Had to go to the new office today so I tried out the commute. The walk from Southern Cross to the office is exactly 20 minutes.
Organising travel documents for an upcoming work trip. I used to rely on Google Inbox for this. The way it ingested your itinerary and hotel booking was useful, but the thing I miss the most were the high quality banner images of your destination. Really nice touch.
Your Dev Environment is Not Your Production Environment
There will be certain things you’re going to need to do in your development environments that you should never do in production. That’s pretty much a given: playing around with user’s data or potentially doing something that will cause an incident is generally not a good idea.
But there are things you shouldn’t do in prod that you may need to do in dev. And make no mistake, there may be a legitimate need to do these things. Using Auth0 and only have a limited number of emails available for your test environment? You may need a way to quickly reset a user. Support billing in multiple countries and need to do a test in one of them? You’ll need a way to change the user’s countries.
And I think that’s fine. Not every environment needs to be a reflection of production. As long you’ve got a staging or pre-prod environment where you can do things like rehearse deployments. But everything else should be skewed towards ease of development, which will mean making these drastic options available and easy to use.
It’s so much easier to post about how something others have worked on could be made better than it is to write about what I’ve been working on. I think there’s room for both on this blog, but I feel the balance is too many posts on the former and not enough on the latter. I’ll try to do better here.
Don’t want to turn this into the “look at what’s wrong with Atlassian’s software” blog, but I found another thing that annoys me about Confluence:
Clicking on a status label brings up a picker, giving you options to change the colour, etc. The picker appears below the label, which usually means it blocks the next thing I want to modify, like the status label in the row below. I need to dismiss the picker first before I can select the label I want to change next.
It’d probably be better if the picker appeared above the label instead.
This is also an issue with dates and links to Jira tickets as well, although with Jira tickets you’re required to make edits within a modal.
Given the number of times I make wiki pages that are little more than pseudo-databases-as-a-table, it would be nice if Confluence had a way to make this better. Maybe something like Notion databases, just to organise information a little neater than the free-for-all you get from tables.
Day 30: treasure
This one’s inside a box without hinges, key, or lid. #mbsept
Day 29: contrast #mbsept
Day 28: workout
It was a quiet evening in the gym that evening, which is unusual for a Thursday. I suspect that bolt of lightening that blew up a nearby transformer scared people away. #mbsept
After having some success getting my early QBasic programs running in the browser I had a bit of a look this morning to see if I could do the same for my Delphi apps. I found a project called BoxedWine which looks promising. Seems to be a minified version of Wine that that runs in browser using WASM.
I downloaded the example and had a bit of a play around with a Tetris clone I built. It worked… to a degree. It was a little slow, and some of the colours were off. But it ran, and was actually usable.
I did another test with an app that used OpenGL, which was less successful.
I think some of the OpenGL shared objects are not in the minified Wine distribution it was using. It might be possible to include them: there are instructions, and a few demos, on how to load files from the full Wine distribution on demand.
Anyway, not sure if I’ll pursue this further but it was a fun little exercise nonetheless. I’m pretty impressed that this is even possible at all. The Web stack is pretty freaking awesome.
Day 27: embrace
Photo credit goes to my sister, who captured this pair showing affection for each other. #mbsept
Day 26: beverage #mbsept
Day 25: flare #mbsept
Day 24: belt
Sometimes a 40 inch belt is just a 40 inch belt, as I realised when I bought mine (honestly, they should describe belt lengths as a range: 38 — 42 inches, for example). #mbsept
The day has arrived. After a meeting in the new office we were told to pack up our things. We won’t see them again until our desks in the new office are ready. 📦
On my last bus ride home from Port Melbourne. Can’t say that I’ll miss it. 👋🚌
Lost another comment to Jira today. Oof! Don’t get attached to anything you write there. Jira will eat your comment and you’ll never see it again. 🙁
You would’ve though, after 15 years of using Jira, that I’d learn this by now. 🤦♂️
Electrification of Melbourne Suburban Railways Plaque
Found this plaque while passing through Southern Cross station this morning.
I didn’t have time to read it, and the subject matter looks really interesting to me (Trains? Power Lines? What’s not to love? 😀). I also don’t know how long it’ll be up for, and I’ve been burned in the past of not capturing something when I had the chance.
So I’m posting photos of it here for posterity reasons. Enjoy.
I’ve got a bit behind my photos for the September Photo Challenge. I’ve got one for today that I’d really like to post. But I can’t do so until I post the days I’ve missed, lest they appear out of order. I better get on that.
I was planning to go into the office today. The train went two stops in before everyone was instructed to transfer to busses. Now on a train heading the other way so I can work from home instead. It’s great that this is now an option.
Day of firsts today. Had a session of indoors go-karts as part of a bucks party. Loads of fun. Won the wooden spoon (although only 3 second slower than the winner).
