The Week #17

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  • One of my side projects is running an air quality bot for the city of Houston called @Kuukihouston. Basically what it does is scrapes pollutant data from The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, stores it in a databases, and tweets if thresholds are exceeded or updated to cross that threshold.

I noticed it hadn't tweeted in a while but appeared to be working. Surely the city Houston didn't suddenly stop dumping benzene into the air (though a man can dream). Turns out they TCEQ started returning 404 Not Found responses to my bot. I hadn't yet moved the server to Frankfurt to be powered by sustainability energy so it was a good excuse to move it and see if it would start working.

Sure enough after moving to a fresh ip address, Kuukibot came back to life and started tweeting again.


  • Sketch wrote a great blog post about why they're proud to be a native app. I wholeheartedly agree - software that's made for the Mac, not just on the Mac is always preferable. At the same time, with iOS and iPad apps coming to macOS with Big Sur and the ARM transition, I feel like even the "native" apps won't feel like Mac apps before we know it.


  • My buddy John at Trendsmap pointed me to a great blog post by Karl called Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit. The basic premise is that closed forums tend to take your work, hide it from the wider internet, and eventually shut down – taking your work with it and without a real way to export it. Basically if it's important to you in anyway, put it on your own site. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere