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My second favourite word to write in a Jira ticket, after augment, is “decommission”. I’m basically using it as an euphemism for “rip this unused code out”. To have made a few tickets with this word today feels glorious. 😊
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As Someone Who Works In Software
As someone who works in software…
- I cringe every time I see society bend to the limitations of the software they use. It shouldn’t be this way; the software should serve the user, not the other way around.
- I appreciate a well designed API. Much of my job is using APIs built by others, and the good ones always feel natural to use, like water flowing through a creek. Conversely, a badly designed API makes me want to throw may laptop to the ground.
- I think a well designed standard is just as important as a well designed API. Thus, if you’re extending the standard in a way that adds a bunch of exceptions to something that’s already there, you may want to reflect on your priorities and try an approach that doesn’t do that.
- I also try to appreciate, to varying levels of success, that there are multiple ways to do something and once all the hard and fast requirements are settled, it usually just comes down to taste. I know what appeals to my taste, but I also (try to) recognise that others have their own taste as well, and what appeals to them may not gel with me. And I just have to deal with it. I may not like it, but sometimes we have to deal with things we don’t like.
- I believe a user’s home directory is their space, not yours. And you better have a bloody good reason for adding stuff there that the user can see and didn’t ask for.
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My favourite gym t-shirt. All the Aussies would get this reference.
This I got from an op-shop but I have been to the Bonnie Doon Hotel a few times. It’s actually pretty nice.
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It’s already May and I’m way behind on my reading goals for the year.
The trouble is that the book that I want to read next is one I’ve read before, which doesn’t really count towards my goal. Well, I guess it could, since I haven’t listed it here. Maybe I’ll let myself this one pass.
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On the train. Overhead announcement comes through from the control centre mentioning that a way to get service updates is to follow Metro on Twitter. Not X, Twitter. Even 1.5 years out.
Such is the staying power of Twitter as a brand, compared to what it’s called now. I’d be curious to know if those not using X or are not interested in tech know about the rebrand at all. Everyone knew about Twitter, even if they never used it.
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Tape Playback Site
Thought I’d take a little break from UCL today.
Mum found a collection of old cassette tapes of us when we were kids, making and recording songs and radio shows. I’ve been digitising them over the last few weeks, and today the first recorded cassette was ready to share with the family.
I suppose I could’ve just given them raw MP3 files, but I wanted to record each cassette as two large files — one per side — so as to not loose much of the various crackles and clatters made when the tape recorder was stopped and started. But I did want to catalogue the more interesting points in the recording, and it would’ve been a bit “meh” simply giving them to others as one long list of timestamps (simulating the rewind/fast-forward seeking action would’ve been a step too far).
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Interestingly, the best example of an app soliciting user feedback might be the Economist app. Just one alert modal with a simple question — “are you enjoying the Economist app?” — and a simple Yes/No answer. No star rating. No review prose. Just a simple thumbs up/thumbs down. Crude, but effective.
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UCL: Brief Integration Update and Modules
A brief update of where I am with UCL and integrating it into Dynamo-browse. I did managed to get it integrated, and it’s now serving as the interpreter of commands entered in during a session.
It works… okay. I decided to avoid all the complexities I mentioned in the last post — all that about continuations, etc. — and simply kept the commands returning
Continue reading →tea.Msgvalues. The original idea was to have the commands return usable values if they were invoked in a non-interactive manner. For example, thetablecommand invoked in an interactive session will bring up the table picker for the user to select the table. But when invoked as part of a call to another command, maybe it would return the current table name as a string, or something. -
The Perfect Album
The guys on Hemispheric Views have got me blogging once again. The latest episode bought up the topic of the perfect album: an album that you can “just start from beginning, let it run all the way through without skipping songs, without moving around, just front to back, and just sit there and do nothing else and just listen to that whole album”.
Well, having crashed Hemispheric Views once, I’d thought it’s time once again to give my unsolicited opinion on the matter. But first, some comments on some of the suggestions made on the show.
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God bless the person that invented the command line history. They just saved me 15 minutes of work.
And while we’re handing out praises, thank you to the person that added
RunAndReturnto the Mockery mock generator. I might be able to climb out of this mocking hell with this before the day is up. -
One other thing from Rec Diffs #233: it’s amusing to hear Siracusa being as frustrated with Britishism seeping into American English as I am with Americanisms seeping into Australian English.
John, I know how you feel. 😀
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Favourite Comp. Sci. Textbooks
John Siracusa talked about his two favourite textbooks on Rec Diffs #233: Modern Operation Systems, and Computer Networks, both by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. I had those textbooks at uni as well. I still do, actually. They’re fantastic. If I were to recommend something on either subject, it would be those two.
The two Tanenbaums. I will add that my favourite textbook I had during my degree was Compilers: Principal, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, et al. also known as the “dragon book.” If you’re interested in compiler design in any way, I can definitely recommend this book. It’s a little old, but really, the principals are more or less the same.
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And that makes it the third time this week that I encountered a bug involving DynamoDB that was avoidable with a unit test that actually used a proper database.
(To be fair, this time is was my fault: I haven’t got around to writing the unit test yet).
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Github/Gitlab code search is fine, but have you ever tried
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I wish Ghost allowed readers to choose a different email address to send newsletters, rather than just send them to the email address associated with the account itself. I’ve got news for you: send reading material to my personal inbox and I’ll never see it. That’s just not where I read stuff: it’s all in Feedbin.
Even better would be a private RSS feed. I know Gruber had issues with doing way back during the Google Reader days. But those days are gone, so it might be worth trying this again. Seems to work for Stratechery.
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For the last few years, I’ve been using 4/24 as the expiry date of test credit cards within Stripe. Well those days are literally in the past now.
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UCL: Breaking And Continuation
I’ve started trying to integrate UCL into a second tool: Dynamo Browse. And so far it’s proving to be a little difficult. The problem is that this will be replacing a dumb string splitter, with command handlers that are currently returning a tea.Msg type that change the UI in some way.
UCL builtin handlers return a
Continue reading →interface{}result, or anerrorresult, so there’s no reason why this wouldn’t work. Buttea.Msgis also aninterface{}types, so it will be difficult to tell a UI message apart from a result that’s usable as data. -
I’d be curious to know why Microsoft renamed Azure Active Directory to “Entra.” That name is… not good.
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👨💻 New post on Databases over at the Coding Bits blog: Counting In DynamoDB
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After a two month hiatus, the coffee booth at the station has reopened. All is well in the world once more. ☕😵💫
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Day 29: drift
Drifted a little from the path at this point of my hike today. Could be easy to get lost though, so it was important not to drift too far. #mbapr
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Manual Moreale hit the nail on the head with this quote from his latest post:
The web is not dying. The web is huge. The web is ever-expanding. The fact that the web is just the same 5 big websites is a fucking lie. It’s like saying the restaurant industry is the same 5 fast food chains. It is not. It’s up to you to decide to stop visiting those 5 sites and stop ingesting their fast food content.
It feels like when these people say “the web”, they mean “whatever platform I’m addicted to.” Might be time they started trying out that URL bar that appears at the top of every browser.
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👨💻 New post on Go over at the Coding Bits blog: Custom Import Paths In Go
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Day 27: surprise
Quite surprised that this photo came out as well as it did. Was purely an accidental press of the shutter button. #mbapr
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Interesting to see Google starting to solicit reviews for apps that came with the phone, such as the… Phone.
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Igore the click-batey headline: this is quite a good post. Really enjoyed it. And, on the whole, I agree with the author. Via Jim Nielsen’s notes
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Day 26: critter
Watch out for these ones. #mbapr
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UCL: The Simplifications Paid Off
The UCL simplifications have been implemented, and they seem to be largely successful.
Ripped out all the streaming types, and changed pipes to simply pass the result of the left command as first argument of the right.
"Hello" | echo ", world" --> "Hello, world"This has dramatically improved the use of pipes. Previously, pipes could only be used to connect streams. But now, with pretty much anything flowing through a pipe, that list of commands has extended to pretty much every builtins and user-defined procs. Furthermore, a command no longer needs to know that it’s being used in a pipeline: whatever flows through the pipe is passed transparently via the first argument to the function call. This has made pipes more useful, and usable in more situations.
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Thou Doth Promote Too Much
Manual Moreale wrote an interesting post about self promotion, where he reflects on whether closing out all his People and Blogs post with a line pointing to his Ko-Fi page is too much:
And so I added that single line. But adding that single line was a struggle. Because in my head, it’s obvious that if you do enjoy something and are willing to support it, you’d probably go look for a way to do it. That’s how my brain works. But unfortunately, that’s not how the internet works. Apparently, the correct approach seems to be the opposite one. You have to constantly remind people to like and subscribe, to support, to contribute, and to share.
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Some emus have moved into a nearby sanctuary a few weeks ago. I managed to catch a glimpse of one during my walk today. A rare treat indeed.
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I was snakily going to suggest a “HTML naked day” to complement both CSS and JS naked day, but then I realise that that’s the default for all modern web frontend development. 😏
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👨💻 New post on Databases over at the Coding Bits blog: PostgreSQL LATERIAL Joins
