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A Feature Request for Twitter, Free of Charge
It looks like Twitter’s product design team need some help. Their recent ideas, “inspired” by the features of other companies like Snap (Stories) and Club House (Audio Clips), don’t seem to be setting the world on fire. Well, here’s an idea for them to pursue, free of charge.
A lot of people I follow seem to use Twitter threads for long-form writing. This might be intentional, or it might be because they had a fleeting thought that they developed on the spot. But the end result is a single piece of writing, quantised over a series of tweets, and assembled as a thread.
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Adding Blog Posts to Day One using RSS
Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this.
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It’s only just now that I realised I no longer need to brace myself whenever I see the headline “The President is tweeting”.
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A Simple Source IP Address Filter in Go
I’ve found that it’s occasionally useful to have something that allows through, or blocks, requests to your web application based on the source IP address. There are a number of reasons as to why you may want to do this: maybe it’s because you’d like to put something online that only you would have like access to, or it could be that you’re building something that is publicly available, but certain endpoints should only be accessible to certain machines for security or privacy reasons. For me, the motivation was to build something that was not quite ready to share with the outside world.
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Published two tracks last night: Taxonomy and Hazard. Both of these were made during the depths of the Melbourne Lockdown 2.0, although they’re not about the pandemic. Also, this whole self-promotion thing is new to me so apologies if this post looks a bit weird.
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It’s a little bit shocking, the minute you move to a position with a bit more leadership responsibility, how quickly your calendar fills with meeting requests.
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That feeling you get when you see a class or struct that was defined in another library that you’re using; and you wish you could change it, but doing so will triple the time it takes to complete your task.
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Working on an album cover for some music I’m hoping to publish soon. Who knew that one the skills required for publishing music online is graphic design?
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Apart from a small cluster that’s been contained a week ago, there’ve been zero locally acquired cases of Covid-19 in Victoria. That means gyms have dropped the need to book in advanced. I kind of miss it though: being required to book forced me to actually commit to a session.
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If you’re looking for a way to edit long-form articles, may I recommend this technique from C.G.P. Grey. I’ve using it a few times for another blog I’m maintaining and while I don’t use Editorial, I do export the articles as PDF and mark them up in GoodNotes with the Apple Pencil.
I’ve found this technique usually results in better posts. It’s probably because of the shift in mode and location: I go from producing the words on my desktop, to deleting or rearranging them by hand on my iPad in a different room. I’ve also found that it is a lot more enjoyable: I actually look forward to editing this way.
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Some of these collaborative editing tools, like Google Docs or Atlassian Confluence, have a feature to allow reviewers to add comments to a document, maybe to ask the author a question or to make some changes. There’s usually an action to mark a comment as resolved, which will archive it. But I’m never sure who should be the one to resolve it: the reviewer or the author.
What I tend to do, when a reviewer leaves a comment on something I’m working on, is to make the corrections and then reply to the comment without actually resolving it. My thinking here is that this gives the reviewer an opportunity to acknowledge that they’ve seen the updates, and they indicate this by resolving the comment. This is how I work, but I know of other people that make the changes to the document, then immediately resolve the comment, with or without replying to it first.
What these comment systems need is a separate resolve action for both the author and reviewer. That way, the author can mark the comment as resolved once they believe they have addressed the reviewer’s concerns. Then, once the reviewer has had a chance to look at the changes, they can mark the comment as resolved if no further work is required. At any time, either person can post a reply, thereby keeping the comment open. Only once both parties resolve the comment does the comment get archived.
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It’s strange that the IETF, one of the principal foundations responsible for maintaining the standards of the web, are still publishing these standards as if they were intended for a dot-matrix printer.
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Some thoughts on app permissions in macOS
It’s funny how the casual meandering of your mind can be a source of inspiration. This morning, my mind casually turned to thinking about all the work that Mac developers need to do to get access to privileged APIs — like location, contacts, or the accessibility APIs. My experience of going through the motions to enable these permissions for the apps I use, along with hearing of the lengths developers go through to make this as seamless as they can, reveals to me the clunkiness that this entails. I could imaging this being a huge source of frustration for these developers, not to mention a huge source of support requests.
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Feedbin, the RSS reader I use, has the ability to add Twitter users as feeds. It works pretty well and has some nice features, like including article linked in the tweet. One thing that they should add is the automatic unrolling of threads.
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First encounters with GitHub (and Substack)
All these new Substack newsletters that I’m seeing reminds me of my first encounter with GitHub.
Back in 2009, I was checking out the source code of an open-source library we were using. Clicking on the link to the source bought me to this strange, new code-hosting service that I’ve never seen before. As someone who was use to the heaviness that was SourceForge, or the boring uniformity that was Google Code, the experience felt very minimal and slightly unintuitive. It took me a while, for instance, to realise that the version tags were selectable from a drop-down list. I also thought that it was quite restrictive to only offer checking out the source code with this weird SCM client called “git”. The whole experience left me thinking of this website as rather niche, and I never really expected to see it that often, given that Source Forge or Google Code reigned supreme at the time.
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My understanding is that in Australia the “official” start of the week is Monday, but the iOS internationalisation settings for Australia has it configured to be Sunday. This is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but I’m feeling some real dissonance over this.
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Building Sets from Maps
In the various Go projects that I work on, there have been times when I have needed to store items in a set. Many languages have a set implementation that is usable right out of the box. Unfortunately, Go is not one of them; but a set can be created quite easily using Go’s map type. Here is the technique I use to do so.
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One thing that needs to be clearly disclosed when signing up to anything — be it software, an energy company, or a newspaper — is what they try to do when you wish to close your account. This really needs to be in plain writing and not buried away in the Terms Of Service.
I’m experiencing this now after recently switching my energy provider. Even after the account is closed, they are sending me messages about the special offers I can have, if only I switched back to them.
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Thank you to the person on Micro.blog that recommended Music For Programming. Working from home alone can be a little hard when there is complete silence, and being able to just put on something that doesn’t require your full attention helps a lot.
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The standard audio and video player controls that browsers use for pages that don’t have their own UI really need to include both a 30 second backward and forward button. I use these all the time when they’re available, and I always miss them when they’re not.
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I should be writing. I would like to write. I would like to like writing. But every time I think about it, I feel this imposing force in my mind, as if just considering it tires me out. I wonder if this is “the resistance” that Steven Pressfield talked about.
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I have the impression that browser vendors are trying to encourage web developers to use the native DOM API, instead of using wrappers like jQuery. But I still like using jQuery as the DOM API is so darn clunky. Does anyone actually prefer it to jQuery?
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I really appreciate the amount of hard work put in by those that run the ABC News Coronavirus live blog1.
They have been running it almost every day for about a year now, including public holidays. The reporting is timely and the answers to questions from the public is as informative as possible given the amount of information they had at the time.
But the thing that I appreciate the most is the little things they do to try and make dealing with a stressful issue slightly easier. Things like publishing words of encouragement from the readers: these comments really helped me during the dark days of the lock-down last winter. They also do not hold back on the animated GIFs.
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The live blog link changes daily so this is the link to the page that usually has it. ↩︎
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A Quick Review of the Year
Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” type post, although there’s a bit of that, and there’s no dramatic insight or anything of that nature. It’s more of a chance for reflection, plus a bit of a document for future me on what the year was like.
Personally, as difficult as this past year was, I wouldn’t necessarily say 2020 was a bad year. I know I’m saying this from a position of good fortune: I didn’t loose my job, or my house, or my health. So I know there are a lot of others that have experienced a much worst year than I have. But for me, I’m coming out of this year feeling a little better than I have the previous couple of years gone by.
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