this space intentionally left blank

November 20, 2015

Filed under: tech»coding

Weir, year two

I realized the other day that Google Reader shut down in June of 2013, which means I've been using Weir as my RSS reader for more than two years now. It's my longest-running software project, and still one of the most complex things I've built in Node. And apart from occasional revisions, it's been up and running constantly, in mobile and desktop browsers, that entire time.

I don't log out a lot of metrics from Weir, so there's a lot of stuff that I'm not tracking. But I can say that there are currently 113 subscriptions, with around 6,000 stories in the database. The server that hosts the app (as well as my various domains) downloads about 20GB of data each month, most of which is probably Weir (the rest is e-mail and server updates, and I'm frankly not that popular). It also hovers around 10% of available memory, which is pretty good for a garbage-collected language on a piddly little VM.

On the client side of things, the Angular code has definitely started to show its age. This was the project that I used to learn Angular, and since then I've learned a lot about the framework. Would I use it if I were writing Weir from scratch? I'm not sure. I still love the databinding aspect of Angular, but I suspect I could write a smaller, nimbler version of the UI in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. At some point, I may give it a shot: the server API is clean enough that writing a new client should be relatively straightforward.

As an experiment in self-hosting a cloud service, Weir is a mixed success. But I have grown to love the way that something I wrote has become a fixture of my life. I clear out my stream on the bus in the morning. Throughout the day, Weir's purple tab icon lights up to let me know that new items are available. It feels like wearing clothes that I tailored for myself — using it feels a little nicer than it should, just from the pride in its construction.

Past - Present