Hello Patrons š This is the February 2022 progress update. Iāve thought about it and Iām going to include all my projects in these updates, as focusing on a single project felt a bit too constraining. Iāll talk about the website, stream, the bunnies.io project, and the Discord server.
This progress update is cross-posted to my website, to serve as an example. To get future updates, sponsor on Patreon š§”
carrot.blog #
I refreshed the support page on my website and added a fun little way of recognising patrons. Every patron gets a loaf on the page, and if you have your privacy settings set to hidden, youāll show up as āanonymousā.
The implementation was quite interesting, and required the first bit of custom infrastructure for the website. Before, everything was statically compiled, and hosted on GitHub Pages, fronted by Cloudflare. Now, thereās also a self-hosted VPS (virtual private server) that runs a backing API instance, written in Kotlin (as you might expect). The sponsors component uses a websocket (and falls back to basic HTTP) to update the list live as people support. This was somewhat complicated by the Patreon API, which isnāt under active development, and uses something called āJSON APIā which Iām distinctly not a fan of - the responses end up being quite complex and piecing things together is hard. However, it all works great now, and seeing the list update live is awesome. Sometimes over-engineering things is worth it.
Stream updates #
I took the time to reorganise my OBS setup, so that everything is included in a single window. Iāll likely write another blog post about this, so I wonāt go in to great detail, but hereās a screenshot of what that looks like at the moment:
Iām enjoying streaming Spelunky but the game is brutally difficult and requires a lot of concentration, so Iād like to stream some more relaxing games. I recently streamed the Spyro: Reignited trilogy which is really fun to play through again - I played a lot of Spyro as a kid and the remake gives me all the same feelings.
Iāve been testing and following along with a PR to make OBS Studio run natively on Apple Silicon. It works great (CPU usage is approximately halved for me), but plugin support is still limited, so Iām looking forward to when that makes more progress.
You can follow the stream to get notified when I go live: Carrot @ Twitch
bunnies.io updates #
The bunnies.io project needed security updates, and I took the opportunity to refresh the infrastructure as well. The project is entirely hosted on a single DigitalOcean instance, which is managed using Terraform and Ansible, so tearing this down and reconstructing is wasnāt too big of a job. As a bonus, the counter now āsticksā properly across reboots/failures (using Redis), so it will be much more accurate from now on.
At the time of writing, there have been over 1.56 million bunnies served through the website and API, and around a terabyte of media served every year through Cloudflare š°
Discord updates #
Finally, Iād like to mention the Discord server - Iāve opened this up to the general public, and added an āairlockā, so that newcomers have to be approved to see any channels. Supporters at every tier now also get access to a supporters-only section, including voice and text chat, if youād like to talk about projects in a more private setting.
Iām really pleased a handful of folks have joined the server - itās gaining momentum, and I hope it can be a kind, relaxed place for people to hang out.
This progress update is cross-posted to my website, to serve as an example. To get future updates, sponsor on Patreon š§”