• 6 min read

Putting apps to sleep, and waking them in under two seconds

Cover image

A shard is a small server. Often a very small one, a VPS with 1 or 2 GB of RAM, and the whole point is that you can install a pile of apps on it and treat them as your own: photos, documents, notes, a recipe box. The trouble is that self-hosted apps are not shy about memory. Immich alone, with its machine-learning workers, will happily take a large bite out of a 2 GB box before you have uploaded a single photo. Install three or four apps like it and the box is full.

  • 6 min read

Unblocking Apps by fixing a Performance Bottleneck

Cover image

For a while now there was a problem with the Immich app. On the web it did not start most of the time. If it did, it was painfully slow to start and to load images. Curiously, the mobile app did work. I had been meaning to fix that app in particular, but did not get around to it. But a few days ago, a pass over all the apps to upgrade them revealed the actual problem. It was the same problem that plagued other apps and made them slow, for example KitchenOwl. These apps did work, but they were no fun to use. Long waiting times between action and reaction made them just feel sluggish.

  • 5 min read

Rebrand and Public Source Code

The brand Portal was always meant to be a placeholder, one that felt increasingly stale lately. So I did some brainstorming and sketching and came up with a new name and logo. From now on, Portal will be called:

freeshard logo

  • 7 min read

Going Paperless with Paperless on Portal

One of the most useful Portal apps is Paperless. Especially in countries like germany, where paper still plays a big role in everyday life, Paperless can help you stay on top of your documents and keep your desk and shelves clean. After optimizing my setup for the last few weeks, I have arrived at a point I would consider (almost) ideal. In fact, it is almost fun to scan and organize documents now. Let me walk you through it.

Digitizing your Documents

  • 7 min read

Eating your own dog food

The Portal ecosystem is more than the software that runs on the Portals themselves, it also consists of a bunch of administrative functions. Among others things, they

  • create, assign, upgrade, and remove Portals,
  • manage Portal resources,
  • monitor Portal health
  • accept and process payments,
  • receive and process app usage reports for revenue share.

Until now, these tools were accessed using a command line interface, but with increasing complexity I decided that it is time for something graphical.

There is the saying "Eat your own dog food", which means that you should use the products that you create. So the new graphical interface became a brand-new Portal app. And it really shows the simplicity Portal can provide if used correctly.

  • 9 min read

App Integration Overhaul

When developing a piece of software, the best way to make steady and sustainable progress is to work in small and self-contained increments. Each change should have a clear scope that is easy to reason about, to test, and to roll back if needed. Side effects should be avoided as much as possible. With the latest update, I did the opposite of that.

  • 3 min read

Smart Home and IoT

MQTT

Recently, we were made aware of some smart home appliances that use MQTT to talk to a backend in order to publish data or receive commands. This backend can be freely configured, it just needs a MQTT broker.

  • 3 min read

Peer-2-Peer Communication

It has been some time since our last update here on Patreon. For one thing, we have been busy with lots of smaller tasks - both technical and regarding business development - that do not really warrant a blog post. Some of them made it into our newsletters though. But another reason for the long silence is the next big feature which was a particularly tricky and time-consuming one: peer-2-peer communication.

  • 2 min read

Backup your Portal

This is a big one! Since from the start, we told everyone that Portal is in an early prototype stage. Your data is not safe, and it could get lost at any time. Technically, this is still the case, but now it is possible to download a full backup of all of your data whenever you want.

  • 2 min read

Shared Directories

⚠️ This feature is not backward-compatible. Your current Portal must be deleted, and you need to recreate it. Write us as soon as you are ready.

Most apps that you install on your Portal need to persist data in some way. There are currently two ways they can do that: a) they request a database on the Postgres instance that is running on the Portal or b) they mount a part of the Portal's filesystem.