I run a website called Notfellchen that list animals that are waiting for adoption. It’s currently restricted to fancy rats in Germany and that for good reason: Running this website involves checking every shelter every two weeks manually. You need to visit the website, check if there are new animals, contact the shelter and add them to notfellchen if they allow it. This takes time. A lot.

This blog post will outline some of the things I did in order to streamline this and make it possible to check every german shelter in 2.5 hours.

I spend my day working with Salesforce, a very, very feature-rich CRM that you pay big money to use. Salesforce is the opposite of OpenSource and the many features are expensive. Salesforce business model is based on this and on the lock-in effect. If your company invested in implementing Salesforce, they’ll likely pay a lot to keep it.

So what does an alternative look like? Let’s have a look at Twenty, an OpenSource CRM that recently reached the magic 1.0 version.

Introduction

In the last month I improved the mapping of about 100 german animal shelters - not only out of the goodness of my heart, but because it helped me.

Let me explain why: I develop notfellchen.org, where users can search animals in animal shelters, specifically rats, they might want to adopt. The idea is to have a central website that allows you to search for rats in your area.

This is necessary because only a small percentage of animal shelters has rats. As a user, just checking your next shelter doesn’t work. Some users will stop after checking the second or third one and just buy from a pet shop (which is a very, very bad idea).

I recently had to write a lot of SQL code and thought it would be very neat to have some vim shortcuts to execute the current line or the current command. I want to share this with everyone as the second command needed some try-and-error on my part.

Adding the following to ~/.vimrc

map <F2> :.w !psql<CR>
map <F3> :.,/;/w !psql<CR>
map <F4> :w !psql<CR>

will enable you to execute the current line in psql with F2. F3 executes the current line and the next lines until a;. F4 executes the whole file.

Integration

Following the quickstart documentation I tried to add cactus comments to this blog. I currently rely on infrastructure by cactus.chat as I do not host a private synapse server.

I currently implemented this as a shortcode with hard-coded site title and a variable room name.

Quickstart with HUGO

Register your site

There is a registration system, that ensures that you are moderater in your comment section(s). I order to register your site you have to send a message to @cactusbot:cactus.chat . First try help to ensure that the bot answers you, then register your site e.g. register hyteck. The bot should inform you of success and add you to a moderation room.

I had some IoT devices that I wanted to integrate in my monitoring. For this I set up a MQTT broker as the MQTT protocol is a simple solution to send data from IoT devices to a server. This tutorial is focusing on setting up the server, but I also introduce a Python based MQTT client to test our installation.

On your server, first install mosquitto, our MQTT server/broker.

sudo apt-get install mosquitto

Allow standard mqtt port in firewall (if you have ufw installed)

As you man now I work in a research lab. Nearly everyone in our lab needs to do at least some programming. There are trained software engineers next to people how write their first line of code here. As we produce a lot of code that is only scripts not many people used git or any other version control system. For all the good reasons (some are mentioned in the guide) we everybody to learn git in a way that is tradeoff between good version control and fast development. As most of us work on separate projects there is not so much need to collaborate which is reflected ind this guide as I completely excluded branching and merge conflicts. Yet I hope this will maybe help some learners of git or some people that need to introduce git to others.

ILMO

is my first bigger FOSS-project. It aims at managing small libraries as found in a department of a university. You can finde the project on Github.

History:

I started to create ILMO for the (rather small) library in the study rooms of mediacal engineering. It contains about 300 books, 120 labcoats and safty glasses and some more stuff. As I was in charge of the lends I started to get annoyed by our paper-based solution. Especially when a bunch of people was trying to lend things it took to much time. Also reminding people to return stuff was unnecessary complicated. Therfore I started to programm this library management tool from scratch. I only reused some basic database and session functions. The project is still a field of learning how to do things for me. Nevertheless after about half a year of development and many tests the system went live in Winter 2018. Since then I fill the bugtracker and slowly improve workflows and add functions.