Transmissions for SemWebbers

tl;dr

After a bit of waffle about my motivation, I describe my Transmissions project in a way that folks who do similar stuff to me will get. It's an in-progress NodeJS data processing microframework to help me (at least) prototype things faster. It's a pipeline-style setup where the application is largely determined declaratively (in RDF), with small processing units joined together at runtime. This approach happens to work very well when using AI for coding assistance.

This post is prompted by receiving a message from Bergi this morning. I'd been postponing contacting him until I had something clearer to show. I've annoyed myself here because he's an old friend, I should've been chatting anyway.

Aside

I should maybe turn off the attachment to GitHub Copilot in VSCode from markdown files, it can be very helpful for finishing sentences, but it's a bit like having a very eager puppy around. Copilot's words. As were these :

He was asking about the Semantic Web, and I realised that I haven't written about it for a while. I've been thinking about it a lot though, and I've been working on a project that's very much in the spirit of the Semantic Web.

Not entirely wrong, but definitely not what I was about to write. Back to that.

Motivation

So my coding time over the past couple of months has been spent on a project I hadn't anticipated. It all went a bit meta. Thing is, I was revisiting my personal projects with a different attitude. My über-project has always really just been about trying to make myself better at doing stuff. A major aspect of this being Personal Knowledge Management. Plus the Getting Things Done bit. All that stuff.

But my approach, until recently, was very much influenced by certain things I saw around. On the one hand Open Source - something I strongly believe is necessary, everywhere. On the other, trad software exposition and especially startup culture. The way I'd unconciously been merging these two was that the goal was to build an openly-available products that other people could use. There wasn't a lightbulb moment, more a gradual realisation that what I was trying create was, in the first instance, for me alone. Make my life easier. Get that sorted, I should be better at doing things that might be useful for others.

to be continued...