Moving from ids to slugs

Slugs are nicer to look at and easier to quickly understand so we're transitioning to them!

Should have planned them in from the beginning!

Queries list

 I added a link to saved queries next to links for new queries and schemas.

How to be steady on vacation mode and dog fooding

 I'm going to try to do at least one little thing every day while on vacation mode and then report here.

Today I made it more convenient to make a new query from the schema by changing the default query when you click on a field from 

SELECT [field] from [table] limit 1;

to 

SELECT * from [table] where [field]=? limit 10;

Then from there you can replace the question mark.

It's much more common that I care about a column name because I want to use it as a filter than that I care about it because I want to look at only that column.  In fact, the latter pretty much never happens!

So that's the good thing about dog fooding and then coding.

I'm back

 I missed Saturday and Monday but I'm back.

So then here are the main things:

1. Try to improve things every day.
2. If for some reason you miss a day, get back on the wagon and start up again!

On the road

 I got a little bit done on the plane today without wifi, slightly improving the pricing page and the flow there and investing a bit into automating changes to the site.

But yeah, most of my time was spent first working for Loanpass, then traveling across the country, and now at a family reunion.

Astro and registration

Today I switched the pgscope website over to Astro.

Before today I just used html and css, but once you have multiple pages that share html or styling, which you need to do if you want consistency, some kind of automation becomes the way to go. I haven't really tried Astro before but it's reasonably intuitive and I got the site refactored into Astro!

I also got registration working, so you can now make an account without asking me for permission!

More basics: pricing, faq, and registration page

 Yesterday somehow I didn't include making a blog post in the checklist.

But to report, I added new pages to the site for pricing and FAQs.  And those encouraged me to add a new registration page to the app.

Now I need to make the registration page work!

More small tweaks (and why that's powerful)

 I kept working on the query page and also updated tests that were broken by changes from yesterday!

It's small, but here's the theory:

A 1% improvement every day for a year becomes a factor of almost 38.

After six years you end up at a factor of a billion.

The point is that some kinds of improvements compound and if you can make those you end up with something really powerful.

So if I can make compounding improvements to the service offered by PgScope then I'll end up with quite the service!

Only small tweaks

 Lacking much time today, I kept things simple.

• I added pgscope to my LinkedIn and Reddit profiles.
• I started working on the query page to try to get it to the point where I can start doing postgres tutorials using the query page rather than just psql.

Lots of work but lots of fun (and pgscope email works!)

 Today I

• Created an aws organization
• Created a new prod account in that organization
• Connected ses within that organization to pgscope so that I can programmatically send and receive emails
• Connected Zoho to pgscope so that I can personally send and receive emails
• Started a postgres anki deck
• Made the first video in a postgres tutorial series 

Importantly, I avoided showing the pgscope query page because it's just not pretty enough yet.

So I guess that's something that I will work on: make it pretty enough so that later videos can be in the app!

I also have to figure out how to connect the anki deck to the sight.  But it's a pleasure to be using Anki!

See null, apex site is less scary, and can query table size

A few little things for today:

1. The main landing page at https://pgscope.com looks a bit better and has more working links including one to this blog.
2. I set up email forwarding.
3. The app now supports schema names and table names in query results.
4. You can now easily use the same query on alternate databases.
5. It's now easy to see if a column is nullable or not.

www and apex are live!

What I did today:

• Made the login page nicer with bigger input fields etc.
• Researched how to host the static home page for pgscope and decided on github pages for now.
• Created the pgscope github organization
• Created and published a simple test home page using github pages
• Got that home page showing up on the custom domain www.pgscope.com
• Got https working for that setup.
• Pointed apex dns also to github and verified that that worked.
• Switched to the apex domain as the primary instead of www.pgscope.com. So https://www.pgscope.com now redirects to https://pgscope.com

The app is live!

Yesterday I got an updated version of pgscope code live on the remote server.

Today I got https set up with Nginx and Let's Encrypt.

So now the app is live at https://app.pgscope.com !

Beginning a PgScope Blog

This Blog

Posts here will likely be terse and frequent.

This is a blog about PgScope and it's progress from nothing to something interesting.

PgScope

PgScope is a tool that I've wanted and have been building and making for a bit.

It's inspired by Metabase, which I love, and by the Posgresql Database, which I also love, and, surprisingly, by Django, which I also love.

Right now it's mostly a tool to rapidly search through the schema of a Postgres database and use your search results to write queries.

I want to make it an indispensable tool for any company using a Postgres database as a core piece of their company.

But yeah, right now it's just a personal project.

My situation

I work at LoanPass full time, and love my colleagues and leadership there. I get to work with Postgres and Rust there everyday solving challenging problems as we make the most flexible, most powerful, and fastest Loan Pricing Engine on the market.  

I also love that LoanPass have expressed full acceptance and even encouragement as I seek to make PgScope something interesting over time.

I have four children at home in elementary school, middle school, high school and college. And I have three other children at college away or on a mission and a fourth who just graduated in Linguistics and is about to go to Taiwan to teach English.

I'm a seasoned developer and data guy. I earned a PhD in optics, focusing dispersion and quantum optics. After a postdoc and some time as a research scientist I transferred out of the life of a laser physicist about 10 years ago and have helped startups get off the ground by coding from home since then.

PgScope is now my effort to create something of my own. I hope to do a little bit of work on it each week, each day, Monday through Saturday, which occasional breaks for travel.

This is a marathon, not a sprint, so I'll try to keep it fun and get plenty of rest along the way.

Here goes!