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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. Continue reading ā
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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. Continue reading ā
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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.
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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. Continue reading ā
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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.
