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2021 Week 233 min read

giscus 💎

I added a new feature earlier this week: discussion reactions. Now giscus can show the reactions to the main discussion (top-level) post. It translates to reactions to your blog posts/web pages, just like on Disqus.

Someone suggested the feature and I think that it's a good idea. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that. Suggestions like this are one of the reasons why I love open source.

I also wrote a guide to self-host giscus. I'd been putting it off for later, but someone asked for it, so...

GitHub has also dropped the GraphQL-Features header requirement for the Discussions API, so I can finally drop my workaround.

I also did some minor improvements along the way.

Overall, quite a busy week for giscus.

DjangoCon Europe

I was lucky enough to get a grant this year.

The conference started on Wednesday because there were sprints this year.

Sadly, I still had a lot of work to do on the weekdays, and I already got tired by the end of the day. The conference schedule was 2 PM - 12 AM my local time.

I couldn't get a good streaming quality with my internet connection for some reason. Last year, I was able to work around this using a VPN on my private server. Thanks to my ISP, that trick hasn't been working for the past few months.

I could only watch a few of the talks and couldn't join any of the QnA session or the gather.town stuff.

I feel really bad for not saying hi to the folks I know, especially my GSoC mentors.

Here's hoping for a better one next year, or the next, or... yeah. In person, hopefully.

Other stuff

My ISP really sucks, especially for handling traffic outside my region. As I said above, I circumvent this issue by tunneling through my server in Singapore.

However, my ISP has been dropping packets to DigitalOcean servers since last year, so I had to move to Vultr. That worked fine, until a few months ago, when the same issue resurfaced.

I did some research to find the alternative, but it seems that other platforms also got the same issue.

Switching to another ISP is currently not an option as there's only one other ISP available at my location, and that one sucks, too.

I finally found one that seems fine: UpCloud. I deployed an instance and installed WireGuard on it.

It's much, much better now. Really wish I found out about it sooner. I'll have to catch up with the DjangoCon talks I missed.


Still feeling a bit sad about the stuff I wrote last week. He's doing better now, but we won't proceed with our plans until August or later.


This week was such a mixed bag, honestly.

I don't feel so good, mentally. It got worse every day until Friday. There was an issue that I'd rather not talk about.

I really needed to clear my mind -- work has been kinda crazy this week, and likely the next as well.

I went out for a walk this morning. It's the first time in two months.

I think that helped.