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Does anyone else have this much trouble getting out and meeting people? Is it just a matter of practice? Is it just me that usually comes home feeling like a fool? Ugh!
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No, I tell you what it is. It all feels a little too anonymous, at least for me. Having a smaller gathering where you all know each other will probably be better for me.
Or maybe something with a little more structure. Where you’re given a role, rather than ask to come up with one yourself. 🤔
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Coming to the realisation that in order to get the most out of a boardgames social gathering, you really need to have played a lot of boardgames, something I haven’t really done. And I’m not sure I like boardgames enough to develop this. Which makes me wonder if this is worth keeping up.
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I do wonder how familiar my fellow developers are with descriptors like “snake_case”, “camelCase,” or “kebab-case.” Been trying to negotiate with someone over a data format and they used one themselves, but didn’t understand another. Maybe I should’ve used Pascal case (which I’m unfamiliar with).
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This week’s earworm is Axiom Verge OST. 🎵
Well I say it’s this week’s earworm but the truth is that I wanted to listen to it today, and I keep forgetting the name of this album. I’ll remember that I posted about it here, though.
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Stopped to enjoy a croissant at this bakery in South Melbourne on my way to work.
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I remember. OS/2 may be gone, but it’s not forgotten. 🙂
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I think the idea of video for podcasts may have some promise, but not if you’re simply grafting video on the existing podcasting experience and show format. On the phone, you’re fighting against people watching short-form video delivered by an algorithm. Attempting to go head-to-head with the TikToks of the world is a loosing battle, and I can’t see it work well with the feed-based approach of traditional podcasts (unless you like spending all your time making short-form videos).
No, what wins in the traditional podcasting ecosystem is deep para-social relationships with those putting out a decent show on a regular basis. That’s why I think the shows that’ll do well here are ones I can watch on my TV. Shorter that audio-only podcast episode (I’ve got stuff to do) yet long enough to make it seem worth it to me, that rely more on that visual element (interviews are fine, but what am I getting watching you instead of just listening), and that require my full attention. Imagine YouTube if all they had were subscriptions.
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It’s interesting hearing about Apple planning a video-based “podcasting” service with support for HLS. It may seem like podcasting is all video now, since everyone with a show is publishing on YouTube. But I suspect that a lot of those playing a podcast on YouTube aren’t even looking at the video: they’re treating it as an audio player. They’re only using YouTube to gain discovery from the algorithm, since it’s so difficult to get this within the open podcasting ecosystem. So what would they gain from Apple’s offering that they’re not getting already?
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I can’t remember when I started regularly using split-screens for my work, be it code, documents, or my notes. But wow is it a great way to work on something. Worth trying out if you haven’t already.
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What to Talk About When You're Talking About Your Side-Business
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I’m really starting to like exe.dev. It’s become a bit of a playground, where I can spin up and tear down ephemeral virtual machines to test things out. There’s an integrated coding agent, which I used yesterday to test out how well it went with building an app from scratch. Today I spun up a VM to test out a Pure Blog instance (the coding agent assisted with hooking up the site with Nginx, as I had no interested in dealing with the PHP setup myself). I would share you a link to it, but one other thing I discovered is that the HTTPS proxies to the VMs are private by default, so there’s no risk of spinning up a web-service that’s not ready, or intended for, the public internet.
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Steve Yegge’s Gas Town looks quite intriguing. I’m in no way ready for it myself, and not really in the market in yet another orchestrating system. But it is interesting reading about it (although I find pretty much whatever Yegge writes interesting to read).
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80% Done 80% Well
Yeah, this one’s about that “Something Big is Happening” blog post. Continue reading →
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Last night, I learnt the number one rule for giving an effective technical conference talk. Do you know what it is? I thought I knew what it is, but apparently my guess of slamming the audience with as much detail as possible is not it.
No, the number one rule is to tell a story. You are there to teach, to share, but to do so effectively, you need to ensure that the audience is engaged. And the most effective way to do that is to shape your message as a story. Not only will it force you to distill what to say to what is most relevant, it will also be entertaining.
A good practice for blogging too.
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When auditing any software system, it’s important to remember that there is another trail of history that can’t be checked into Git: the context in which the system was built. Maybe the person working on it was inexperienced, but maybe it was fit for purpose once, but then the purpose changed. Or there was a need to get it out quickly and a proper solution couldn’t be done in time. Or priorities shifted and people needed to be redeployed to other things.
Whatever the reason is, I doubt the reason was that the original implementor was intentionally careless. So go easy on yourself/others when you see something strange and say out loud, “why did I/they do it like that?”
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I gripe about Medium, but credit to where credit is due: at least they offer full-text RSS feeds.
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Well, my streak has come to an end. For reasons beyond my control, I’m going to have to install Microsoft Teams.
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🔗 Six Colors: Apple’s Creator Studio has a rough App Store roll-out
But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense [sic] to the user experience?
I was a little worried that Apple would put ads in the version of Logic Pro I bought and paid for a few years ago. Fortunately that isn’t the case (points for restraint, I guess). But it sucks they’ve decided to do this in software that’s bundled with the OS. Getting ideas from Microsoft, maybe.
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Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series.
Completely agree. It’s striking how difficult it is to get to the podcast site from the podcast shownotes, particularly for those shows hosted on the larger networks. Me thinks half the reason is because they don’t actually have a site (they should).
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🔗 LMNT: Interface Sound Effects
Playing Nintendo games […] makes me wish macOS was flooded with lots of interface sound effects. For clicking down, up, resizing windows, minimizing windows, zooming windows, dragging windows, clicking buttons and checkboxes and radio buttons, dragging sliders, etc.
The most notable interface sound I can remember was Windows 98, which made a mouse click sound when double clicking a folder in the explorer. This was when tapping on trackpads to simulate a mouse click were becoming a thing, so this was probably meant to be more utilitarian than whimsical.
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The path to effective hatred of software goes through the path of excessive love of software. You must have had love for vast quantities of software, and experience all stages of that love: to write it, to run it, to maintain it. Only then will you start experiencing that effective hatred, and appreciate its fruits: less code, simpler code, less dependency.
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Hating software might be a good quality for a software developer to have. 😏
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In the spirit of “less”, I’m going to cut down on the number of projects I have in flight. I’m juggling too many projects, and none of them are getting finished. So I’ve updated my /now page to explicitly list the projects I’m not going to do. A public declaration of what my no’s will be.
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TIL about Stripe pending update feature, where you can update a subscription on condition that the payment was successful. Wish I knew about this before I coded up all this logic manually. I wonder if this is a new feature (I wish Stripe added dates to their documentation).