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I must agree once again with Manual Morale on his recent post about search and the future of the web:
I think curation, actual human curation, is going to play an important role in the future. In a web filled with generated nonsense, content curated by knowledgeable human beings is going to be incredibly valuable.
Ben Thompson has been arguing this point too: in a world of AI generating undifferentiated “content”, that which has the human element, either in it’s creation or curation, would stand apart. He says he bets his career on this belief. I think it’s a bet worth taking.
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How is it that it’s become so natural to write about stuff here, yet I’m freezing in my boots drafting up an email to a blogger in response to a call for some feedback?
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Love that NetNewsWire has a setting to open links in Safari instead of the built-in WebView. Very useful for articles which require an active login session, which I’m more likely to have in Safari. To enable, go to Settings and turn off “Open Links in NetNewsWire”.
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Never thought I’d be desperate enough for food and money that I’d be forced to learn everything there is to know about authentication, OAuth, and SSO, but here we are. 🤓
P.S. I’m trying to be droll here. Please don’t test me on my knowledge of OAuth or SSO. 😅
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Writing Good Data Migration Scripts
I’m waiting for a data migration to finish, so I’ve naturally got migration scripts on my mind.
There’s an art to writing a good migration script. It may seem that simply throwing together a small Python script would be enough; and for the simpler cases, it very well might be. But it’s been my experience that running the script in prod is likely to be very different than doing test runs in dev.
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I appreciate projects like Next.JS put a lot of effort into their guides, but they still need to provide a basic API reference. Knowing about request helpers is fine, but do they return strings or arrays? What if a query parameter’s not set? This is stuff I need to know. 🤷
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Working in the project which is using TypeScript for the code, and Go for the deployment configuration. Wish it was the other way around, where Go is used for the code, and TypeScript… isn’t used at all. 😛
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👨💻 New post on Databases over at the Coding Bits blog: PostgreSQL BIGSERIAL “Type”
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I haven’t gone all in with AI co-pilots or anything with my coding setup yet, but the latest version of GoLand comes with what is essentially a line completion feature that I actually find quite useful. I suspect there’s some ML in there as it seems to understand context and produce suggested line completions that are, more often than not, pretty much what I was going to type out by hand anyway. Many times I could implement most of a new function simply by typing Tab several times. Impressive work, JetBrains.
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On Sharing Too Much About Too Little
Manuel Moreale wrote an interesting post today about sharing stuff online:
Life can be joyful and wonderful and marvellous. But it can also be a fucking nightmare. And yes, it’s important to celebrate the victories and to immortalise the glorious moment. But it’s also important to document the failures, the shitty moments, the dark places our minds find themselves stuck in. It’s all part of what makes us unique after all.
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BASIC.HTM
While poking through some old files this morning I came across probably the first bit of HTML I’ve ever written, way back on the 10th April 19961.
I think I vaguely remember making these. We were in Castlemaine staying over at my grandparents house and Dad bought along his laptop for us kids to play with (complete with a passive-matrix LCD and 2 hours of battery life). It was the evening and I was mucking around with Netscape Navigator. This was before we got the internet at home so I’m not quite sure why we even had Navigator. It may have been that Dad was using it for work, or maybe it came preinstalled on the laptop. But whatever the reason, it was there, and I was playing around with it.
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Indexing In UCL
I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an
indexbuiltin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself.I’ve reserved
Continue reading →.for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets. The big one being that if I were to use square brackets the same way that many other languages do, I suspect (although I haven’t confirmed) that it could lead to the parser treating them as two separate list literals. This is because the scanner ignores whitespace, and there’s no other syntactic indicators to separate arguments to proc calls, like commas: -
🔗 Goodbye to Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, the best iPad Pro accessory
I’ve never considered hoarding accessories before, but I might start. The Smart Keyboard Folio is perfect for how I use the iPad: a great stand and decent enough keyboard that doesn’t get in the way when I just want to read.
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Free idea for anyone interested in making a mockumentary: a band that specialises in “Musak,” the type of music you hear in lifts or dental offices. They’re trying to make it to the big leagues — a well known department store, like a Myer or Macies — and they’re up against other bands getting better gigs, the Musak industry “big-wigs,” and their own shortcomings. Sort of like “Spinal Tap” meets the doctors waiting room.
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It’s ironic to think that part of my job is to make sure that the nice artwork that I see on our 500 and 404 error pages are never seen by anyone else.
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It’s always fascinating browsing the early methods and properties of the DOM. It feels a bit like an archeologist shifting through strata uncovering facts about some long lost civilisation. “Oh, they didn’t call them query parameters back then. Instead, they were known as search strings.”
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One other skill I wish I had was good audio mastering skills. Been going through some more tapes last night and it would be so sweet to be able to remove the loud hiss some of them have. I know what I need to do in principal, but translating that into an FX chain in Logic Pro is where my gap lie.
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Browsing some of the WeblogPoMo posts on Mastodon the past few days. A lot of great posts, plus some really talented web designers out there. Wish I had their artistic or web-design skills.
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Of course I deployed something that broke other services because of dodgy permissions. So…
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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.
