Olivier Forget

Instead of going over the month of December (not much happened), here is a quick recap for the year in countdown form: Four Releases I released four versions of Dropserver: 0.13.0: Install/update apps from URL. See January. 0.13.1 brought a few bug fixes and improvements. See March progress report. 0.13.2 Adds a proxy for outbound requests, and many small tweaks. See May update. 0.13.3 See September progress report. Three Main Areas of Work I worked primarily on three new things in 2024:

In our drive to take control of our web presence by self-hosting our services from home, it seems contradictory to depend on 3rd party services to make it all work. Companies like Mailgun, Tailscale, Cloudflare, Netlify, NextDNS, Linode, AWS, ngrok, and many more offer compelling solutions to the endless challenges of self-hosting. But does using them mean we are fooling ourselves about our independence from big tech? Here is how I think of things as I decide what to use in my own home, and what I integrate into Dropserver.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for November 2024. Here is last month’s report. This month was all about Tailscale integration. Trying to get this stuff right isn’t easy! Dig in… Config Conundrums When I started Tailscale integration I reflexively put some configuration parameters in the ds-host config file. Silly idea. First, I should not be adding things to this config file. Nobody wants to write a config file before running a new service.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for October 2024. Here is last month’s report. Dropserver 0.13.3 released As I mentioned last month I released ds-host and ds-dev version 0.13.3 with support for Deno 2. I updated to 0.13.3 on my personal instance of ds-host, which happened without a hitch. I am still using Deno 1.x because I haven’t updated all my apps to work with Deno 2. Update Leftovers and Shopping List for Deno 2 The changes to Leftovers and ShoppingList for Deno 2 were trivial in nature (though I still wish there were none).

Deno 2 is here. My project Dropserver, an application platform for your personal web services, uses Deno as its app sandbox. Deno 2’s arrival forced me to break backwards compatibility in Dropserver, which is something I really don’t like doing. Here’s an explanation of why this happened, how it chafes with my vision for Dropserver, and how I plan to avoid this in the future. Deno code in Dropserver Dropserver is written in Go, but it runs apps written in JavaScript (or Typescript) inside Deno.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for September 2024. Here is last month’s report. Going Off On a Tangent from Tailscale Integration Tailscale integration is progressing. I am able to read information about the network, such as connection status, peers, etc… This data is dynamic and changes when the tailnet admin shares a node with someone, or a user connects a new device, etc… Some of this data has implications for the ds-host appspace owner.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for July and August 2024. Here is last month’s report. Work on Tailscale integration is ongoing, but before heading off on vacation I took some time to improve a Dropserver app that I use daily. Work on the ShoppingList App for Dropserver I finally put a bit of polish into the Shopping List app for Dropserver and released it: https://shoppinglist.olivierforget.net/ My wife and I had been using an earlier version of this for well over a year now and it was finally time to make it better.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for June 2024. Here is last month’s report. I started on the Tailscale integration, which began by getting the tsnet package, which resulted in a shock. Go get tailscale.com/tsnet … 😲 After entering the command the machine churned for several minutes while unfurling a seemingly endless listing of dependent packages required by tsnet. Yikes. tsnet loads lots of dependencies from the tailscale.com package which is expected.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for May 2024. Here is last month’s report. May was a “Spring cleaning” month. Before launching into my next big project (Tailscale integration) I want to have a clean code base, or at least clean out the obvious relics of ancient ideas that never fully blossomed. Here we go: Remove Unused Appspace DB Code Back in ancient times Dropserver apps could store data in a sqlite DB that was managed by Dropserver.

Dick Rutan died earlier last month. This caused me to revisit a time in my life when I worked for him, flew with him, and shared in the misadventures of a failed project with him. I worked for Dick from the Summer of 1998 to Spring 1999 while he was on his second attempt at being the first to go around the world in a balloon non-stop and non-refueled. He was already famous for his circumnavigation of Earth in the Voyager in 1986.