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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.
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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.
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🔗 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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… 🤔
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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.
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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. 😒
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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! 🥰
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Casey Newton published a great interview with the dev behind Web3 Is Going Just Great. The whole thing is worth a read, but she made this choice statement that I found especially apt:
In a lot of ways, people are also tying themselves to the technology in ways that I haven’t really seen before. You don’t see a lot of people pick a type of data model—say a linked list—and say “okay, how can I solve [x problem] with a linked list?” But that’s exactly what’s happening in web3
Exactly!
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I’m wondering if the Apple Pencil would do well with a dedicated charging case. I only use my Pencil occasionally so I don’t keep it on the iPad, and when I do need it, it’s always flat. Having it on the desk, charged at say 50% to keep the battery healthy, would be nice.
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Someone shared a great Q&A video with Seth Godin yesterday. I was hoping to listen to it at the gym but the video — which is hosted by Vimeo and embedded in a webpage — refused to play when the phone screen was off. Not sure if this is Vimeo, or just the web browser, but it’s a bit of a shame that this happens.
I’m converting it into an audio file and have uploaded it to Pocketcasts, so it’s not a huge issue. This can be done relatively easily using youtube-dl with the
-xflag:youtube-dl -x --audio-format=mp3 <url-of-webpage-containing-video>Make sure to set the
--audio-formatflag. I didn’t included it at first and it produced an M4A file which was around 100 MB, which I thought was a bit large. The MP3 file was half that, and it’s likely I could have reduced it further, but I figured that it was good enough. -
My YouTube Watching Setup
I’m not a sophisticated YouTube watcher but I do watch a lot of YouTube. For a while I was happy enough to simply use the YouTube app with a Chromecast. Yes there were ads, but the experience was nice enough that I tolerated them.
Recently, however, this became untenable.
It started with Google deciding to replace their simple Chromecast target with a Google TV style app, complete with a list of video recommendations I had no interest in watching. This redesign also came with more ads, which themselves would be annoying enough. But with this year being an election year, I started seeing campaign ads from a political party I have absolutely zero interest in seeing ads from. Naturally Google being Google, there was no way for me to block them1. I guess I could have just paid to remove the ads, but this wouldn’t solve the Chromecast problem. Besides, the feeling of paying for something that is arguably not a great use of my time felt wrong. I felt that a bit of friction in my YouTube watching habits wouldn’t be a bad thing to introduce.
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Apparently household solar panels are so prevalent in some states that it’s at risk of destabilising the grid. It’s a bit of a shame that this wasn’t foreseen by those responsible for the grid, and that energy storage systems weren’t considered to deal with the excess, instead of requiring a remote kill switch on the inverters.
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I was entering a commit message in GitHub, when I was shown the following tip:
ProTip! Great commit summaries contain fewer than 50 characters. Place extra information in the extended description.
Maybe it’s just me but it would be nice if the message provided a link to a style guide explaining why great commit summaries have fewer than 50 characters. There must be a reason, since someone has gone to the trouble of coding up this message. Tell me what that reason is, and I’ll determine whether it’s a good enough style to adopt.
If there isn’t a reason, maybe it’s best not to bother me about this.
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It may not have cooled down quite yet but with the days getting shorter, Autumn is feeling really close now. Time to break out the Hot Cross Buns again.
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Reminder That Your Content Isn't Really Yours on Medium #3
Looks like Medium has had a redesign recently, with recommended posts now being featured more prominently. Instead of appearing at the end of the post, they’re now in a right-hand sidebar, which doesn’t scroll, that is directly below the author of the post you’re reading.
And let me be clear: as far as I can tell, these are not recommendations from the same author. They can be from anyone, covering any topic that I can only assume Medium algorithmically thinks you’d be interested in. It reminds me a lot of the anxiety supplier that is Twitter Trending Topics.
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