Three things recently:

1) I made a Slack app in my spare time to help with a thing at work. Jumped through the hoops in the Slack marketplace, and then it was live (Dibs On Stuff). A few people at work used it and that was great! Solved the problem.

Blinked and then about 100 organizations had installed it. Xmas 2022 came and I used my free time to add (a ton of) extra features, and a paid mode to access them.

I feel like I have made quite a few side projects in the last 20 years - eg I spent 8 years on ONE of them (do you know how many commits you can make in 8 years?) Anyway this weekend Slack project that ate up one little Xmas has some legs!

I get an email every time someone uses the thing. There's new mail every day and honestly it is just - imagine this next bit uppercase and uncensored, possibly ending in 1 or 2 exclamation marks: f-ing awesome.

2) The private message app Signal has had to make some difficult decisions around continuing to support sms. It's fair enough sms is problematic. But there's also an aspect of "sorry but bad luck" to all the people that not only are stuck still using sms, but who acted as evangelists for Signal - helping our family members help themselves etc.

So I wrote an exporter for Signal: extract sms, mms and all Signal messages, into an xml file that can be re-imported into the stock Android message store. So at least you can choose to move them somewhere else.

I don't actually feel great about this, and more generally I do think Signal are saying all the right things, but it's still definitely a walled garden, eg:

You are free to fork Signal - it's open source - but you're not going to be able to message anyone on "original" Signal from your fork. They own the servers, and that's fair enough. Data tx/rx isn't cheap when you multiply it by hundreds of millions.

I am aware of Moxie's article from ages ago, touting the benefits of being able to upgrade people overnight to encrypted end to end protocols. But wow, the walled garden aspect is actually - STILL - after all these years and learnings - just terrible. I can pick up any phone and call anyone on any phone network. I can send an email to someone on goddamn hotmail or yahoo for example (if only it were encrypted by default). But Signal, Whatsapp - private networks, walled gardens, selfish, un-open, and disappointing considering what we're capable of.

Anyway, wrote an exporter (alexlance/signal-message-exporter) so you can get your stuff out of Signal. If you want to. (Their built-in exporter doesn't export Signal messages)

3) Before I realized Iran had really seized control of the country's internet - I spent time trying to migrate the Signal proxy to AWS lambda. I think it's still a decent idea. Lambda would let you spin up extremely cheap Signal proxies, regionally located all over the world. I got it working in nginx and also haproxy via docker image and deployed to Lambda, but unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the lambda https endpoints don't support SNI.

If anyone can convince AWS to permit SNI in their lambda https endpoints then it could still be a goer. It may be the case that other people are wrecking this idea (illicit data over proxies via SNI). But yeah, super-cheap reverse proxy, yes ok with a 15 minute timeout, but it'd do brilliantly in times of need.