Finished work and now I’m having a quick dinner before heading off to a meetup. And I can’t lie: I’ve been nervous all day. 😬

Kind of glad I don’t run a big, multinational corporation.

📝 New post over at Workpad: Try-Catch In UCL - Some Notes

I think Slack’s got an opportunity here to displace Confluence as the “system of record” for work documents. Their Canvas editor is quite good, much better than Confluence’s, and it’s one I really like using. Yet once a Canvas is written and published, they’re ridiculously hard to find again.

Having a central place to browse Canvases and arrange them into categories, much like someone would do in a wiki, would go a long way to making them useful as documents unto themselves, rather than simply “big messages” with short-to-medium-term lifespans.

That’s not to say there’s not a role for such documents. In fact, I wonder if that’s why wikis are always difficult to navigate: you’re mixing documents that have different expected lifespans. System designs sit alongside retrospectives from 2022, which sit alongside the agenda for a meeting next week.

Here Canvases in Slack could be created with the default expectation that the lifespan will be a couple or weeks, or a month, and it’s only those that you explicitly “keep” that would be browsable in this new system. These are the ones you expect to last years and be always kept up to date. The others will still be there — Slack can archive them — but they’ll slowly fade into the background much like the message history.

Anyway, just some random thoughts I had while starting to work on a design within a Canvas and wondering if it should actually go into Confluence.

📝 New post over at Workpad: Weekly Update - 20 Oct 2024

So it looks like Squarespace has been acquired by a private equity firm. I wonder if the new owners will keep buying podcast ads, or if they’ll pull them like Akamai did when they acquired Linode. I get the feeling a lot of shows are relying on Squarespace’s consistent ad money to remain viable.

I’m going to a meetup surrounding a book that I haven’t read yet. I wanted to finish what I was reading at the time and I figured I’d have about a week to read this book before the meetup started. I thought I remembered buying it, so when it came time to start reading it, I was a little surprised to find it missing from the Kindle app.

Fearing that I was running out of time, I went to Amazon to buy it again, only to discover that I actually pre-ordered it and that it’s going to be released on the date of the meetup.

So, yeah, feeling releaved about that.

Oof, it’s been quite the week! Almost over though: only around 30 minutes left, then it’s the weekend.

I’m officially a Zio today. 🙌

I’m generally not someone who likes to talk to people working on my hair. Even so, if silent cuts were offered to me, I not sure I would accept. The occasional “what do you do” and “how’s business”, enough to acknowledge each other, is fine. Not even having that would seem a little strange.

Don’t use access permissions to control what a user can and can’t do if the correct functionality of the system you’re building depends on it.

A user’s permission should dictate what a user has the right to do and see based on the policies of the resources themselves. But when it comes to the correct functionality of a system, it should be built such that if you were to disable all the permission checks, the user should be able to do whatever they can without breaking things. Relying on permissions to prevent this feels like a code smell to me, and can leave you with policies that have blanket denies for everyone that just can’t be taken out, and no one remembers why it was added there in the first place.

I don’t count myself a Safari fan, but full credit to Apple: they’ve made remote debugging for iPad Safari very easy. Plug the iPad in, tap “Trust the Device” a few times¹, and Safari’s developer tools menu shows the iPad right there. It also works for SafariViewController sessions in modals, which is nice.

Goland’s LLM-powered auto-complete is really good. It’s got to the point where it feels like Goland is broken when I’m using a version that doesn’t have it. I’m sure they hope to expand of this, and if I can make a request on what they could do next, it would be to add “auto-complete” suggestions in other areas of the code.

For example, I’m working on a function which uses AWS’s Golang SDK to send an SQS message. I started writing out the call to send a message, when I found out that I forgot to define both the context and queue name in the function I’m working in. Nothing too hard to fix, of course, but it would mean moving away from where I’m am now, and conducting a mini context-switch away from calling the SDK to fixing my function definition.

It would be nice for the LLM-based auto-completer to suggest adding the context as the first parameter of the function, as per the convention. The queue name is a little more ambiguous: it could either be suggested as another function parameter or as a field on the provider type. I suppose both are just as likely, but assuming that Goland is refining it’s model based on my trends, it could suggest adding the topic name as a field, along with adding it in as a parameter to the constructor function.

Anyway, something for them to look at when they run out of work.

Maybe there’s still a chance for Apple to release a car of some sort, although probably not how they were planning to. 😜