Since I've been making inflammatory comments here recently, nobody can reasonably claim I've disappeared.
But I have also been doing some actual coding.
I’ve returned to the Rebol family for a real project: replacing the increasingly unmanageable membership spreadsheet of a 100-year-old New Zealand Chinese association. Here's the repository:
https://gitlab.com/Zhaoshirong/tja-membership (Current checkpoint: 0.1.35)
The current client is written in Red/View, with Oldes R3 beginning to act as a local asynchronous service layer. Behind it are AWS Cognito/API Gateway/Lambda and Aurora PostgreSQL.
What has made this particularly interesting is that I’m building it with substantial AI assistance. I’m using AI much more like a very fast pair programmer than as an application generator: I still decide the data model, architecture and behaviour, while it helps inspect code, propose patches, chase Red/View peculiarities, write SQL migrations, and keep track of the interactions between Red, R3, Python, PostgreSQL and AWS.
I started with a generic prompt for Rebol/Red Development, but then have a specific one I made for this project:
Today’s amusement was adding a small API/database trace window. We had a Gender field in PostgreSQL, the client thought it supported it, and yet it kept coming back wrong. The trace immediately showed that the deployed Lambda was returning the old JSON structure. After updating it, the trace showed:
GET .../people/112
"sexCode": "MALE"
Problem isolated across PostgreSQL → Lambda → JSON → Red.
I’ve also rediscovered some very Rebol-ish lessons. A one-second invisible View face is my application heartbeat. When Aurora wakes from auto-pause, a synchronous HTTPS write stops the heartbeat, making the blocking-I/O problem wonderfully visible. That has pushed me toward using Oldes R3 as an asynchronous localhost broker.
So after all these years I seem to have ended up with:
Red/View + Rebol3 + PostgreSQL + AWS + AI + a sleeping database.
And the heartbeat is still running.