nun-db VS url2epub

I never correlate my growth with the company I am working for; sometimes, you overgrow the company, and it is time to leave.

"Pays okay; 100% remote; very few meetings; low standards for productivity mean I have great work/life balance" seems like a perfect workplace.

What you need is probably a project outside of work to challenge you. I built my own company 13 years ago as a side project (I still run it up to this day as a side project) because I was a Mobile developer and Would like to keep doing Web development.

Today, I am having fun with my Open-source project https://github.com/mateusfreira/nun-db. When I have too many meetings or fight fewer coding challenges in my work, writing my own distributed database keeps me fresh and challenged. With it, I learned Rust and also distributed systems, which made me read books and papers that would never be needed for my normal work.

I see that as growing, and it has brought me great opportunities. Times these side projects become companies, and you make money; times, they bring job opportunities that you would not have otherwise.

You should leave a company when your growth is faster and more than the company can take in. Meanwhile, use the low pressure to go after other challenges personally; that is my way of dealing with it.

I am currently developing an open-source (MIT) database that can be directly accessed from the frontend (browser and apps) , that is distributed, and capable to deliver data in real-time. The primary goal is to provide support for any use-case that requires close proximity to users and, most importantly, it is entirely free to use and run by yourself if desired.

If you would like to view it, please visit: https://github.com/mateusfreira/nun-db

Feedback is always welcome, especially if you have a use-case in mind that you believe it may be suitable for but are unsure. I have already utilized it in many of my personal projects and for a few clients with a small number of users, but I am hopeful that it will soon be ready for larger-scale implementation.

Working towards making Nun-db (My personal open source project ) a leader less distributed database check it out https://github.com/mateusfreira/nun-db/pull/50 just yesterday I merged one pull requests there was going for like 2 weeks

Somewhat similarly, I wrote a web app to generate epub (instead of pdf) out of urls and send to eink reader(s) directly (via a telegram bot) so I can read them. Currently it supports sending epub by email (for kindle) or uploading epub to dropbox (for kobo, etc.). It originally also supports reMarkable cloud but we can no longer make reMarkable cloud actually work. There's also a REST api to generate epub to be downloaded directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

For e-ink readers epubs are generally better than PDFs for urls anyways, as epubs are basically packed htmls, and also the flow text works better on smaller screens.

I wrote a service (Google Cloud Run as the backend, with Telegram bot as the frontend) to generate readable ePub from URLs and send directly to e-ink readers. It was originally wrote for reMarkable 2 (using reMarkable cloud), I recently added support for Kindle (by using the send-to-kindle emails). The code is at https://github.com/fishy/url2epub and I blogged about the recently added kindle support at https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle.

I'm open to suggestions on what other e-ink platforms to add, as long as they have a reasonable cloud API. I'm also looking for a good e-ink platform to move to personally, as it becomes apparent that reMarkable really doesn't want third parties to use their proprietary cloud "API".

2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

For reMarkable, I also wrote a Telegram bot to convert http url into ePub and send to reMarkable directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub

(if you don't like telegram or don't use reMarkable, it also comes with a public rest API to generate epub out of urls)

Shameless plug and this is only loosely related: Over the last holiday season I wrote a backend (written in Go and running on App Engine) to convert http url into epub. The frontend is a telegram bot that sends the epub to your reMarkable account directly, but it also has rest api to download the epub file: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

With the purchase of reMarkable 2, I have this need to easily send web articles to my reMarkable 2 from my phone, while officially they only provided a Chrome extension, which can only be used on desktops.

As a result I wrote some go code (https://github.com/fishy/url2epub) for the past 2 days, to generate ePub from URL. I also implemented reMarkable API to send them to reMarkable tablets directly.

The current UI for it is implemented as a Telegram bot (https://t.me/url2rM_bot?start=1), running on AppEngine (code: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/tree/main/appengine). I initially considered making an Android app for the UI, but decided that Telegram bot is less work for me, and works good enough for this use case (sorry for people who don't use Telegram, but this also means that people on iOS, desktop, etc. will be able to use it).

For the future, I might do:

- Expand the URLs supported (currently it only supports URLs with an AMP version provided, and the AMP version does have article tag inside)