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Stephen Hackett on š Flashback #18: The Google Graveyard Draft:
Never fall in love in a Google Service that’s not Gmail
So true.
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Started working on a website for a project I’m hoping to eventually open source. Found it a little difficult to write the section on why this project exists at all. It may turn that I’ll be be the only one that will have a use for it.
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Podcast Roll 2021
Yesterday, @Munish had the courage to share his podcast subscriptions1. Sensing an opportunity to talk about with what I’m currently listening to, even though it may reveal more about myself that I’m usually comfortable with, I’m taking up his dare and sharing mine.
So, here is my podcast roll as of early May 2021:
The shows above can roughly be divided up into the following categories:
Technology: This is a topic that I’m very interested in so there are fair few of these. A lot of them are Apple centric, but this is more of an accident than by design. The second podcast that I started regularly listening to was The Talk Show since I was a casual reader of Daring Fireball at the time (and I still am). That opened me up to ATP, which led to a bunch of Relay.fm shows.
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Iām starting to get the emails from Hover warning me of auto-renew being turned off for domains Iāve bought but never used. Not too long before the lists drops down to a more manageable level.
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On Basecamp
I’ve been thinking about the incident at Basecamp for most of the week. I wanted to write something about it earlier, after hearing about the policy changes on Tuesday, but I’d figure that it would probably be best to wait a bit and learn more about the issue first. The last thing I wanted to do is add one more knee-jerk reaction to the mix during the heat of the moment.
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Early coding session this morning for a side project. Woke up at 4:45 am to work on a feature I just have to have. Manage to get just over an hour out before work.
The drive to do something like this doesn’t come along often; and when it does, it’s glorious.
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I wish there was a song lyric website thatās not riddled with ads. I donāt know why all the right holders havenāt put one togeather that is fast and ad free. People use them (well, I do at least), and it shows that theyāre interested in the music they listen to.
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Some thoughts on Apple Subscription Podcasts offering
Youāve probably seen the blog post outlining the details of Appleās new Podcast Subscription offering. The latest post from Daring Fireball has a link to it if you havenāt seen it on Twitter already.
After reading this, Iām not sure who would choose to go with Appleās Podcast hosting. Money aside, it looks like another case of Apple mediating the relationship between host and listener, not to mention keeping subscriber content exclusively on Appleās app.
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I listened to a interesting podcast about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and how it could be used by police to make arrests safely and without the use of lethal force. Sounds like a good idea.
Also, surprised that āNinja Copā is not a movie already.
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My current bookmarking scheme is all over the place so I’m giving Pinboard a try in an attempt to make it a bit more organised. Might help with my blogging as well. I’ve been in a bit of a writing drought recently which may be related to my reading inputs.
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Nothing humbles someone who thinks they’re a reasonably good developer than picking up a brand new software platform, and trying to build something non-trivial in it. I’m speaking from first hand experience here.
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Today is one of those rarest of days: a day with no meetings. There’s not even a stand-up, at least not one involving a video call. Just a day where I can put my head down and work from start to finish. Glorious!
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Surmounting The Hill
Sometimes adding features to software is like cycling on a hilly road.
You start off at the bottom of the hill, a little unsure of the hight and gradient, and how well you’ll be able to tackle it. You start the uphill climb, writing new code, adding tests, trying an approach that may not work, backtracking and starting again. This uphill climb is starting to tire you out. You’re making forward progress, even thought it may not feel like it, but it’s slow and you’re not sure how much longer you can keep cycling for.
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I really have to stop getting distracted writing tools to “help” me with the less than interesting aspects of my work, and just frickin do the work. Otherwise, I’ll just end up with two things that are unfinished.
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A thing about Clubhouse is that since itās live audio, it requires listeners to be awake. Given that most hosts that I would be interested in listening to tend to target US timezones, that is rarely true for me.
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Nearly every office I’ve been in that has a dishwasher have their own makeshift system for indicating whether the dishes in the machine are dirty or clean. A quick win for dishwasher manufacturers would be to build this “dirty/clean” indicator directly into the front panel.
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I’ve been really enjoying the posts that Jason Fried and DHH are making on HEY World, especially the ones on how they approach product design, or how they run Basecamp. The latest post from Jason about decision making is certainly one that I’ve found very intriguing.
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I think one reason why the autocorrect in iOS is so frustrating is that, not only is it aggressive in thinking that it knows the right word, but that it doesnāt take attributes like capitalisation as hints of the word Iām trying to use.
Iāve been trying to write a post with the word āblameā, but Iāve been misspelling it as āblaimā. The iPad, trying to be helpful, is automatically changing it to āBlairā. It knows that āblameā is a possible correction ā if I were to undo the change and bring up the chip of suggested alternatives, āblameā is one of them ā but I never get the opportunity to select it as it changes the word from under me.
When thereās no suggestion, the misspelt word is simply highlighted. Maybe that should be the way to go for all missspellings unless iOS is almost certain that it knows the correction. I know itās a hard problem, but it would be appreciated if more work is spent on making this less frustrating.
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It took an hour navigating various Telstra phone trees, chat apps, and the website, but I’ve now got a static IP address for my home internet. The reason for doing so relates to work, but it does open up other use-cases which may be fun to explore.
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One aspect of software development that I like is the research side of things: learning something new and interesting that will hopefully be useful for the problem I’m working on. The downside of this, though, is that I cannot listen to podcasts while I work.
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There are many people around where I work that like āloud carsā of some sort, but I most certainly do not. This is one more reason why Iām looking forward to electric cars being the norm.
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There was a massive spiral wheel-shaped spider web in my backyard that I thought was abandoned. It was only after I took it down this morning that I realised it actually wasn’t. Now I feel kinda bad.
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I wish more podcasters realise that there are other podcasting players than just Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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Thank goodness Micro.blog offers the ability to edit replies. It seems like I’m constantly making small spelling or grammatical errors in my replies, and it’s always after I post them when I see them.
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Some photos of my time in Warburton yesterday, in the Yarra Valley. Went for a bike ride and a bit of a bush-walk. Lovely day for it, if a bit sunny.
Isnāt it just. Itās a lovely part of the world, particularly at this time of year.
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A Year Under The Pandemic
This was originally a journal entry but I thought Iād share it here as well. Today is the end of week 52, almost a year to the day that the pandemic became all to real for me. Iāve taken today day off to spend some time in Warburton. It was in Warburton last year, almost to the day (13th of March), that things began to get serious. The news coming out of China and Italy was grave: hundreds of deaths, thousands of new cases, hospitals filling up, lack of ventilators and staff to operate them, PPE shortages, scenes of people locked down in their home. The outbreak in New York was becoming serious as well, and the US government announced closure of their borders to Europe.
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I love the idea of HEY World, that you can publish a blog post simply by sending an email. Theyāve also put a lot of care into the styling of the posts as well, and each one looks great. It almost makes me want to sign up to try it.
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I’ve been writing a bit more on my development related blog recently so I’ve added the feed to this Micro.blog account. This means there may be some more software development related posts showing up in the timeline. I’ll see how this goes.
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It’s a public holiday today, meaning that instead of writing software for work, I could do almost anything else. But of course I chose to spent the whole day writing software for myself.
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It’s funny how somtimes you make a mistake, then you make another mistake that relates to that first mistake, and they somehow cancel each other out.
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Request to all cafe owners: please ask the customer if they would like coriander in their sandwich before putting it in. I know many people who love coriander, but I most definitely do not! And it’s always an unpleasant shock when I take a bite of a sandwich that has it.
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Itās the middle of week 2 back in the office, and Iāve found myself falling back on most of the old routines that were put in stasis for a year. Iām a little shocked at how quickly that can happen.
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I had a Blot.im account that I was paying for but not using, so I’ve started a digital garden on software development. It’s mainly links and techniques that I’ve found helpful, but also a place to voice an opinion, and occasional rant, on the goings on in the industry.
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The interesting thing about technology breakthroughs is how quickly the shift from the impossible to the banal actually is. An example of this is machine learning. This was something that was being researched on since the 1950s, with very little to show for it in terms of practical applications. This changed very recently, thanks to the growth of computing power. Now, many of these same techniques are used in many things that are taken for granted, like language translation, image recognition, and surfacing content in algorithmic timelines of social networks (not all utilisation of this technology is good).
This was one of the first thoughts I had when I heard about the announcement of a potential vaccine for malaria, which uses very similar technology to the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.
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Iāll have to go clothes shopping today to get a new jumper. Itās hard to find them during summer, but autumnās just a few days away, so Iām hoping that they are in stock again. I didnāt have a chance to buy one last year because of the winter lock-down.
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Setting Package Variable When Building Go Project
Hereās a technique for setting a variable in a Go project when building it.
Say you have a global variable like the following:
// Package www.example.com/pkg/sample package sample var ServerVersion = āāThe server version is determined during build time based on the Git tag. This is available from the environment, but you donāt want to hard code this yourself. Doing so will mean that youāll need to update it when it changes, and you know that youāll forget to do that (I constantly do).
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Supporting HTTP/2 Without A tls.Conn In Go
Go has support for both HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 in the web server available in net/http. Unfortunately, in order support HTTP/2, the
net.Connreturned by thenet.Listenermust be of type*tls.Conn. If it is not, the web server will refuse to upgrade the connection.This makes it impossible to use HTTP/2 if youāre using a listener that may be returning different
net.Connimplementations.One could argue that this appropriate, given that HTTP/2 must be performed over a TLS connection. Iām not so sure I agree on this front. Is it up to the standard library to enforce this, or should there be enough room available to the developer to choose how this should be enforced? What if TLS is being terminated at a load balancer?
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Itās amazing, and perhaps a little shocking when you think about it, how much time spent on planning software development activities is actually spent on fighting Jira.
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Feature needed for news sites: a mouse-over for names in an article that quickly shows you who they are and how they relate to the reported issue. I always forget who is who and have to go back to the top of the article to reread their introduction. Books need this as well.
