This past week I have been very sick so it definitley has not been a very fun week. I’m still not feeling 100% but hopefully I’m on the tail end of this thing.

Work update

I did some more work with grafana and prometheus. I also worked on setting up some enterprise sites in our datacenter. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to automate all of the steps because right now it is still a fair amount of work to get everything setup for a new enterprise install.

Side project Updates

I made a couple of very small improvements to SkillSift. I changed some button text so rather than having the button say “Create Applicant” which Rails apparently puts their by default it just says “Apply”, but I’m thinking about changing it to “Submit Application”. I also started adding an email address field to the default application field, but I still need to add some email validation settings to the model. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to handle custom questions for the application form.

I also had an idea for creating an rss reader plugin for discourse. I’ll probably start it out as just a little cli app that talks to my private discourse install that will post a topic to my forum for each to blog post update for all the blogs I “subscribe” to. I think it is a great idea rather than having a completely separate app just for rss and I think it could also be a cool idea for other forums to use. That way the forum could automatically get content about a specific topic based on the blogs that it followed and that could spark some conversation.

Podcasts

I enjoyed watching this video about how Intercom got started. It was also interesting here him talk about the importance of having a recognizable brand vs allowing customers to customize everything.

I also listened to another great episode of The Art of Product where they talk about Discourse!

Discourse Forums

This week I would like to feature the Fun Fun Forum. Most of the forum is private but I thought it was pretty cool that they decided to make one of their topics a “Spotlight” topic and make it public. Which is kind of a cool idea to bring awareness to their private forum. The spotlight topic is Teaching programming to children and teachers