Weeknotes 2020/50 - Micro APIs, ethical analytics | Today I Learned by Ville Säävuori

Last few weeks I’ve been working on some small micro APIs for Slipmat. This week I built a new homepage for Slipmat Labs and added changelogs for Spotify Playlist Parser API, Tidal Playlist Parser API and the new Discogs Search API.

I’ve really liked working with FastAPI and Vercel for making these kind of micro APIs. My typical Python stack runs on Docker and usually has lots of heavy dependencies like databases and background runners. These FastAPI projects are great because they’re literally just one file with some extra for docs and theming. What’s best, Vercel is amazingly fast deploying them, so the whole CI/CD pipeline feels really rewarding as any changes you push are in production in less than a minute.

Privacy-friendly analytics

I wanted to have some idea of the usage of Slipmat Labs projects but I didn’t want to add Google Analytics for them so I’m experimenting with Plausible.io instead. Based on initial impressions, Plausible works really great for small sites like Slipmat. It unfortunately doesn’t have an API so I can use it for the whole Slipmat, but as the project is open source, I explained my use case in their discussions - maybe someday.

Web Design Excercises

Got an inspiration from the new GitHum homepage to flex new Tailwind 2.0 muscles and created a new repo for Slipmat UI development. I spent hours on a couple of simple ideas but didn’t get very far. I really like the modern “let’s use the all available space” kind of designs, though.

I’ve done quite a lot of work to open up all my Slipmat development but UI design is something that probably doesn’t work very well in the open. I’ll happily post some mockups and beta designs at some point but not yet.

Misc

Published Slipmat Beta 35 with a couple of nice long-awaited features plus several smaller fixes and tweaks.
Added Discord integration to multiple Slipmat repositories and added a firehose channel to our community chat to make the development work even more visible to ordinary users. Sure, the channel doesn’t offer any useful information for most, but what it does show really well is the amount of work that goes into the repositories every single day.
Reinstalled Wakatime plugin to VSCode to get more detailed statistics on my coding habbits. Based on the first week stats, I spend way too much time coding!