Much of the development work that I'm involved in these days is in the space of creating integrations between two or more products that I use.  There is a common dilemma that has always arisen when doing this and it goes something like this:

• Product A creates a new/better way of doing something
• I decide to update my existing (or create a new) integration with Product B to take advantage of the new thing that Product A created
• I discover some limitation of Product A's new thing that prevents some aspect of the Product B integration from working.
• I basically need to create a 'hack' that mostly uses Product A's new thing while still allowing all of the things that I need from Product B to continue working.
• Months pass, and the company that makes Product B, ultimately creates a proper integration with Product A that uses the new/correct way of doing things.
• I need to migrate to the new integration from my once necessary 'hacked' together solution, while guaranteeing that everything continues to work seamlessly.

I'm currently working on two separate projects that fall into this category.  Do you experience something similar?  What's your decision process and/or techniques for making the most of this 'throw away' effort?

image generated by Gemini Advanced using this email as a starting point

Shopify Pixels

The biggest hack that I'm currently building involves Shopify Pixels.  Over the last few years, Shopify has been moving to a more extensible theme infrastructure.  As part of this, any JavaScript customization should be run from within a sandboxed 'pixel' environment.  One of the last holdouts that I need to migrate to this is my Google Tag Manager integration.  The problem with this is that the auto enhanced conversion metrics for Google Analytics 4 cannot fire from within this sandboxed pixel environment.  I've figured out a way to basically recreate these events in a way that everything still 'works', while suppressing the 'auto' events.  I know that it's only a matter of time before the Google Analytics Shopify integration will be rewritten in a Shopify Pixel compatible form that makes this all wasted work.  In the meantime however, I'm blocked waiting for a solution to this before I can move forward with another feature that I want to add that depends on all of this working in a Shopify Pixel compatible environment.

Zapier Bug

The second issue that falls into this area arose due to a bug that I discovered with Zapier's Shopify integration months ago.  Basically, Zapier wasn't using the latest version of Shopify's API so their integration was missing numerous features that I needed to keep my Shopify customer records in sync with other CRM systems.  This required me to essentially create a CRM in Zapier tables and then have edits trigger webhooks into a system that I created that made the correct modern Shopify API calls.  This Zapier bug has now been fixed, so I should be able to dramatically simplify how this integration works.  I know though that it's only a matter of time before I'll need to do something similar again... Do I keep my webhook based system ready to go? or just recreate what I need when that time arises?

Android App Not Updated for 10 Years!

In other software development related news... I recently had a client that I developed an Android app for almost 10 years ago contact me because that app has stopped working on the latest version of Android.  I was honestly shocked to learn that this had been in continuous operation by their company since I had first delivered it.  The Android ecosystem has changed so much over that time that I told them that it's likely more cost effective to have someone rewrite it from scratch rather than update the old source code to work properly.  I've written before about how I've abandoned Android development, so if anyone reading this is interested in potentially taking on this job, let me know!  

On a similar note, I constantly have software development needs come up that I either don't have the bandwidth or needed skills to address.  I'm always looking for people interested in working with me on projects or in cases like this, taking on a full project.  If you're interested in being pinged when this occurs in the future, let me know what skills you're interested in being notified about.

Improving HRV

Over the past several months, I've discussed many of my experiments and experiences regarding Heart Rate Variability (HRV).  I've created a post that summarizes what I've learned.  I intend to continue updating this with the results of future experiments.  If you're interested in this topic, check out:

Fermented Solutions

All of my plant starts are in the ground as of this past weekend.  Gardening moving forward for a few months will just consist of weeding, harvesting and filling in as plants come out.

I'm still very intrigued by the Akkermansia benefits I mentioned in the last issue.  The product that I tested isn't commercially available yet, but I intend to start using it regularly when it is.  I may try a competitor product in the meantime.  This experience has led me to further investigate postbiotic metabolites.  I'll write more about this soon.

Now that gardening time has been freed up, that type of content will likely lessen over the next few months.  I'll be sure to keep you updated with whatever interesting things I'm tinkering with.

Happy Fermenting!

J

Questions?? Want a deeper dive on something discussed here? Reply to this message to continue the conversation.

Just signed up or forwarded this message?  View past issues or become a subscriber