Stephen Castro-Starkey

I wrote this post about my big dreams for Coffee Time. I wonder if it's time to start thinking about the My Cafe idea again? The gist: Lean Coffee has a place in a lot of tech circles. However, it hasn't really found its way out. I wonder if there is an opportunity to rethink the whole conversation paradigm and do a bit more experimentation on a new platform?

Yesterday I discovered that SQLite isn’t all that reliable at maintaining integrity of FTS5 virtual tables. Following their documentation to create a content backed virtual table with the recommended triggers lead to database corruption after just 5 operations.

Surprising how little I’ve been reporting on my coding adventures. Coffee Time is making good progress! Have been working on little things after getting feedback from conversations. Also started thinking about wiki!

Well, ok, so I've rebuilt all the blog functionality I lost when I removed Patreon integration. At least enough to keep people apprised of things. Now I'm wondering if those posts should be part of the global RSS feed! Gotta think about that.

Also, as I write this post I realize the tag name is not correct. I really need to build functionality to delete and edit tags.

I am feeling the pain of not having a team to work with me on Coffee Time. It is very slow going. Motivation comes in fits and starts. I often wonder if I could have done a particular thing better. I wish I had the energy to grow my user experience capacity. But side projects like this don’t seem to attract people. I will have to go out and find! But where?

Coffee Time is back! And on a whole new domain!! With embedded video, password-based authentication, and everything. Check it out https://coffeetime.social

There is a ton of infrastructure I built around the old lean coffee app that relied on Selenium WebDriver. Now that I’m developing on Linux for the first time and struggling with it, I’m realizing I should probably throw all that away. Spent many hours trying to figure out why my tests wouldn’t run at all.

I feel like a return to simplicity is in order.

Starting to wonder if the best thing to do is use the old Coffee Time Java codebase to kick start the lean coffee revolution! At least it has a complete set of features.

Really want to do more on my cafe. Maybe this weekend since I’m feeling comfortable in the new job!

Edit event is done! I might add the option to add a url to a video call for folks what want to use apps that are more feature rich than the system we are about to add (LiveKit).

Today I did a bunch of stylistic updates in My Cafe, but no new features. Not sure why I'm stuck. This stuff should be easy!

Lots of progress today! We can create communities and from within a community you can go to a page where you can create an event. Using the native datetime html5 thing hoping people have modern browsers…

Made a bunch of improvements to My Cafe in the past few days! Users can set and remove passwords. Admins can approve user registrations, or deny/block them. And you can also modify the site configuration in the UI. The finally create org/team/whatever. What should that name be??

My Cafe now has basic email login. Most folks get annoyed with this kind of thing so I'll add passwords next and possibly passkeys in the future! Then we will create organizations/teams (still trying to figure out what the name should be) and events within those. Then agenda management, insights, tasks, etc.

I’ve been thinking a lot about authentication in My Cafe. It’s starting to look like you will register/logon using your email address, and then afterwards you can add a passkey so you can login that way if you want to.

Almost done implementing email based authn!

Today's Lean Coffee chat to talk about whether we want to rebuild Coffee Time or reuse the existing codebase was quite good! We landed on starting a new codebase. The source code is hosted at https://fossil.calmabiding.me/mycafe.

Next up: user authentication!

Feeling a bit down lately. But maybe that's just sleep deprivation? Have made some small edits to my legacy lean coffee app in preparation for bringing a few friends down memory lane as we consider rebuilding it! Or maybe I'll find a way to hack up the old one to make it easier to self service? Not sure what I want to do really. But, I'm certain I don't like compiling JavaScript. Ha!

Visit the old app if you want!

My thoughts so far. Third party auth or local? Simplicity or complexity? Or eventually both?

The new cafe app is coming along nicely. Just copied over the site config code from My Life and tweaked it a bit to correct some sins I've discovered. Next up: authentication!

Earlier I wrote that I would try out SuperTokens. Sadly, I don't think I want people to have to manage multiple server processes, and they require a backend written in either golang, nodejs, or python. Our backend is Java-based. Guess we'll have to try something else!

Well, as I said yesterday, I tried to integrate Ripley. It didn't work. Very much needs to plug into internals I don't want to work with (like http-kit).

So now I'm looking at Inertia, Unpoly, Twinspark, and htmx all thanks to this blog post

🤷‍♂️

I seem to have reached the limit of my energy to improve my blog. Perhaps that's for the best! Now I'm gonna focus a bit on implementing a small Lean Coffee web app. Or mobile app. Not sure exactly. But it will be entirely self hosted and open source and free!