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I’d be curious to know if a brand new user to Facebook would be able to get any value from it. Looking at screenshots of their app redesign, the whole thing looks convoluted and unintuitive. Is the sole purpose of Facebook now just to keep existing users from leaving Facebook?
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AWS Tools: Documentation & The Website
Worked a little more on “awstools” (still haven’t thought of a good alternative name for it). I think the “dynamo-browse” tool is close to being in a releasable state. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to clean up most of the inconsistencies, and making sure that it’s being packaged correctly. Now it’s documentation writing time. I’m working my way through a very basic website and user guide. It’s been a little while since I’ve written any form of user-level documentation — most of the documents I write have been for other developers I work closely with — and I admit that it feels like a bit of a slog. Continue reading →
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Write It Down
I am feeling some very minor after-effects from the booster I took yesterday (nothing serious, just the expected cold-like symptoms). I was curious as to whether it was anything like I experienced in January, when I got my last booster. I went to my journal to see what I wrote about it. Unfortunately for me, there was nothing there. To be fair to my past self, there were some other events going on at the same time which I did write about. Continue reading →
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Boosted. 💉💉💉💉
(also muffined up once again 🧁)
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🔗 Publishing your work increases your luck (via Github’s The Readme Project)
I found this very inspiring. Given where it was published the subject matter is about software, but I believe that it could apply to pretty much any creative endeavour.
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Had sprint review today. Overall, it went really well. Much better than last time. We didn’t quite clear the board but that was mainly because we finished the work we planned for and were simply pulling in tickets from the backlog.
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Newsletter Reminder Emails
I subscribe to a newsletter that sends “reminder” emails if I skip an issue. If I don’t open one of the email newsletters I receive, then a few days later, a copy will be sent with a forward of the form “looks like you skipped an issue. Here what you missed.” These reminder emails are bad, and here’s why: It gives the impression of hustling me. I appreicate the time you take to publish something that I see value in, but sending these reminders feels like your forcing your content onto me. Continue reading →
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Trying a new cafe this morning. I drive past this place all the time, and I keep telling myself I should try it. Fortunately it’s only a 15 minute walk from home.
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Listening to the ATP #491 discussion on code formatting right now. I guess I’m not the only one that converted from BSD braces to K&R because it was the style used by “everyone else” (Go requiring this style helped a lot here). I will stand on liking the cuddled “else” though.
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This is how I usually spend my Saturday mornings. One difference today was that a train-replacement bus drove by roughtly every 10 minutes or so which, given that it was the weekend, was more often than I expected (not that that’s a bad thing).
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AWS Tools Dev Diary
A little more work on “awstools” today, mainly on a bit of a cleanup spree to make them suitable for others to use. This generally means fixing up any inconsistencies in how the commands work. An example of this is the put command, which now writes all modified items that are marked to the table (or if there are no marked items, all modified items) instead of just the selected one. Continue reading →
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A lot of Slack messaging and organising calls with others today in order to get something finished for next week. These sorts of days are exhausting: where you’re simply reacting to things. Starting to settle down now though, given that we’re nearing the end of the day.
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Shutting Down Blogging CMS
Ditching the CMS I was using for this blog is actually quite liberating. It means I don't have to spend any time trying to bridge the feature gap for what I need for a basic blogging CMS, and could focus on other projects. For example, I spent this evening working on "awstools": mainly coming up with a new name for it. I really can't use "awstools" as AWS is a trademark. Continue reading →
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Had an excellent design session meeting this morning, but after 1.5 hours of talking, my voice is absolutely horase. Might need to consider improving my speaking skills and possibly even my voice strength. A microphone or headset might also be helpful.
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Moving my work journal over to Micro.blog.
That blog has been bouncing around CMS’s for a while now, and there’s always one or two things I’ve found lacking. It got to the point where I’ve began building my own CMS, and although it’s closer to what I’d like for this work journal — and includes a few features that other CMS’s lack, like private posts — I’ve been thinking about what’s missing, like image hosting and syndication, and realising that spending the time to build them would just be time I don’t spend on other things.
And honestly, the reason why I’ve been unhappy with all the other CMS’s I’ve tried is because I was hoping for something which easily supports posting short updates with the occasional long post… something similar to Micro.blog. Well, something like that already exists, and it’s called Micro.blog.
So I’m going to do the “kill your darlings” thing and try having this journal hosted here for a while. Sure it will mean that I don’t get things like private posts (which were honestly the only unique feature about that homegrown CMS) but I can probably make it work. At least there’ll be one less distraction.
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Trying my Pixel 6 caseless for a little while. It was starting to interfere with swipe gestures which was getting a little annoying. Might be some other benefits with no case, such as being able to carry a physical notebook again.
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Went to see Hamilton at Her Majesty’s Theatre last night (a little ironic, I know). I’ve seen the Broadway recording, so I didn’t come in “cold”. But it’s nothing compared to seeing it live. Absolutely faboulous. Highly recommend.
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How is it that I can make a change in one area of an Android app, like add a new fragment, and a completely unrelated area of the app (the DB models) decides to stop building correctly? Sometimes it feels like the whole dev. environment is held together with masking tape.
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I’ve turned off analytics for this site. It’s been more than a hinderance than anything else. It got to the point where I actually stopped visiting my own site just to keep my visits from showing up the data. How crazy!
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The Feature Epic (Featuring the Epic Feature Branch)
Here’s what’s been happening at work with me recently. I write it here as an exercise in how I can learn from this. They say that writing can help in this respect so I’m going to put that logic to the test (in either case, just having this documented somewhere could prove useful). We’re working on a pretty large change to the billing service powering the SaaS product sold by the company I work at. Continue reading →
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Given how often I’ve been typing it recently, you would have thought I’d know how to spell “Los Angeles” by now.
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Hmm, the folio keyboard I’m using for this iPad is starting to flake out occasionally. Sometimes when I unfold it, the iPad doesn’t recognise it and throws up the on-screen keyboard. Restarting the iPad seems to fix it, so I’m not sure if it’s a battery age thing. 🤔
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Got offered a free sample of a “lamington scone” at the bakery I went to today. Tastes pretty much as you’d expect. 😋
Good to see that there’s still room for innovation in scone technology. 😉