I’m sorry, but Apple’s magic mouse and keyboard are the absolute worst. I’m making so many typing errors on the keyboard and scrolling with the mouse is absolutely impossible. I’m willing to admit that I’m just not use to them but gosh I wouldn’t choose them if they weren’t provided by work.

Can someone follow you on Substack without you even having a Substack? I have an account but I’m just a reader; I don’t publish anything there. Yet somehow I got a follower. They may be disappointed as I do my Substack subscribing via Feedbin.

I have passing fancies of re-theming this blog, mainly to improve the style of code excerpts. I resist the temptation, not only because I’ve grown to like the current theme, but I’d like to avoid posting too much code here. I can post code elsewhere. This site can be about other things.

Visited my Nonna this afternoon and showed her some photos of my recent trip to Italy. I had some concerns that I may have gotten the town she grew up in wrong. But turns out I visited the right one, and she was really happy to see photos of it.

I do like the idea of a personal changelog but I know that I’ll need to have some way to automatically create entries when I post to blogs, make changes to repostories, etc. If I had to maintain it manually, it’ll just be one more thing that I neglect.

Got some, shall we say… “pointers” about how we could improve the code-base we’re working on at work.

As much as it hurts my ego to hear someone making suggested improvements without fully taking into consideration the context in which that code was originally written (learning the service the code was interacting with, under pressure to deliver it by a given deadlines, etc.), I’ll admit on the whole the feedback is fair enough. I know there are times where I tend to gloss over the finer details of the code I write as part of a team. And that I treat things like sufficient observability metrics, proper naming, and decent logging, to be mere afterthoughts over getting the code to actually work and moving on to the next task. I’ll try to do better there.

There’s one thing I will make a comment on. A few suggestions were of using shared utilities, like core libraries managed centrally, for things that were written in the moment. Here’s the thing about shared utilities: I won’t be aware of, or forget about, their existence unless I have a hand in writing them. You can do things like announce them in Slack, but unless I have an opportunity to start using them right there at that moment — an opportunity that rarely comes up — I’ll eventually forget about them and just fall back to plowing through in my own way. Getting me to review to them will probably work (or, more likely, forcing me to review them; keeping up with code reviews is another thing I’m pretty terrible at).

Anyway, I think my ego’s sufficiently soothed now. I’ll start writing up tickets to get these fixed.

Anyone else miss the visualisations of Windows Media Player? Pining for the dance of the freaky circles right now.

Not much going on at the moment. The most interesting thing that’s been happening is that I’ve been playing around with Wails recently, building a sort of test workbench for gRPC and REST APIs. It’s really early days so there’s not much more to say about it just yet.

I’d like to say I’m looking forward to a day of solid coding, but the last few times I wrote that, I ended up with a day full of annoying meetings. So, do I tempt fate and write that I’m looking forward to a day full of annoying meetings? Not sure I can say that, even if it is just to avoid a jinx.

When I heard about what CNET is doing to their old articles it strikes me as to how relying solely on SSO is a bit of a looser’s game. Ok, I might not be your typical web user, but I almost never look for the latest news by making a web-search. I visit or subscribe to sites that I trust, that have a good user experience, and don’t bombard me with crummy ads.

I haven’t visited CNET for a while but seeing them do this this, along the crazy idea of using AI to generate stories, it’s clear that they’re not interesting in building up trust, instead going for the get-top-search-ranking-and-stuff-me-full-of-ads business model. That might get people to click once or twice, but why would they come back? I can’t imagine web users not learning that CNET’s articles are not worth the crappy user experience.

Aargh! I’ve been misspelling “aargh” all this time (two A’s, not one).

Incidentally, the word “misspelling” looks like a misspelling of “miss-spelling”. Looks like it’s missing an S. But it’s correct, according to Apple’s dictionary.

Aargh! I haven’t had time to write up new work or even finish the work I’ve picked up because I’ve been in meetings and discussions around the work I’ve already planned. Meanwhile the backlog is starting to dry up and people are starting to look for things to do. It’s overwhelming.

Need some focus time. I’ll break for lunch, then I’ll be turning off Slack notifications for the afternoon so I can get my stuff finished.

I don’t know why I’m writing this here. Not sure how this is in any way interesting to anyone else. I’m sorry. Just need somewhere to release some pressure.

Multi-carat support in text editors have been a huge game changer to my coding workflow. I love them. I use them all the time, and I miss them when I’m in an editor that doesn’t support them.

Ok, mark the date: first time I’ve seen someone in public with a foldable phone. The narrow screen is a bit of a giveaway. I knew they would be thick but I didn’t realise how narrow they are folded up. I’m guessing that’s the point though. 🤷‍♂️

Giving the Scribe editor a try. Works great. Seems like a perfect editor for those focused writing sessions where you need as few distractions as possible.

Oof, attended a council meeting this evening about a development that is planned down the road of my place. Must say, I know of better ways to spend a Monday evening. The council decided to let the development go ahead, which is very unfortunate. There are avenues of appeal though, and quite a large level of opposition to this, so hope is not lost.

I’ll be frank, I didn’t want to go this evening. I was kinda expecting this outcome, and feeling all that (justifiable) emotion was uncomfortable. I felt it was important to attend nonetheless. All the Pressfield and Godin I’ve been reading recently seemed to meld together into a simple though along the lines of “yeah, it’ll probably be uncomfortable and ultimately won’t change anything. Do it anyway”.