This week I finished the first version of the barcode scanning flow I’ve been working on for Noisebridge. It’s a very simple Rust CLI that listens for input from a specified input device, and outputs only valid ISBN13 codes that it receives. Today I’ll work on a small Go program to take the ISBN numbers, looks them up and records the books in a PostgreSQL database. The next step after that is a small web service which allows people to search the books and see what we have at Noisebridge.

As I write this I’m back in Dublin having been at 31C3 these last few days. It was a fantastic time meeting a whole range of new interesting people, as well as getting to know better the wonderful friends that I’ve made this year. Running into the end of the year I was feeling a little burnt out, mostly due to fire-fighting interpersonal drama in Noisebridge. I was very much looking forward to the break from SF and the commitments I have there in the hopes that I’d be re-energised, and as it turns out it has done exactly that.