For local dev work I often need to run multiple local tools/servers in parallel. In a recent project I learned about Foreman and it’s Procfile format. There is a whole suite of runners for this format, but I found all of them lacking in some way or another. Don’t want Ruby? Don’t want NPM in a NPM-free project? And worst of all, “What was the command again? goreman run?”.
Go makes it quite easy to spin up and manage a couple of processes so I created proc.
Similar to how you process a Makefile by running make, with proc you can run your Procfile.
Over the years I used several setups for running local dev environments. When learning a new SDK I usually had to learn their recent “local dev server”, “live dev environment” or similar. I found that these tend to be very narrow in capability and caught myself always thinking “why don’t you just let me define a Makefile and run that on src/ changes?”. I tried several ways to achieve this (eg. entr) but was never happy with the resulting setup.
I usually use Makefiles for dev work. They are somewhat arcane but I find them to be highly efficient and since make is available everywhere there is no setup cost at all.
So recently I created remake which watches src/ and runs make on changes. It is extremely simple but given that make can do basically everything also quite capable in the end.
It is quite unfortunate to announce that we had to unpublish Watch Later from Google Play today.
A couple of weeks ago we had to fill out an audio form regarding the YouTube client API usage of Watch Later. As a result Google shut down our API access. To our surprise, they actually forwarded us their internal report which came our of a manual audit. Some bean counter looked at the app and decided that it does not “improve the user interaction with YouTube”, resulting in a violation of ToS - specifically III.
Watch Later has been updated and released on Google Play to the beta channel. Unless something catastrophic is wrong with the version, it will roll out to 100% in a couple of days.
Notable changes:
User playlists
YouTube recently shut down the API to insert videos into a user’s Watch Later playlist. I expect YouTube to remove/migrate that platform feature in the coming months, but that is only speculation. Until then, the app will work by letting the user select one of their playlists and insert the videos into that instead.
Remember the days before plug-and-play? When you had to manually configure IRQs on your hardware, taking care to have no overlaps, hoping that it’s even possible without overlaps? If not, be glad… The bad news is: If you’re an Android software developer, thanks to Android Oreo’s background execution limits forcing the use of JobScheduler, those days are sort of back. Good news: this time, it’s all software, and we as a community can collectively make things work.