Still looking for work queue management stuff

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

  • Self-hostable (and ideally free)

    I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

  • Public vs. private vs. shareable items

    It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

    Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

    I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

  • Nested items and/or project groupings

    When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

  • Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

    Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

  • Kanban view

    Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

    Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

  • Priorities and due dates

    Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.

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Blorgin'

I feel like I need to come up for air, after some protracted busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which I have none of at the moment).

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Trying to ramp up

Right now I seem to be in a situation where my brain is fired up about a whole bunch of different things, and I’m trying to figure out how to get myself actually working on any of it in a nontrivial capacity.

First, I was inspired to rewrite/flesh out the next little chunk of Lewi, and I’d like to get to drawing it.

Second, yesterday I had a great idea for a pair of VRChat avatars, which I have a lot of fun ideas for how to do them (especially with how the facial animation systems are going to work).

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Co-op creative agency

The best times in my career have been when I’ve been tasked with solving interesting problems or making single-serving things, rather than working on a single specific project in the long term.

I am really good with figuring out how to do a thing, but not so much with figuring out what to do in the first place.

I feel like my best career path would be some sort of consulting, or working for a creative agency. But I really do not like the actual work model involved in either of those things.

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Short-term disability leave

Over the past couple weeks my pain has been flaring up again, driven especially by work stress. A few days ago I hit a breaking point and realized that this is something I need to actually take short-term disability leave for.

Fortunately, Moz has an extremely generous disability leave program, and management would much rather someone take it if necessary. So, for now I’m off from work until August, and we’ll see where things go from there.

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A better way to handle multi-account GitHub

I mentioned my crappy approach to using multiple GitHub accounts on a Slack I’m on, and someone else pointed out there’s a much easier approach: Instead of using wrapper scripts to set up different environments, you can fake it using .ssh/config and .gitconfig rules.

First, set up key rules with .ssh/config:

~/.ssh/config
Host  github-work
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_work
Host github-personal
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_personal

Next, set your origin based on whether the workspace is work or personal; for example, git clone git@github-work:work-org/project.git (and of course you can git remote set-url origin for existing workspaces).

Finally, to handle the different author name and email, git 2.15 and later support conditional includes. If you keep all of your work projects in a separate directory, you can put this into your .gitconfig:

~/.gitconfig
[includeIf "gitdir:~/wfh"]
path = ~/.gitconfig-work

then .gitconfig-work includes your work-specific configuration, e.g.:

~/.gitconfig-work
[user]
name = Boring Legal Name
email = work-email@example.com

Thanks, Silas!

Using multiple GitHub accounts from a single macOS/Linux account

Let’s say you’re stuck working from home due to an ongoing apocalypse. Let’s say that you use separate GitHub accounts for personal projects vs. work (for one of any number of reasons), and that when you’re working from home you’re using a personal computer. Let’s say that for Reasons it’s not feasible for you to juggle multiple user accounts on said computer, and you need to be able to access both of your GitHub accounts without a lot of hassle.

The main problem is that GitHub ties your ssh key to your account (out of necessity), but all connections to GitHub are via the master git@github.com account, so there’s no easy way to differentiate which key to use at runtime.

So, here’s how I managed to set things up so that I could select a GitHub account on a per-shell basis.

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