I’ve gotten back to running lately. In this post, I’ll explore my past experiences and figure out where I’m going. The Past Sometime in 2014, probably around April, I was gifted a few pairs of running shoes, and I figured that I should put them to good use. I still vaguely remember my first few runs in those shoes: like countless others, I ran way too fast and felt the consequences.

There’s an unfortunate confusion in the Julia community when it comes to making your code available to others in a registry such as General, and it’s mostly due to ambiguity in the relevant terminology. We talk about tagging new versions, making new releases, and registering packages all the time, and no one is ever sure what exactly we mean. Are we pushing a Git tag? Making a GitHub release? Adding a version to the registry?

A few weeks ago, I embarked on a quest to stop depending so heavily on so few accounts for my online services. In short, I tried to remove Google from my life. I was mostly successful! But, somewhat unsurprisingly, some things ended up being more trouble than they were worth. More specifically, Nextcloud was a pain in the butt. It had a pretty giant footprint on my little server, it constantly encountered errors when checking for changes, and it just wasn’t that useful to me—I mentioned in the previous post that I don’t really use office software very much, and that hasn’t changed.

The Ruby gem VCR is a tool that allows you to “[r]ecord your test suite’s HTTP interactions and replay them during future test runs for fast, deterministic, accurate tests”. It’s really useful for testing things like web API wrappers. It also contains 3,000 lines of code. Let’s use Cassette to build it in Julia with less than 1% of the code! The first example in VCR’s README looks like this:

About a month ago, my YouTube account was suspended without warning or justification. They told me I violated the TOS, but all I do on YouTube is watch videos. I sent in an appeal, and it was quickly turned down, again without reason. I know I’m not the first one to have something like this happen to them, and it’s well known that the only way to get through to the machine is by raising a stink on Twitter, but… I don’t have a Twitter account.