This winter I've gotten reinspired to work on programming projects. Yes I'd rather be out riding my bike, but I really don't like our cold wet foggy winters. I've got my other projects like guitar repair and of course practicing guitar. It's good to have a balance. But there is something about writing code that not only fascinates me but gives me a real sense of accomplishment. Getting a computer to do something based on a bunch of cryptic lines you write is very satisfying. Of course all my coding has been on the web for many years and my favorite thing to do is to get different sites working together. So my latest project was to see if I could get my personal website to make posts to Bluesky.
What makes this stuff even possible is open protocols and open source code. I could never do anything like this myself, but if the protocols are published and there is sample code out there I can usually hack things together. In the case of Bluesky the protols are open and there is good documentation. For my website, which runs on Drupal, someone had already contributed a low level module that provides a gateway to the Bluesky service. It still took me a couple of days and a couple of hundred lines of code to put it all together, but its now working. Once I finish this post and review it, I'll just click a button right here on my website to post a link to it on Bluesky.
I gotta say I'm not really very good at coding. I write good code mind you, but I'm so slow and it takes me forever to find the answers I need and figure things out. This of course is a direct result of the rapid deterioration of my 76 year old brain. But the other side of that is that I've got to think coding is a really good thing for us old folks to keep our brains from rotting even faster. Use it or lose it, so they say.
Writing code also seems to be a very fitting thing to be doing right now. I remembered something from the I Ching "The power of the dark is ascending. The light retreats to security, so that the dark cannot encroach upon it." I imagine much of the internet was created this way. What the tech moguls like Zuckerberg and Musk seem to forget is that the web totally runs on open source code. Without the open source networking code that the web relies on Facebook couldn't exist. And open source is about as radical and revolutionary an idea as ever was. Anyone can use it but no one can own it. If you change it you have to share your changes back to the community. So just writing code for open source platforms like Drupal and Bluesky can be seen as a type of resistance.
Most of what's happening in the world right now is way way beyond my control. And really the code I'm writing is insignificant and will disappear the day my website goes offline. But for now I'm having fun and it's keeping me busy, at least until the next sunny day I can get out and ride my bike again.