Slack’s not great for resolving arguments.
I’m in one now at work. Nothing heated, just a disagreement about a certain design choice. But the ability to post short, sharp responses — not to mention the inherent satisfaction that would come from doing so — adds the possibility of making the whole situation descend to the point where it becomes just like a Twitter-storm. It takes effort to avoid that from happening. It took me effort to do so today.
Maybe something like an “argument” mode would help. When enabled, you can no longer make short posts and are force to write longer ones, maybe with a minimum character count of say 1000 or so. The post will also be delayed by about 15 minutes so that when you do slam a reply out, you have the opportunity to cool off, and reword it.
Two things in life there’s never enough of: time, and available USB ports.
Speaking of nice development experiences, I took a look at the Playdate SDK yesterday. Docs and tools are really well polished. Managed to get a “Hello World” style “game” built and running in the simulator in about 30 minutes. My pixel artwork skills need work though. 🤦
Time and Money
Spending a lot of time in Stripe recently. It’s a fantastic payment gateway and a pleasure to use, compared to something like PayPal which really does show its age.
But it’s so stressful and confusing dealing with money and subscriptions. The biggest uncertainty is dealing with anything that takes time. The problem I’m facing now is if the customer chooses to buy something like a database, which is billed a flat fee every month, and then they choose to buy another database during the billing period, can I track that with a single subscription and simply adjust the quantity amount? My current research suggests that I can, and that Stripe will handle the prorating of partial payments and credits. They even have a nice API to preview the next invoice which can be used to show the customer how much they will be paying for.
But despite all the documentation, test environments, and simulations, I still can’t be sure that it will happen in real life, when real money is exchanged in real time. I guess some real life testing would be required. 💸
Nothing so focuses the mind like a deadline, and the mandate to keep it. The easy deadlines are the ones imposed by others. Much harder, and one that I personally need a lot of work on, are the ones that you set yourself.
🔗 Simulating Amazon DynamoDB unique constraints using transactions
A technique to simulate a uniqueness constraint on a field not used in the key. Came in handy for solving a problem I was having with DynamoDB today. I wrote more about it here if you’re curious.
Have finally got around to arranging the printed books of my 2021 Day One journal entries. Lot of entries last year, enough for two books actually. Although to be fair, I’m also including blog posts and a lot of photos, which would have definitly increased the page count.
I’m trying my best to maintain some consistency across the printed books. I’ve realised that you can make a choice the first time around, but it’s actually the second time around that your choices become a convention. So I tried being a bit thoughtful about some of the decisions I’m making this year.
That said, I am making some slight deviations from the 2020 book. I’m trying a paper cover this time as I found the hard cover a little bit fragile. I’m afraid to bend the spine too far while reading it as I fear it might tear it from the cover. It’s actually preventing me from flicking through the printed book, defeating the purpose of this exercise. I’ll see if the paper cover is better and if so, I may reprint the 2020 journal again.
One last thing: I do appreciate Day One offering this service, but I wonder if it would have been better if this was offered on their website. There’s too much that needs to happen in the iOS app, and due to the nature of the OS itself, I’m always afraid switching away to another app while a long running process is going on, lest the OS kills it and I’ll have to start it all over again. So I’m left with watching long running progress bars.
Looking at wiki software this morning to set up a personal wiki. Lots of great projects out there, it was difficult to choose. Deceided to try BookStack since I like how it arranges pages into bookshelf, books, and chapters. I think some imposed structure would be good for me.
Little bit difficult to think about much else given the current news from Ukraine. Certainly doesn’t feel right posting about the trivial things happening here. It’s devastating that it’s come to this and I feel for those suffering from this horrific attack.
A good indication that I’m not thrilled about doing something is when I start thinking of ways to automate it. Sure I could spend 5 minutes doing the task manually — look at a Jira board, count the story-points of each ticket, and write the sum in a spreadsheet — but that would be boring! What would be much more interesting is spending a couple of hours writing a script to do this, complete with calls to the Jira API, a Sqlite3 database, maybe some graph drawing routines…
Ok, settle down. Just do it manually for now. Plenty of time to automate it later.
Then again, it would be nice if that story-point sum was calculated automatically… 🤔
I’m trying a little experiment on myself where I carry a little notebook with me wherever I go. My goal is to see whether I’d get any value of keeping a daily log of sorts, where anything that might be worth remembering will get written down.
I first tried this a couple of weeks ago, but that attempt was largely abandoned after a couple of days. I thought I’d give it a more serious go this time. So for two weeks, with some exceptions, I will make sure to have a notebook either on me, or within easy reach of me. I started this experiment on Monday, making this day three.
There are a couple of reasons why I’m doing this. The book Steal Like an Artist, and this post (via @amit) were inspirations, and there have been times that, in retrospect, a notebook would have been handy. But in general, I’m just curious to see whether I would get anything out of it. I think a good indication that it’s going well is if I write down a least one item per day. If I actually use to the notebook to recall something, that would indicate success.
Let nobody say that innovation is no longer possible in MacOS. One idea I have: making it possible to move windows, off-screen and out of reach thanks to a monitor setup change, back to the center of the desktop. Honestly, I don’t know why this is still an issue in 2022. 😒
I went to the newsagents today to buy a ruler. It’s been a little while since I’ve been in one, and I always enjoy going, especially to look at the stationary. Seeing all those pens and notebooks: so many possibilities.
Cling Wrap
I bought this roll of cling wrap when I moved into my current place. Now, after 6.5 years and 150 metres, it’s finally all used up.
In the grand scheme of things, this is pretty unimportant. It happens every day: people buy something, they use it, and eventually it’s all used up. Why spend the time and energy writing and publishing this post to discuss it? Don’t you have better things to do?
And yet, there’s still a feeling of weight to this particular event that I felt was worth documenting. Perhaps it’s because it was the first roll of cling wrap I bought after I moved out. Or maybe it’s because it lasted for this long, so long in fact that the roll I bought to replace it was sitting in my cupboard for over a year. Or maybe it’s the realisation that with my current age and consumption patterns, I probably wouldn’t use up more than 7 rolls like this in my lifetime.
Who knows? All I know is that despite the banality of the whole affair, I spent just spent the better part of 20 minutes trying to work out how best to talk about it here.
I guess I’m in a bit of a reflective mood today.
Trip to Ballarat and the Beer Festival
I had the opportunity to go to Ballarat yesterday to attend the beer festival with a couple of mates. It’s been a while since I last travelled to Ballarat — I think the last time was when I was a kid. It was also the first time I took the train up there. I wanted to travel the Ballarat line for a while but I never had a real reason to do so.
The festival started at noon but I thought I’d travel up there earlier to look around the city for a while.
I didn’t stay long in the city centre as I needed to take the train to Wendouree, where the festival was located.
The beer festival itself was at Wendouree park. Layout of the place was good: vendors (breweries, food, etc.) was laid out along the perimeter, and general seating was available in the middle. They did really well with the seating. There were more than enough tables and chairs for everyone there.
Day was spectacular, if a bit sunny: the tables and chairs in the shade were prime real-estate. Whole atmosphere was pleasant: everyone was just out to have a nice time. Got pretty crowded as the day wore on. Lots of people with dogs, and a few families as well.
I’m not a massive beer connoisseur so I won’t talk much about the beers. Honestly, the trip for me was more of a chance to get out of the city and catch up with mates. But I did tried a pear cider for the first time, which was a little on the sweet side, which I guess was to be expected. I also had a Peach Melba inspired pale ale that was actually kind of nice.
Trip home was a bit of an adventure. A train was waiting at Wendouree station when I got there. There was nobody around and it was about 5 minutes until departure so I figured I’d board. Turns out it was actually not taking passengers. I was the only one that boarded, and when I actually realised that it was not in service, the doors closed and the train departed. I had to make my presence known to the driver and one other V/Line worker. They were really nice about it, and fortunately for me, they were on their way to Ballarat anyway, so it wasn’t a major issue. Even so, it was quite embarrassing. Fortunately the train home was easy enough.
Regional train trip today. Nice doing something different.
Finally, for the first time in roughly 2.5 months, I have the opportunity to do a real coding task at work. GoLand, I’ve missed you! 🥰
OS Vendors and Online Accounts
Looks like the next version of Windows will require an online account, and while the reason for this could be something else, I’m guessing this would be used to enable file sync, mail account sync, calendar sync, etc.
I think it’s a mistake for OS vendors to assume that people would want to share their sole online identity across different devices. Say that I had a work computer and a home computer, and I’d use the same online account for both. Do I really want my personal files and work files being synced across, or my scheduled meetings to start showing up in my personal calendar?
I guess the response would be to create two online accounts: one for work and one for home. This might be possible: I don’t know how difficult it would be to create multiple Microsoft accounts for the same person. But if I do this1, and there’s software that I’ve purchased with my home account that I’d like to use on my work device, I’d have to repurchase it. I guess if I’m employed full time it should be work purchasing software, but come on, am I really going to go through the whole precurement buracracy to buy something like a $29 image editor?
This could be all theoretical: might be that this wouldn’t be a problem for Windows users. But I know from my limited experience with using MacOS that issues based on the assumption that everything associated with an online account should be shared on every device can crop up. That’s why I don’t open Mail.app on my home computer.
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This is all hypothetical. I’m not a Windows user. ↩︎
Currently reading: Persuader by Lee Child 📚
Yes, I know it’s like the fifth time I’ve read this, but I really like this novel. One of his best.
The John Curtain Hotel, the pub my friends and I use to go to as uni students, is up for sale. It was a pretty good pub at the time — the $10 parmas were fantastic — but I had no idea how much history it had with Australia’s labour movement. Here’s hoping that history could be preserved in some way.