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🔗 Inessential: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers
I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.
As someone who has only worked in mid-sized businesses (and government) I appreciate Brent Simmons — a developer who I admire and whose software I use every day — candour here. Admitting your biases is not easy.
I know the indie life is romantic. Believe me, nary a day passes where I don’t romanticise about it. But speaking for myself, I think people’s reluctance to go that route is less to do with ability and more to do with the non-technical side, like security, confidence, thinking you have a good idea (not to mention being simply being in a position to take that opportunity). I wonder if some day the stars will align and I’d be in a position to take the plunge. Time will tell, I guess.
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🔗 Pixel Envy: The Future of British Television in a U.S. Streaming World
The BBC has problems, but it matters to people. If a country values its domestic media — particularly public broadcasting — it should watch the future of British media closely and figure out what is worth emulating to stay relevant. The CBC is worth it, too.
I’d add that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Cooperation) and SBS are worth it too. Culturally speaking, it’d be a sad day if those were to go away.
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🔗 NY Mag: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast
Two thoughts on this. The first is that I think these kids are doing a disservice to themselves. I’m not someone who’s going to say “don’t use AI ever,” but the only way I can really understanding something is working through it, either by writing it myself or spending lots of time on it. I find this even in my job: it’s hard for me to know of the existence of some feature in a library I haven’t touched myself, much less how to use it correctly. Offloading your thinking to AI may work when you’re plowing through boring coding tasks, but when it comes to designing something new, or working through a Sev-1, it helps to know the system your working on like the back of your hand.
Second thought: TikTok is like some sort of wraith, sucking the lifeblood of all who touches it, and needs to die in fire.
Via: Sharp Tech
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Sage advice from Kev Quirk. I feel like I’m struggling a little at work recently, like things are slipping. Like Kev I can’t multitask, and I know I’ve got to get better at doing a single thing at a time. But unlike Kev, I need to care more about making an effort.
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🔗 Prefer Numbered Lists to Bullets
Good arguments for using numbered listed instead of bullets in chat communication. I don’t disagree with any of them. I will say that tend to preferred bulleted lists simply because the chat apps I use tend to make using numbered lists more difficult than it should be. Slack, for example, only starts a “real” numbered list when it detects you type
1.. And once you’ve started, there’s no way to skip ordinals within the same numbered list.
Note that "1. This" the only "real" numbered list, and has a different appearance. Even Obsidian’s implementation is not perfect. Despite making it easy to start a numbered list at an arbitrary ordinal, it’s still not possible to skip ordinals.
It’d be simpler if they didn’t try to automatically make “real” numbered lists at all.
Via: Jim Nielsen
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We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.
Wheels are not the same. If I need a wheel for a wheelbarrow, I don’t want to use a wheel for a tractor just because it exists. The same is true for software. If all I want to do is minify some JS without all the transpiling crap that comes from using React or Typescript, why not eschew Webpack for my own handwritten build scripts?
Via: Simon Willison
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🔗 Animating Rick and Morty One Pixel at a Time
Using OpenGL Shading Language, which is apparently supported by browsers, to produce an animation of Rick from Rick and Morty. I’ve yet to go into this post in any great detail, but it certainly looks very interesting.
Via: Simon Willison
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Generates an RSS feed of all the toots you bookmark. I’ve been using it these past couple of weeks and it’s been fantastic. Mastodon bookmarks are front and centre now, thanks to them being in my feed reader.
Via Robb Knight
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🔗 We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
Liked this piece by Joan Westenberg. I occasionally see this cynicism myself, which is frustrating as they usually come from builders. Surely they know how hard it is to come up with a solution to a problem, only have it torn down. Granted, there might be some ego involved in these feelings.
Via Pixel Envy.
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🔗 100 quotes that helped me write
Wish I could remember where I saw this so I can give them a HT. But there are some excellent quote here in this list prepared by Austin Kleon.
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For anyone else interested in the trackside signage of Victorian railways. What got me looking was learning about coast boards. Seems to be instructions to the driver on what to set the train’s power output.
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🔗 How to Write Docs People Read
Some interesting ideas on documentation from Allen Pike. I know for myself I tend to turn towards how-tos when I need to reference something. I’d be curious to know how this could work with technical documentation, which is usually dry and out of date.
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🔗 Lens
A nice looking meta tag checker by Robb Knight. Finding a good meta tag checker that’s not riddled with ads is difficult. This might be the one I’ll use going forward. I also liked his blog post on how he built it.
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Quite the condemation of React and “frameworkism” in frontend web development. I’m not a frontend guy, but I do poke through the code from time to time, and it’s mindboggling how complicated it is. And for what? Is it for any specific engineering decision that are relevant to us? Or is it just because “Facebook does it?”
Speaking of which, if you read anything from this post, read the “But” section. An excellent set of rebuttals for why React may not be a good default choice.
Oh, and also the first footnote. I had no idea that some of React’s design decisions came about because of IE 6. The ghost of Microsoft’s shitty browser continues to haunt us all.
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🔗 How I ship projects at big tech companies
Good post, although a hard one to read while reflecting on my last few weeks at work, and just feeling that I’ve been falling short in what it takes. 😔
Via this post, found on this BlogFlock.
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Someone on Micro.blog posted a link to this little web-app years ago, where you can write your thoughts and they float away into the ether, never to be seen again. I didn’t grab a link to it at the time, which I regretted. Well, I’m not making that mistake twice.
Via Anil Dash
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Also, hat tip to the “postrolls” which led me to the previously linked item. I’ve been enjoying these two over the last few days:
I’ll post any more that I find. 🔗
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🔗 Thinking About Recipe Formats More Than Anyone Should
Just looking at the formats in the post, it’s a bit of a shame that they’re little more than lists of ingredients and instructions. But I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about that, given how varied recipes can be.
The one exception, Cooklang, looks interesting. It seems a bit limited in the types of recipes it could be used for. But sometimes the best languages are the ones with a small, yet deep, focus on a problem space.
And of-course there’s an XML version. I opened this post expecting there to be an XML version. 😄
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I have my doubts about this future being realised. Or it’s probably more accurate to say I rather that this future isn’t realised.
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Some interesting links from linkage.lol that I want to note before accidentally closing my browser tab.
🔗 Blogging Resources Complements of Robert Birming
🔗 For Linkblog FansIt’s also a site I’ve now subscribed to.
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A great post by Annie Mueller. And pretty much spot on, based on my understanding of how to gain confidence.
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Found this while browsing Dave Winer’s blog-roll on Scripting News. I enjoyed reading this post so I thought I’d take his advice and be nice by sharing a link to it.
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🔗 Chris Arnade Walks the World
I’ve been enjoying this newsletter for the past month now. Chris is a good writer (understandable, given his profession) and gives wonderful descriptions of the places and peoples he visits. Worth looking at if you’re into blogger-travels-the-world style blogs.
