comes from detailed note-taking but making connections with people I've worked with, companies I've interacted with, etc adds a lot of color and detail.

- In a similar vein, tying together people with contacts (from Google or iCloud), events, and notes helps me be a better friend, neighbor, family member in my personal life. I don't have an excellent memory so I build it out in Obsidian.

- I like being able to do simple things like figure out how many bike rides I took since I've been laid off (65 bike rides, totaling over 645 miles and 138,000 feet of elevation gain).

Does this all change my life drastically? No but I like the work, I like how present in my life it makes me, and it's fun.

I've been talking about this with a friend/colleague of mine. Some of the greatest sources of data are "recorders" that are running in the background. Oura or any other activity tracker, Google Maps with location history turned on, browser history. Data privacy concerns aside, those sources can really help tie things together.

Personally, I stopped using my Oura ring and don't have location history collected anywhere (that I control or know of). One of my big ideas for this is a native application for your phone and laptop that collects everything it can in the background and surfaces it somewhere you control (synced via a service you choose, lands on a machine you own). Maybe overkill for many people but being able to access that without giving it to another service would be something I'd use.

Thank you very much for writing all of this out!

My abstracted YAML representation worked pretty well for this initial PoC but I'm seeing places where this is just not going to fly for more complicated queries. I'd much rather string together more competent technologies to accomplish my goal rather than spending a year reinventing the wheel.

Along the lines of your comment ... trying these queries in a general language and in SQL brought me to the same conclusions you have here. One of the foundations of this is open source so if I write a recipe and contribute it, I want someone else to be able to take it and tinker with it or extend it but do that without having to deal with too much boilerplate.

I will take a look at Datalog. I know I've seen it before but don't know much about it. Thank you again!

> how does this information really create significant value for myself?

This was a really important question I asked myself. If I build it, will I use it? I had two answers.

First, I do, somewhat regularly, have reasons to look back into this archive. If it mission-critical? No. Is it nice to have, yes? I like being able to see what happened on a certain day in the past, I like seeing how trends between activities come together, and I like tying systems together locally rather than in the cloud. I use Obsidian so bringing everything together locally is a big motivation.

Second, this is just a hobby, like any other. Having conversations like this, contributing to the universe of open source, connecting with people on the things I feel strongly about (data privacy, local first, life logging) ... it's fun and interesting and a good use of my life. There is a tendency to get a little obsessed with it all (family history of OCD forces me to be mindful about it) but I've enjoyed the process so far.

I love your browser extension idea. Managing content from the web that I want to save has been a big challenge locally.

Oh, this is really fantastic, I'm going to check it out! Does you end up with an archive of the data that's being queried?

In case we might be a good fit ... https://www.joshcanhelp.com/hire-me/

I've always thought that the messaging/texting interface is really nice and intuitive. It's like your terminal history but more ... personable?

I got it running locally and, while I wasn't sure all of what I could do, it was responsive and search worked well. Nicely done!

I'm wary about adding chores to my life, that was something I mentioned in the article. I've been running the API crawler for a while now and, so far so good.

The quantified self movement is adjacent to this but not quite. If you are gathering data from a service with an API, this can grab that and you can work with it. I used to wear the Oura ring and now I have 2+ years of data sitting in JSON on my laptop that can be ported to anywhere. I'm not really looking to, like, optimize productivity or physical output or anything, I just want to have and work with data from services that make my life a little easier.

I've had a few uses for PDPL so far and I'm trying to add functionality when I need it rather than taking a shortcut and just writing the script I need in $LANGUAGE. But, like you said, it was fun to build and I learned a lot so if it's not useful to me or anyone else, that's OK too!

This is beautiful and something I wanted to accomplish, in my own way, as a part of this project. I love this:

> It collects all your crap, and it puts it on a timeline. > I thought it would be neat.

Everything you're describing in your comment here is what I'm trying to do with PDPL, get the data out of those services so you can use it. In your case, it looks like Timeline focuses on files ("The filesystem is the database") so you could (assuming it works for you) have an output function that formats the filenames in a way that you can use and adds the date.

Thank you for this! Looks like a kindred project. I have hard of Datasette before but not Dogsheep, I'll give it a look.

> except if it were used for bills, taxes, and financial management.

I have another tool I built for finances:

https://github.com/joshcanhelp/budget-cli

I'm trying to think of a way to get the two working together because there is a lot of overlap in what they're trying to do.

> I would be surprised if Apple and Google didn’t eventually start to build something like this

They could certainly do it but I think it goes against what they want to do with the data, which is gather and centralize it. Maybe folks would go for it but the core idea here is saving for yourself, not storing it in another platform.

> It’s a well thought-out framework

Appreciate that, thank you!

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41183795

I totally agree. This would not work well with a large body of documentation and has some big limitations in terms of formatting.

I never got to my second spike but I was looking at maintaining separate code files that could be included and tested atomically. That model was based on how we were trying to do it at a previous position using Contentful for the content management and then pointing code samples to publicly-available files.

This looks great so far and glad to see others tackling this tough problem! I've spent a lot of my time writing documentation and example code and, while I love the process, it's very hard to keep it all up-to-date. I wrote up a spike I tried a while back that worked well for what I needed it for:

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/testable-documentation-spike-1/

My experience was 100% different (but also 6+ years ago). Margins just weren't enough to build it into estimates and it was nearly impossible to sell it to clients as a line item.

This was on my mind when I published it. I know, personally, other folks who did not have as fond of a memory as I do and others who are in a tough spot because of these layoffs (visa issues, financial hardships, etc). I certainly don't mean to imply that I represent all views here but it seems to have resonated with a lot of my former colleagues (who were the audience for this post).

This is a good question. A lot of people, all over the world, put a lot of work into something and getting acquired turns stock options worth $0 into options worth a lot more than that. It’s just my $0.02 but, knowing the founders and who they are, I’m fairly sure this was more about giving back to the folks that made it happen than it was a purely business decision.

Also, Auth0 was investor-backed so there was likely a lot of pressure to sell at the price being offered. I don’t know how all that works exactly but I can imagine that this kind of decision is made by more people than just the founders.

I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

https://www.11ty.dev

I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/