muxup-site VS excalidraw

On https://muxup.com/ you should see pastel-coloured randomly drawn 'roguh' highlights for the site title and for the titles of individual articles. If you mouse over, they'll be redrawn while your mouse is hovering. If you're on mobile, you won't see that, and that's fine. It worked just fine on Android (FF or Chrome) and iPhone last time I checked, but do let me know if you're not seeing that.

It's really very simple, just thought the distillation of the 'rough' drawing technique to a couple of dozen lines of code for this use case might be of interest to some.

I can recommend writing a short script to test redirects and cache control are configured as expected for your site - here's mine (health warning: shell script) https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/utils/server_t...

I link to something I've written in a conversation if it's relevant (like this - my blog is https://muxup.com/), and post articles to HN, lobste.rs, or an appropriate subreddit if no-one else does and I think it's relevant to people there.

I've also found that a custom-written generator is surprisingly productive. My own attempt is at https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/build.py and I wrote up a few notes on it here https://muxup.com/2022q3/muxup-implementation-notes#site-gen....

See my implementation notes post for more technical detail (which also links to the site source).

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.