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Can a Single Line Or Even a Single Word Be Considered a Legitimate Blog Post?
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Of Lemons And Modern Software
I found myself nodding my head throughout Alex Russell’s post The Market For Lemons: The complexity merchants knew their environments weren’t typical, but they sold highly specialised tools as though they were generally appropriate. They understood that most websites lack tight latency budgeting, dedicated performance teams, hawkish management reviews, ship gates to prevent regressions, and end-to-end measurements of critical user journeys. They understood the only way to scale JS-driven frontends are massive investments in controlling complexity, but warned none of their customers. Continue reading →
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In which I put away Elm for a bit to make the playfield look good (or at least, better than it was).
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2023 Year In Review
Well, once more around the sun and it’s time again to look back on the year that was. Career Reflecting on the work we did this past year, there were a few highlights. We managed to get a few major things released, like the new billing and resource usage tracking system (not super exciting, but it was still fun to work on). And although the crunch period we had was a little hard — not to mention the 3 AM launch time — it was good to see it delivered on time. Continue reading →
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Got an earful of these buggers this morning (they stung me on the earlobe).
I did not take it gracefully. 😂
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Speaking of Anders Jensen, he’s composed a few songs for the 8 Bit Keys YouTube channel. Usually he’ll release them as tracks on his albums, but I couldn’t find the last one he wrote, and I’ve been liking it a lot. So I’m placing a time-stamped link to it here so I can go back to it. 📺
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Have been on Bandcamp buying more music from Anders Enger Jensen. Started listening to both Retro Grooves Version 4 and Version 5. Can recommend the first track on version 4. 🎵
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Day One Waffling
Thinking about my journalling in Day One recently and I’m wondering if it’s time to move it off to something else, maybe Markdown files in a Git repository. Still mulling it over but every time I weigh the two options in my mind, the simpler Markdown approach always wins out. Plain old Markdown files are just way more versatile and portable than what Day One offers. I can put them in a private Hugo (or Eleventy) site and browse them in a web browser, with the backing of a full HTML renderer that offers, amongst other things, figures with captions (yes, I want them that badly). Continue reading →
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First Impressions of Eleventy
I tend to use Hugo whenever I need a static site. But my magpie tendencies have driven me to take a look at Eleventy, and I can definitely see the appeal. Going through the Eleventy quick-start guide, I’m quite impressed with how easy it was to setup a bespoke layout for a single site. I’ve done similar things in a few Hugo sites and while I wouldn’t describe it as “hard”, it’s certainly more involved. Continue reading →
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Maybe it’s just because my expectations are shaped with my usage of Go, but I pretty much expect any modern language designed for writing non-trivial applications to have unit test support built-in nowadays.
Which is why it’s a bit surprising to see a language as opinionated as Elm that doesn’t include a core test package and test runner out of the box. I had to download a third-party test runner and install a non-core package to write and run unit tests. Not difficult to do, but still quite an uncharacteristic, JavaScript-esc approach to supporting this aspect of development in an otherwise integrated language toolkit.
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Finally got a chance to say hello to Evie, the young border collie, this morning. She and her human are regulars at the cafe I go to, so I see them quite frequently from afar. But this was the first day she came to my table for a pat.
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🎥 Elm Connections #3: Group Matching
In which I work on “categories”, the model and logic that deals with the groups the player is to “connect”, plus find my way with how sets work in Elm.
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🔗 Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 Ban Takes Effect; Apple Appeals
The ITC’s ruling was subject to a potential veto by U.S. President Biden by December 25th, but today, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a statement that it has decided against vetoing the ITC ruling, meaning that the ruling is now final.
It seems odd to me that Apple was expecting a reprieve from the White House over this patient dispute with Masimo. Issuing a veto looks like choosing one US company over another. Doesn’t seem like good political optics to me. Maybe it seemed to Apple it was worth a shot. 🤷♂️
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🎥 Elm Connections #2: Starting The Playfield
In which I continue work on a Connections clone in Elm by starting work on the playfield.
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For those that celebrate, a very Merry Christmas to you and yours; and a happy and safe holiday season to all.
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2023 Song of The Year
Well, believe it or not, my standing Christmas Eve Mass organ gig has come around once more1, so it’s time to decide on this year’s Song of The Year. This is the second post in this series, so please see last year’s post on what this nonsense is all about. This year’s nominees are (not too many this year): Wooden Ship, from Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra by Nigel Westlake. Continue reading →
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🎥 Elm Connections #1: First Steps
In which I record video of me building a Connections (or Conlextions) clone in Elm (while at the same time, have a go at editing video).
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This new protected crossing was installed on one of my walking routes while I was away. It’s actually about time, as this rail crossing sits between two curves and with no warning of an approaching train, was actually rather dangerous. Plus, it’s always fun seeing new rail infrastructure installed.
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Making some progress in learning Elm for building frontends. Started working on a Connections clone, which I’m calling “Clonections”. This is what I’ve got so far:
It’s been fun using Elm to build this. So far I’m liking the language. Of course, now I’ll have to come up with puzzles for this. 😐
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Testing out a personal PeerTube instance for hosting videos. If you see a video of Ducks and Purple Hens, then it’s working (it’s a longer version of this video).
EDIT on 17 Nov 2025: I’ve since taken my PeerTube instance down.
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Epic Feature Branch Redux
Trying a long term feature branch approach for something we need to do at work again. I’ve tried this before, with mixed results, and I rather not do it this way. But the alternative is feature flagging a significant part of the system, adding cruft that would never be cleaned up. At least this way, we have a chance to go in with a crowbar and just clear out the code we no longer need. Continue reading →
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I don’t know when it’s started, but if you’ve generated some Go code from a gRPC schema, and you try to cmd + click on one of the generated symbols within GoLand, instead of actually going to the Go code, you’re sent to the Protobuf schema itself.
Usually cmd + click will just take you to the code defining that symbol, and in previous versions, it did for this generated gRPC code as well. This is a recent change, and it’s… less than useful, to me at least.
Fortunately, opt + cmd + click will take you to the actual generated code.
