Jess's Site

It's been almost five years since I last posted an actual new post on this website, with any changes mostly being minor content fixes rather than brand new posts. However, to coincide with some personal news I have posted on Twitter, I figured I would post something new to summarise the last 5 years, with some more in depth posts possibly coming sometime in the future. Without further ado, here is a summary of projects: - My final year project was a software system designed to be able to manage multiple CCTV cameras with differing recording schedules without a central server, instead any device on the network could connect and control the cameras via mDNS using a Windows app. - I did a long form post with my employer about my experiences with making high performance React Native applications on both native and web, and how we had to move to Tamagui due to poor performance on the web. - Made a Node.JS payload app to create AI powered chatbots you can add to a Discord server - Various other AI experiments I want to clean up and open source at some point. I also took the opportunity to rebuild my website once again: It's now running the latest Payload 3 as a CMS platform with Next JS 15 for the frontend technology.

So firstly -- WinIRC is not dead. I am still working on it, even if there's been no commits to the repo, I've still been working on fixes and new features in IrcClientCore, which will end up in WinIRC. Eventually, I hope to finish the current update for WinIRC, which although isn't the recode I mentioned in the last release, is a major decoupling of the IRC logic from WinIRC into IrcClientCore. It also has a number of UI tweaks including coloured nick names, and displaying the number of unread messages in the channels on the sidebar. This update is planned to happen soon. The reason I've not been working on it as much (apart from university / being employed) is a WIP project currently called Signal IRC. This is an IRC client based upon the same IrcClientCore library as WinIRC, but rather than running as a native UWP application, it's an ASP.NET web application. This is essentially the spiritual successor to an older project I had, namely Comet IRC. The major differences is that the backend and frontend is not nearly as tightly coupled -- the backend utilises a mixture of ASP.NET Web APIs for login / server management and SignalR for real time messaging. The frontend is a Vue single page application that's served by the ASP.NET server portion. I plan to have a public release of Signal IRC as an alpha on Github at some point this year assuming I have time, once a few key features are completed, including storing message scrollback within a database.

WordPress has served me well for a good few years now, but I decided last year that it's time for an overhaul of my site to use more modern web development practices and for me to have much more control over it. I also wanted much more emphasis on the projects I've done, rather than have them buried as a small link on a subsection of the site. This led me to create this site -- a Hugo powered static site with a couple extra server side scripts to manage Netlify style continuous integration and GitHub auth for the Netlify CMS used for content management. It also utilises the InstantClick JS library for Gatsby like SPA navigation and page preloading in a couple KBs of JavaScript The site is fully open source, and available to download at https://github.com/rymate1234/rymate.co.uk.

WinIRC 1.5 is finally making it's way to the Windows Store, with a host of new features - the main one being a refreshed UI. However, the release of the application has left much to be desired. Just over two weeks ago, I pushed the final 1.5 changelog to the WinIRC Github, as I was hoping in the next couple of days the release would be live on the Windows Store. As it turns out, this wasn't the case - I forgot to test it locally, and the Store based certification process marked two issues that needed to be fixed before it would be certified, specifically: - The twitter library used had uploaded binaries to NuGet built in debug mode - Metadata issues with the UWP MenuBar lib I created So I fixed the first issue by building a local NuGet package for the twitter library, then tested with the local Windows App Certification Kit (WACK) and my app passed, with no mention of the other metadata issues. So logically, I tried to release it on the store, and it failed the store WACK test with the same errors as last time! I first assumed it was my machine, so I tried it on my tablet and then a Creators Update VM, and failed to reproduce on both After trying (and failing) to get help from MS support, I tried last night to rename the filename of the package that was uploaded to the store, as all of the ones I'd uploaded were the default filename. This worked! Although there was still a difference with the store results to my results, I managed to fix the metadata issues with my UWP MenuBar (by importing the source as a c# class library to the main WinIRC source tree) meaning WinIRC passed it's validation tests. So what's next? For WinIRC development, the next step is to refactor the app to properly use an actual design pattern, probably MVVM. I also want to add some scripting support to WinIRC, so users can add their own commands and functionality to WinIRC. For distribution, I want to work on alternative distribution channels for WinIRC and other UWP / AppX applications, so it isn't entirely centralised in the Microsoft ecosystem, and hopefully so apps don't need to have a special signed certificate. More on this if I actually manage to make a prototype