Welcome to Level1 Devember!

:fire: Hype

It’s almost that magical time of year again! No, not Xmas :christmas_tree: . Although, just as magical. :wink:

I’m talking about Devember .

Okay, so it’s not remotely Devember yet, but 2020 has been weird. We’re also sponsored by Linode to bring you some free stuff! That’ll run out juuuuuust about when devember is over.

https://linode.com/level1techs

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Linode, in particular, is doing a new approach with their marketing. They are building a genuinely useful resource for learning, which I love. Unlike AWS tutorials, where you get shackled to AWS automation, you don’t really get the same “Linode Beergoggles” when you learn from this resource:

With AWS, it’s not really until later that you’ve got a lot more experience that you’re comfortable with other services. There is a time and place for AWS, but imho the best way to leverage cloud service sis like what Troy Hunt does which is leverage each service against every other service to minimize costs. It’s really brilliant. I digress…

I’ve been doing this Devember stuff for like 5+ years now. It started small, but we had tons of participants last year. It’s great fun, and I’ve met a lot of cool devs along the way (hat tip mods et al, you know who you are). A lot of the time I hear about paying work, students getting jobs because of our help with their “github profiles” (and whatnot – you get hte idea). Some of you have gone on to great things, won awards, etc.

This year we’re doing Devember through the end of the year, and I’m going to do at least a couple videos on what everyone is working on. Work-from-home is here to say, and the skills you build in Devember have never been more in demand. School semesters are ending early, people are bored. It just feels right. I had planned to do this even without Linode, but they’re basically giving away free trials for all your cloud space projects. Do you use Amazon AWS or Azure for work stuff? You might be surprised how expensive those alternatives really are! :smiley:

In a word, Devember is a challenge . One that you impose upon yourself; to code for one hour each and every day in the month of December. You do this for the sake of the pursuit of knowledge.

The challenge is pretty open. You can decide for yourself what you wish to do: learn a new language, learn a new stack, develop an ambitious project, continue from a previous project, or just have a little fun.

:thought_balloon: Suggestions

To be frank, it’s unrealistic to code for a solid hour straight if you do not have a plan. That is why I suggest everyone either does the agile method of development or spend the first few days formulating a plan and then spend the rest of that time executing that plan.

From past years’ challenges, we have learned a lot. One thing I’ll share is that people live busy lives and may not be able to fully commit. We totally understand that life can get in the way of things, however, we don’t want that to discourage you. Any effort, no matter how small, towards a goal is net positive progress.

:balance_scale: Rules

If you would like to sign up for this challenge, simply make a thread with the tag, #devember2020 – The thread can be either under #blog or #code.

Next, reply here with a link to that post. Tell us a little about you, and your idea or project. Link to your git account or test site (or don’t, if you don’t want to).

If you just signed up, we might need to bump your ability to create new posts in blog/code. If that happens just reply here, and we’ll help.

When you reply, try to make a 1 line statement about your objective, such as this example:

My Devember project is to learn the Go language by creating or adapting a CMS back-end that’s compatible with a React frontend and is compatible with Wordpress’ Gutenberg editor.

My other Devember project is that IoT thing I talked bout on Patreon a while back…

:thinking: Ideas

If you need some ideas, please feel free to ask. Technically we’re getting started on Devember a little early this year. Usually you commit to doing at least an hour a day, but I think we can be flexible. You can just ask in a reply here. Once you’re all set use the EDIT function to try to keep this thread clean.

:medal_sports: Perks

If you complete this challenge then you get a shiny new badge, the Devember Badge!

:hammer_and_wrench: Happy coding!

:wrench: Helpful Stuff

Useful tutorials on most of the languages.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/index.htm

Five mistakes new programmers make.

Coding Tech Talks:

FunFunFunction (currently on Sabbatical)

Happy coding! :heart:

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… aaaaand how much work would a plugin (that’s not going to happen in the sense of a “plugin”) be to allow, say, Retroarch, to pull a list of users, all with different settings, and their save files, from a central server, and then write the updates back, I wonder. Probably too much to be reasonable when starting from a little scripting and some homeserver docker?

Nope, nope, nope. Retroarch’s API is very specific.

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I’d say it’s doable.

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based on the challenge, I’d say a month.

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At this point, I’m not sure if I can commit to the time required, but I do have an idea.

I use xBrowserSync to sync my bookmarks and ArchiveBox as my personal webpage saving/archiving service. I want to be able to easily import my bookmarks into ArchiveBox directly from xBrowserSync, but not all of them, only bookmarks from specific folders.

So, I will need to download, decrypt, and parse the xBrowserSync api format. Then select bookmarks that are in specific formats, and finally import them into ArchiveBox. I’m planning on running this on the machine that my ArchiveBox instance is on.

Edit, thead here:

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I actually have an app idea that basically only solves a problem at work for me. But still a reason to code. So…

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In order to further my understanding of orchestration tools, I think my worthy challenge would be to port all my existing manual configurations into salt stack.

This is usually a real pita when ever I have to rebuild something and forgot how to to do it.

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I’m in…
As every time I will try and make a game and I will just finish some basic mechanic and be done with it :smiley:
I will do what I can to basically commit 30 hours or so during the month.
I may even start now-ish to set up some basic stuff so I don’t do setup for the first week or so…

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Not sure I want anyone to see the mess I can make given an editor…

Anyway. Brace yourself for the attempt at making (and finishing) a small puzzle game.

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My daily work includes maintaining and managing complex linux systems, automation and various human factors. I do have a CS background and like to find bugs, features and solutions.

This project was born around 2 years ago as a small proof-of-concept after talking to a friend about “Hey, how can we make the system boot into a fully encrypted disk” - the lazy way.
Going through multiple levels of paranoia, best practices and security knowledge, this is where I landed so far in the implementation.

Link to the Project blog forum post and GitHub repository.

Goal for the #devember2020 is to implement notification and some signing check application (android app or similar) to allow better control over when things are allowed to happen/trusted.

Update: Due to full time work and other coding I did not get diving into the android app part, but did add a small perl script call inside my ssh authentication portion on the “key holder” side to notify me when an unlock event/attempt happens.

Side note: I did learn that Android phones do not boot without battery, but soldering usb directly (to the where the battery normally connects) does work (Disclaimer: do not try this at home without reading docs on what you actually do, or when the device contains data you want to access later on).

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I will join in and likely make a game. I have several side projects that I have been tinkering around with, making and re-making, so this will be a good excuse to pick one and stay focused on it.


So is Devember starting early, or is this thread for getting hyped for the next 2 months?


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Not sure how much work will be required for this and if it will last to december, but I was planning to start on this now so might as well try to join: project thread. I’m terrible at naming, so no repo yet.

The goal is to make a small web interface to the Nyaa torrent tracker to try organize the mess of releases to make it a bit more convenient.

I will certainly not do anything on Mondays, but I will try to get a little bit work on it each day otherwise. My Github has been very quiet the last two years and I want to try to get back to doing hobby coding a bit more regularly.

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My Devember project is to learn the Rust programming language by creating a flight pattern and prediction software. Be sure to lick that like button and smash that subscribe

HIT THE BELL TO BE NOTIFIED EVERY TIME YOUR INSANITY JUMPS UP TWO POINTS

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I see why L1T recommends Linode :wink:

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Hello, World!

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Hi, my name is Max, and I’m a hobby software developer(would like to be a professional sometime), and I really like Lua.
I’ve just created the post for my Devember project, Lua Libraries for crazy bootable devember challenge

As the title might already suggest, my goal is to produce a small, bootable image(for VM’s and real hardware) using buildroot(a toolchain for creating embedded Linux images) that runs a few cool example programs for my Lua libraries.

Specifically, I want a custom window-based GUI, and a simple game, along with some other cool example programs(without using SDL, X11, graphics drivers, image formats other than bitmap, or really anything I haven’t implemented myself, besides the kernel and some core utils).

I’ve implemented a lot of that separately already, in a hacky, ugly way, and I want to do it again(in a maybe less ugly way).

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Cool stuff!

Happy codding ya˙all. :smiley:

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Just posted my devember project on the community blog

I am creating a virtual tabletop for RPGs similar to roll20.

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Very nice!

I’ve been brewing a Discord bot to outsource all the character sheet forms, roll20 links, and all that jazz for some friends’ homebrew for fun. And, y’know, learning experience.

I will watch with great interest.

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