Long Form Posts

January 22, 2021 8:04am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this.

January 12, 2021 9:46am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

It’s funny how the casual meandering of your mind can be a source of inspiration. This morning, my mind casually turned to thinking about all the work that Mac developers need to do to get access to privileged APIs — like location, contacts, or the accessibility APIs. My experience of going through the motions to enable these permissions for the apps I use, along with hearing of the lengths developers go through to make this as seamless as they can, reveals to me the clunkiness that this entails. I could imaging this being a huge source of frustration for these developers, not to mention a huge source of support requests.

January 11, 2021 4:05pm

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

All these new Substack newsletters that I’m seeing reminds me of my first encounter with GitHub.

Back in 2009, I was checking out the source code of an open-source library we were using. Clicking on the link to the source bought me to this strange, new code-hosting service that I’ve never seen before. As someone who was use to the heaviness that was SourceForge, or the boring uniformity that was Google Code, the experience felt very minimal and slightly unintuitive. It took me a while, for instance, to realise that the version tags were selectable from a drop-down list. I also thought that it was quite restrictive to only offer checking out the source code with this weird SCM client called “git”. The whole experience left me thinking of this website as rather niche, and I never really expected to see it that often, given that Source Forge or Google Code reigned supreme at the time.

January 1, 2021 9:38am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” type post, although there’s a bit of that, and there’s no dramatic insight or anything of that nature. It’s more of a chance for reflection, plus a bit of a document for future me on what the year was like.

Personally, as difficult as this past year was, I wouldn’t necessarily say 2020 was a bad year. I know I’m saying this from a position of good fortune: I didn’t loose my job, or my house, or my health. So I know there are a lot of others that have experienced a much worst year than I have. But for me, I’m coming out of this year feeling a little better than I have the previous couple of years gone by.

December 16, 2020 7:32am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would be better just to post my story here.

I became unhappy with Chrome about two years ago. I can’t remember exactly why, but I know it was because Google was doing something that I found distasteful. I was also getting concerned about how much data I was making available to Google in general. I can prove nothing, but something about using a browser offered for free by an advertising company made me feel uneasy.

December 13, 2020 9:49am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leon Mika

It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an update.

In short, and for the second time this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining a CMS is not a good use of my time. The largest issue was the amount of effort that would have been needed in order to work on the things that don’t relate to content, such as styling. I’m not a web designer, so building the style from scratch would have taken a fair amount of time, which would have eaten into the amount of time I would have spent actually writing content. A close second was the need to add additional features to the CMS that were missing, like the ability to add extra pages, and a RSS feed. If I were to do this properly without taking any shortcuts, this too would have resulted in less time spent on content.

December 8, 2020 10:00am

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Leon Mika

Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails, the front-end layer is very simple: server-side rendered HTML with a bit of jQuery augmenting the otherwise static web-pages.

After a bit of time, I wanted to add a bit of dynamic flare to the frontend, like automatically fetch and update elements on the page. These projects were more or less small personal things that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time maintaining, so doing something dramatic like rewriting the UI in React or Vue would have been overkill. jQuery was available to me but using it always required a bit of boilerplate to setup the bindings between the HTML and the JavaScript. Also, since Buffalo uses Webpack to produce a single, minified JavaScript file that is included on every page, it would also be nice to have a mechanism to selectively apply the JavaScript logic based on the attributes on the HTML itself.

December 2, 2020 12:51pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce:

First, my take presupposes that the point of Slack is to be a genuinely good service and experience. […] To succeed by appealing to people who care about quality. Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams.

Continue reading →

November 19, 2020 8:29am

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Leon Mika

I’m planning to start a new blog about Go development and one of the things that I’m currently torn on is how to host it. The choice look to be either using a service like blot.im or micro.blog or some other hosting service, using a static site generation tool like Hugo, or building my own CMS for it. I know that one of the things people tell you about blogging is that building your CMS is not worth your time: I myself even described it as “second cardinal sin of programming” on my first post to micro.blog.

November 9, 2020 8:36am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Around April this year, my old Android Nexus 9 tablet was becoming unusable due to it’s age and I was considering which tablet to move to next. I have been a user of Android tablets since the Nexus 7 and I have been quite happy with them (yes, we do exist). However, it was becoming clear that Google’s was no longer interested in maintaining first-party support for Android on a tablet, and none of the other brands that were available were very inspiring.

November 3, 2020 10:05am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Leon Mika

Here’s a short story about my endeavours to find an album that seems to have disappeared from the face of the internet. I’m a bit of a sucker for original sound tracks, particularly instrumental ones. One that I remember being very good is the music from The Private Life of Plants, a documentary series from David Attenborough made in the mid 1990s. It was one of those sound tracks that occasionally popped into my mind, particularly when looking at lovely autumn leaves or other scenes from the show. But it has been a while since I last watched it, and I never though to look at whether an album of the sound track actually existed.

October 31, 2020 7:50am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

I’m excited to see, via Golang Weekly, that the official support for embedding static files in Go is being realised, with the final commit merged to the core a couple of days ago. This, along with the new file-system abstraction, will mean that it will be much easier to embed files in Go applications, and make use of them within the application itself.

One of the features I like about coding is Go is that the build artefacts are statically linked executables that can be distributed without any additional dependencies. This means that if I wanted to share something, all I need to do is to give them a single file that they can just run, without needing to worry about whether particular dependencies or runtimes are installed prior to doing so.

October 29, 2020 6:20am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

For those of you using Preview in macOS for viewing an annotated PDF, if you need to move or delete the annotations in order to select the text, be sure to undo your changes prior to closing Preview. Otherwise your changes will be saved without asking you first.¹

This just happened to me. I have a PDF annotated with edits made with the iPad pencil and I wanted to copy the actual text. The annotations seemed to sit on top of the text in an image layer, which means that in order to select the text, I have to move or delete this layer first. I didn’t want the annotations mixed up with the ones on the other page, so I decided to delete this layer instead of moving it. This was a mistake.

October 26, 2020 8:07am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Good day today. From a high of 725 Covid-19 cases in August 25, Victoria has just had 24 hours of zero new cases and zero deaths. This is during a period of extensive testing in the north of the metropolitan, during a testing blitz in an attempt to contain an outbreak. Labs have been processing tests late into the night, with not a single one so far coming back positive.

October 22, 2020 8:15am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole about writing and publishing online yesterday after reading this article from Preetam Nath and this article from James Clear. I’ve been thinking about creating and publishing on the web for a little while now, which is probably why these two articles resonated with me.

These articles highlight the importance of creating and publishing regardless of what the topic is. There have been a few things that I’ve been wanting to share but I haven’t done so, probably because I worry about what other people think. The interesting thing about that line of thinking is that I tend to enjoy reading posts from other people as they go about their lives. I guess that’s what the original intention of blogging actually is.

October 14, 2020 7:46am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

I’m working with a unit test that uses mocks in which every method in the mock is verified after the method under test is called, even if it is not relevant to the test. Furthermore, the tear down method verifies that every dependent services has no more interactions, which means that removing a verification that is not relevant to the specific test case will cause the test to fail.

Please do not do this. It makes modifying the tests really difficult and results in really long unit tests that hides what the test is trying to assert. It also makes it harder to create new tests to verify a particular behaviour, as you find yourself copying all the verification code that is not relevant to the case that you’re trying to test for.

October 10, 2020 10:49am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Leon Mika

I’ve recently started a new job so I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to become familiar with how the relational databases are structured. Usually when I’m doing any database work, I tend to use the CLI clients like mysql or pg_sql. I tend to prefer them, not only as they’re usually easy to use via SSH, but the REPL is a nice interaction model when querying data: you type a query, and the results appear directly below it. The CLI tools do have a few drawbacks though. Dealing with large result sets or browsing the schema tend to be harder, which makes it difficult when dealing with an unfamiliar database.

October 6, 2020 10:35am

Leon Mika

There have been times when I’ve wanted to share a link to an episode of a podcast that I pay for, but I’m hesitant to do so as the feed is private and unique to my account. The episode is also available in the public feed, but has been trimmed as an incentive for listeners to pay for the show. I can always find the episode in the public feed and share that, but I’m wondering if there’s a better way to handle this.

September 23, 2020 9:17am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Today is a good day. Melbourne’s 14 day daily Covid-19 case average is now 29.4, which is beyond the 30 to 50 band required to move to the next stage of reopening. Seeing the fruits of our collective sacrifice, bringing the daily case numbers from a peak of around 740 in August down to the 11 we saw on Monday, makes me proud to be a Melburnian.

As much as I like for things to reopen sooner than planned, I think we should hold the line for as long as we possibly can. The potential prizes for doing so – the crushing of the virus, the ability to travel interstate again, the chance to eat at restaurants without fear of infection, the chance for a normalish Christmas and summer – are within reach. I know that’s easy for me to say as someone who has the ability to work from home, and I completely recognise those of us suffering right now being unable to work at all. But just like the darkest hour is before the dawn, so too will the sweet taste of victory and accomplishment be when we finally crush this virus and meet the rest of the country where they are. To rush this, to reopen too early, and see our effort thrown away would be upsetting.

September 17, 2020 10:05am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Moving from a Mac Pro back to Linux for work, I’ve come to appreciate how well things just work out of the box in macOS. Things like Web RTC display capture, which is used for sharing the screen in browser-based video conferencing sites (and I think also in Slack, since it’s using Electron and, thus, the Blink rendering engine), work flawlessly in macOS, but proved to be a bit of trouble within Linux.

September 15, 2020 9:04am

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Leon Mika

After recently changing jobs, I’ve received a brand new Lenovo work laptop. As good as the laptop is, and it’s OK for a work laptop, it has one annoying feature. Whenever the laptop is plugged in and powered, there is a bright white LED that is always illuminated. Because I’m still working from home — and it is likely that after the pandemic I will be working from home at least a few days a week — and my desk is in my bedroom, having this white LED is no good for my sleep.

September 1, 2020 3:51pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

One of the things I like about Markdown as a form of writing online, is that ordered lists can simply begin with the prefix 1., and there is no need to update the leading number in the subsequent items. To produce the following list:

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

One only needs to write:

1. First
1. Second
1. Third

or:

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

or even:

1. First
3. Second
2. Third

The one downside to this approach, unfortunately, is that there is no nice way to specify what the first ordinal should be. If I were to use 3. as the prefix of the first item, the generated ordered list will always begin at 1.

August 26, 2020 8:49am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

What is Google doing cancelling the Pixel 4 after 6 months? They spend $1.1 billion buying the HTC mobile division and state that they plan to start making their own mobile chips, giving the impression that they are serious about producing decent, flagship hardware for Android. And then go ahead with discontiuning their current flagship phone after 6 months?

Look, I know from a purely economical perspective, the Pixel line makes little sense. Android is not iOS. They don’t hold the prestigious high-end of the market, with the margins that come from it. But that’s not Google’s business. They’re an advertising company first, and a search company second. So I can understanding that Android to them is more of a cost centre; the price of keeping access to their services open to mobile users.

July 21, 2020 10:04am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Leon Mika

It was around the beginning of June, when the number of new Covid-19 cases for Victoria were around 10-20 a day, that there was a general feeling that suppression was working and that it was time to begin opening up. I will admit I took advantage of the looser restrictions, but I always wondered whether it would be better to remain closed for a little while longer and go for elimination. This was not the official strategy though: we have testing and tracing up and running and as long as we know where the virus is, we can continue to roll-back restrictions and achieve some semblance of normalcy.

July 14, 2020 8:43am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

There are new reports of Facebook’s SDK crashing apps again due to server changes. The post above links to Bugsnag article which explores the underlying cause: that’s worth a read.

I’m going to throw a shout-out to Go’s approach to error handling here. I’m not saying that this shows the superiority of Go over Objective C: these sorts of things can happen in any language. The difference I want to highlight is that Go treats error handling as part of the standard flow of the language, rather than the exceptional flow. This forces you to think about error conditions when you’re making calls to code that can fail.