My magnum opus of published open source software is sisyphus, which is a simple little shell script that produces a random pair of suggestions of things to do next. The observation is that the world is full of repeated tasks that never make it onto todo lists, and that being mindful of same helps get you away from the keyboard and into real life.
My modest goal for sisyphus is to implement it into every environment that I touch. I think of it as randomness as a microservice, or perhaps just an exercise in connecting a tiny shell script to some hulking bit of complex infrastructure.
Some list of places this might show up if I get the right combination of time and energy:
- an OpenFaas function on top of faasd on a Pi 4
- a Jamstack function in Netlify
- a dynamic page in Gopher or Gemini
- the page https://sisyphus.annarbortelegraph.com somehow
- at the end of a curl command
- implemented in Go, Python 3, or Rust
- as a Telegram bot or a Slack command
- in a protected environment requiring two factor auth to access
- via a function call that generates a postcard
Fortunately the algorithm at the heart of sisyphus is very simple, as implemented by the GNU "shuf" command. And also fortunately the data set it shuffles from is small enough that there is no risk of any kind of performance problem, no matter how hard I try to make things fast or slow it shouldn't matter much.
More at the sisyphus repo on Github.
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