Mike Zornek

The Moral Struggles of AI Coding

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:57:53 -0400

This is more of a personal journal entry than a typical helpful blog post. Normally, I’d keep this in my private notebook, but since I want to link to these thoughts, I figured I’d post them on the blog.

Background: I am a programmer with nearly 30 years of experience who makes my living through freelance and consulting work, typically focused on programming Elixir and related web technologies.

AI coding is a complex and heavily debated tool for modern developers. I do not use AI coding to generate large swaths of code. I tend to use AI to check my work, offer typeahead suggestions (while honoring the patterns I’ve intentionally chosen), explore ideas, and debug complex/unfamiliar codebases. I’ve been slow to adapt to AI tools compared to many of my peers. Even now, I continue to struggle, trying to find balance between my industry’s expectations and my personal moral objections.

Some of the reasons why I dislike AI include:

Illegally and immorally sourced. The manner in which these language models are created, without respect to ownership or license, breaks my fundamental beliefs about law and my ethical appreciation for personal ownership.
Environmentally unsustainable. The immense amount of electricity and water resources used to build and run AI services is unsustainable. The monopolization of resources and the pollution (noise and materials) are a blight on every community they affect.
Economically unsustainable. The cost of AI tokens is hugely subsidized, and that will not last forever. If you become dependent on them and the price increases drastically, will you be able to afford it?
Decayed software quality. I’ve been of the opinion that software quality was already on a sharp downward trajectory well before AI. The increased speed of development we are seeing with AI, alongside questionable code quality and fewer people in the process, creates an environment where software is unstable and ultimately miserable to use and work with.
Clogged Internet. The current internet was built and is scoped for human activity. The increased growth of bots will lead to both an unacceptable ratio of noise to signal and the breaking of fragile infrastructure, e.g., the Tragedy of the Commons.
Endless cleanup. I worry that my profession will become endless days of debugging someone else’s hastily built vibe software. I described this vision to my accountant as the person cleaning up the elephant poop in a parade.
Mass surveillance AI enables a dystopian level of privacy violations, as historically large datasets can now be spun together in order to profile and categorize all of your movements and speech, for the highest bidder. Reinforcing the loop, the more you use AI, the more data you feed the machine. These data sets are now owned and sold by third parties over whom you have little legal authority.
Self-identity through my work. After spending my adult life having built my identity through my profession, what does it mean if I no longer write code? I cannot find my identity through a process of managing agents who write code for me.

Nonetheless, I use AI

With all that on the table, yeah, I use AI – and I kind of hate it. I am nowhere near the zealots who are creating AI agents for everything, but I do use it.

There are some out there who draw a hard line and refuse to cross. They do their best to find as pure a path as they can to live and dodge the madness.

If I had the means, I might consider joining them—but the reality is I’m an aging, self-employed programmer. I live on my own, and I support myself. I find it impossible to imagine staying in this career and having an absolutist refusal to use AI. Any company looking for my work will have a baseline level of AI-use expectations. Perhaps in the future I will find other ways to support myself and enable more choices here, but for now these are the cards I have been dealt.

Where I find value

Some things I have found helpful with AI tools:

You can throw a mishmash of crash logs, screenshots, and other details to help identify bugs and security issues.
You can update dependencies and have the AI look over the code for impactful call sites related to the code diffs and changelogs. Ideally, you are familiar enough with the codebase to have your own gut feelings, but in extremely large or otherwise unfamiliar projects, this can help root out issues to watch for.
Many developers hate doing code review, and while there is room for improvement, I find some of the commentary I get out of automated code review to be helpful. I do personally review and apply my own fixes, but the notes are a valuable second set of eyes.
When present in an unfamiliar codebase (common as a consultant), I get value from asking AI to find and summarize things.
I spel baad oftun and get value from spell checkers like Grammarly. Again, I tend to avoid having any tool write for me, but finding spelling and grammar issues is very helpful.
Sometimes I need to do one-time ETL of data (CSV, etc), and I have found AI to be helpful at reformatting things. I will say this often feels high-risk, since I can rarely confirm that each row is transformed without error, but in my limited use, it seems to work well.
I sweat details when it comes to naming things. I get value from using AI to brainstorm alternative terms of art for things.

Endless Existential Anguish

I get very introspective over AI coding because it is my career, livelihood, and identity. It is a very fluid and evolving thing. The “fun” thing is (and I can not render satirical quotes any larger), once you start down this rabbit hole, you might also question:

The overseas slave labor used to build my computer and phone.
The disadvantaged migrants who harvest the food I eat.
The exhaust from my car that pollutes the environment.

Why is it that I struggle with AI coding so much more in my head than with the slave labor to build the computer? It is the same industry after all.

All proper questions for a therapy session – and with that, since we are losing the plot, I’ll end it here.

GitHub Copilot and Unhonored Branch Protection

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:40:25 -0400

I was using the GitHub Copilot web chat experience yesterday for client work. I needed to migrate some issues from a third-party CSV export into GitHub Issues. (It mostly worked, but there was still a lot of data massaging after the fact, which the chat could not do.)

Early in the process, the chat took my command of make the issues to make markdown files in an issues folder on the main branch instead of making actual GitHub Issues.

This repo has branch protection rules that should disallow direct commits on main, but I guess because I am an organization admin, it just does it.

This series of events kicked off unwanted deploys and commits. It was a solid reminder about the dangers of putting these MCP chat servers anywhere near production systems.

I’m starting to get marketing from Render as to the availability of its own MCP services, and I’m very hesitant to use them.

Becoming an Accessibility Ally: My Early Journey and Resources

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Here is a hard truth: while I want to be viewed as an ally to accessibility, I probably would not score very high if you judged me by my actions. In the past, I’ve worked a little extra to find the correct semantic HTML tags to use in various situations. I have included the random image alt attribute but not much else.

I had a few peers at my last employment who were more active regarding accessibility. While management or QA rarely prioritized fixes or rejected a PR because of failed accessibility access, there was some effort and discussions in the trenches. I remained mostly on the sidelines, with only one notable unit of work where we evaluated different approaches to keyboard navigation. (This was for a custom, searchable <select>, which was used for page navigation. I was refactoring it from a messy Alpine implementation to a more cleaned-up LiveView implementation with JS command patterns.)

Having left that job, the interest in improving my accessibility skills remained, and last week I took action working through Frontend Masters’ Website Accessibility course by Jon Kuperman.

In today’s post, I’ll share some things I learned from the Website Accessibility course and a few tools and resources you can look into if you are interested in leveling up as well.

Course Review and Takeaways

This is primarily a video course with some limited live code exercises broken down into the following sections:

1. Accessibility Overview

Provided a review of what accessibility is all about, historically and more specifically related to computers and the web. There was a brief review of legal compliance needs and the various web standards that drive accessibility specifications.

The section ends with installing a screen reader, which will be used in the next section. For me, it was the built-in macOS VoiceOver tool, but other tools were provided for Windows and Linux.

2. Semantic HTML & Assistive Devices

Reviewed image alt text, semantic HTML, the cost and complexity of using <div> elements as intended buttons, and screen reader-only content. We then use our new screen readers to work through some examples, demonstrating how the screen readers consume content using good examples, bad examples, and encouragement to make the bad examples work better.

I’ve used VoiceOver a little in the past. We did some very rudimentary demos of it when I taught the iOS classes for Big Nerd Ranch, but it was never something I leaned on much professionally. The space to use it on some basic exercises helped me greatly. I feel comfortable now, enabling it to walk content and even flip through rotor menus to see how it can navigate.

3. Managing Focus and Tab Order

This section reviewed keyboard navigation using tab order to influence the flow, what focus is all about, and how the focus should be visualized. I appreciated the candor of the instructor in reviewing what the accessibility standards ask for regarding focus visuals and how this often feels confrontational to some design teams who want to execute a particular look.

4. ARIA Labels & Roles

Right from MDN:

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) is a set of roles and attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.

In this section, the instructor reviewed some examples of ARIA. These specifically relate to me as a web application developer, as I often develop component abstractions that might not fit the standard markup. I can use ARIA roles and labels to decorate my markup to inform assistive devices better.

There was an exciting review of ARIA live regions, which is a way you can decorate areas of the page that are updating in real-time (like LiveView things). You can even use a politeness setting to help share if the update should interrupt the flow of content or be presented at a break.

5. Color Contrast

Reviewed how a lack of color contrast can impact people’s readability with low vision. This section also talked about how you might choose contrasting colors with intent but get poor outcomes for people with color blindness.

An example was shared from a Bloomberg article titled Designing the Terminal for color accessibility:

Notice how the design chooses red and green with a wanted contrasting visual concept, but when viewed by people with color vision issues, they will not see that contrast. To make it work for those people, choose different colors or offer alternative themes.

6. Accessibility Tools & Testing

The course closes by providing lists and demos of various tools (which I will include in my own resources section below).

Course Review

I enjoyed the course greatly. The video runtime total was about 2.5 hours and I probably spent 5-6 hours working through the content, pausing to read up and try things out. It is an excellent fit for the introduction I was looking for. The exercises were helpful but felt a little too open-ended for me. (I am extremely biased, however, to my own teaching patterns from my Big Nerd Ranch days.)

I was not an active paying Frontend Masters member before taking the course. I will likely keep it going for a few months and have bookmarked some follow-up course ideas. (I joined back in 2018 when I was first trying to figure out my exit plan from Apple, and took a few React and other web dev courses.)

In addition to the paid for courses, Frontend Masters has lots of smaller tutorials and blog posts that might interest you.

Resources and Tools

With the course behind me, I wanted to apply what I’ve learned and start with my blog as soon as possible.

One of the first tools I used was the axe DevTools Firefox extension. This extension can help point out accessibly concerns (like label-less form elements, color contrast issues, and way more) with good notes on how to approach each problem. The company behind this is Deque (which is actually where one of my accessibility-fluent peers went to work). A bit of a warning, many of the tools Deque offers have open source availability, but their website kind of steers you to buy the paid-for version, so be prepared to go hunting a bit.

Another tool I relied on was RocketValidator. This tool will accept a single URL, validate it and then follow the site links to provide a full review of your site. This is a paid tool, but you can use a very helpful and usable free tier to get started.

See the initial report for yourself. (Note: this is the pre-fix version of the report. I’ve fixed a ton of those issues.)

When solving the issues I saw on my public site, I relied on the local HTML validator of the Web Developer Firefox extension to help me make sure I was solving the issue. This extension is packed with helpful tools, but today, the Validate Local HTML tool was invaluable, letting me test local dev changes without publishing.

Towards the end of applying my fixes, I also utilized the WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) provided by the WebAIM organization. The presentation of structured content and inline overlays of problem areas was helpful—an example report using one of the test pages from the course.

With most of the accessibility issues resolved, I still had some recommended tools I wanted to try.

Lighthouse is a popular web performance tool. It does include some automated accessibility checks but is way more focused on performance. There are browser extensions for Lighthouse, but you can also run it from the web.

I used some Lighthouse feedback to make some slight changes to my image preloads to ultimately help with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) timings and drawing the page faster.

What also caught my eye was some Lighthouse CI tools. These can slip into your CI toolchain to generate reports, and enforce performance requirements. I did some experiments but would need more time to work correctly. There is even a server you can run so you might track the status of various performance metrics over time. This could be really powerful for a site of importance, but it is well outside my work scope this week.

In addition to Lighthouse CI, I also took note of Pa11y and its own Dashboard tools which seem to solve similar automated measurements over time.

More Resources

WebAIM (web accessibility in mind) has a wonderful collection of articles and resources that can help provide curated and more accessible guidance.
Accessibility Weekly Newsletter is a weekly dose of web accessibility to help you bring it into your everyday work. Delivered to your inbox each Monday, curated by David A. Kennedy.
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops standards and support materials to help you understand and implement accessibility. This is a general index with lots of information.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) docs can be a little dense but helpful to reference if you are debating different approaches.

Notes

VoiceOver will often read the file names, so if you can avoid gibberish names like 20e47595573f720f.jpg, please do.
Generally speaking accessibility conformance is measured and labeled with A, AA, and AAA; and you may see tools like color contrast saying A level conformance is met but AA is not.
I think automation such as CI running these tools and inline component testing of accessibility will be important if a team wants to maintain an accessible site over time. I’d similarly recommend bi-yearly (or more often) manual audits to identify improvement opportunities.

Future Enhancements

GitHub and other sites provide this cool detection of tab and immediately show a Skip to Content link at the top, and when you press Enter, it jumps to the content. I would love to add that to my blog.
Many web apps have aligned on showing keyboard shortcuts using ?. I want to consider doing that for future web apps and maybe even search tools for the blog.
I’ve started moving my blog videos into a simple S3 bucket store. I want to figure out a way to provide text transcripts for them.

Every journey begins with a small step. I enjoyed the opportunity to skill up with accessibility, and hope to continue to apply it to future work.

A Visual Tour of Phoenix's Updated 'magic link' Authentication Code Generator

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 27 May 2025 08:00:00 -0400

With Phoenix 1.8, the authentication code generator inside phx.gen.auth has been revamped, favoring an emailed ‘magic link’ authentication flow.

In this blog post, I’ll give a visual tour of how this looks to the user, what the core schemas/contexts look like, and I’ll sprinkle in some personal commentary as we go.

Background on authentication

When building any web application, user registration, authentication, and authorization are extremely common needs. The Phoenix team wants to help and provides tools and patterns to help get you jump-started.

The Mix task phx.gen.auth is one such tool. Using it inside a fresh Phoenix project, you can set up a community-vetted starting point to allow user registration and authentication.

You’ll also spot some small files created by the phx.gen.auth task related to Scopes a Phoenix 1.8 authorization pattern, but we will not be talking about authorization today.

Creating user registration and authentication flows have a large surface area for security concerns, and using a community-vetted approach like this is highly recommended. Even if you decide to roll your own, generating the community’s recommended code can be a valuable reference tool to inform your custom design.

The sample `Hello` project

The project we’ll be reviewing today was created by:

Installing a prerelease phx_new command:

mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.8.0-rc.3

Creating a new project:

mix phx.new hello

And generate authentication logic:

mix phx.gen.auth Accounts User users

You can find a repo with this code at https://github.com/zorn/magic-link-demo.

User experience

I consider myself a user-focused developer, so let’s start with a visual review of how this registration and authentication feels from a user point of view.

One of the first outcomes of running the code generator is a change to the site navigation. In the upper-right you now have links for Register and Log in.

Registration page

On the registration page, you’ll see a form asking for a single input value, the user’s email.

While password authentication is still an option, a password is not asked for at the time of registration.

Once filled out, the user is presented with a toast explaining that an email was sent to confirm their account.

Opening the confirmation ‘magic link’

When working in local dev, the Phoenix app runs with a web interface to a fake email inbox at http://localhost:4000/dev/mailbox/.

Upon clicking the magic link, the user is presented with a simple form that offers an optional checkbox to Keep me logged in (which will last for 14 days; see module attribute @session_validity_in_days).

This page is required because magic links can be “viewed” by automated systems, such as email link security tools or even URL preview cards seen in apps like Slack. We need to require a user action, and by using the form POST (which automated tools should avoid), we have stronger confidence that the token in this magic link will not be used unexpectedly.

Once the user clicks on the Confirm my account button, they will, in fact, be authenticated AND their account confirmed. On subsequent flows, the button will say Log in.

After authentication, the user is redirected to a predetermined signed_in_path or a stored user_return_to path and is presented with a toast saying they have been authenticated.

After the user is authenticated, the navigation changes to show the account email address, a Settings link, and a Log out link.

Log in with email

To examine the log in form, we will first Log out and see a simple toast with Logged out successfully.. Then, upon clicking the Log in link, you will see this page:

The upper half of the page invites you to Log in with email. Filling out an email will result in a toast saying, If your email is in our system, you will receive instructions for logging in shortly. That email looks very similar to the confirmed email we showed before.

Aside: It is good security practice to build systems so as not to leak user data. I suspect that is the intent of this message’s phrasing. However, the system is not doing this in all places. If you try to register with a known email address, it leaks the existence of the email in the system with has already been taken. There is a balance between pure security concerns and helping the user. You, as the system designer, should decide which path to take for your specific app. I wish the generated code was more consistent, however.

Log in with email/password

The bottom of the page offers a more traditional email/password form. It works as expected. If you are following along, you might be asking yourself, “But I did not create a password?”

An account can, in fact, have a password. It is set on the Settings page we will view below. However, out of the box, the Settings page and its Save Password form is an optional page, not all users would have seen.

Aside: I think it is a bit odd that this generator is doing Log in with email and a secondary (optional) Log in with email/password. In my own professional experiences, I’ve done each separately but never both at the same time. It feels like a UX decision that could lead to user confusion.

Settings

As an authenticated user, you’ll see that the Settings page provides two forms, one for Change Email and one for Save Password.

Change Email

When you put in a new email value and click Change Email the change does not happen immediately. Instead, a link with a token identity for a UserToken record that contains the request is sent via email. Only when that link is activated is the change applied.

The generator logic inside of update_user_email/2 will destroy any previous UserToken records, protecting against multiple change email links going out. All previous ones are deleted upon creation of a new change:#{user.email} token context. More on the UserToken schema below.

Save Password

Setting a password is not a requirement on the registration page.

To set the initial password (or change the current one), you need to fill out this form with a password value and a confirmation. Out of the box, this will require a 12-character length value, but other requirements can be added, and the generated code offers suggestions inside of User.validate_password/2.

You might note this form does not ask for the current password. Instead, this whole settings page utilizes a function from Accounts called sudo_mode?/2. The boolean function is documented as follows:

  @doc """
  Checks whether the user is in sudo mode.

  The user is in sudo mode when the last authentication was done no further
  than 20 minutes ago. The limit can be given as second argument in minutes.
  """
  def sudo_mode?(user, minutes \\ -20)

If the user attempts to load the setting page using a more stale authenticated session, they’ll get a flash redirect saying, You must re-authenticate to access this page.. Some other user experiences would ask for a confirmation of the current password; this is an alternative approach to that security need.

Aside: I don’t like the name sudo_mode?/2. For me, sudo implies an increase in privilege. I renamed the function recently_authenticated?/2 in my own fork of this logic.

Schemas

All of the core authentication logic is found inside Hello.Accounts. There are two main persisted entities.

  schema "users" do
    field :email, :string
    field :password, :string, virtual: true, redact: true
    field :hashed_password, :string, redact: true
    field :confirmed_at, :utc_datetime
    field :authenticated_at, :utc_datetime, virtual: true

    timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
  end

The first is Hello.Accounts.User, and this is a schema for the persisted entity for the registered user. Most fields are pretty straightforward. Good to see the use of redact: true for those password-related fields.

I feel a little curious about the virtual authenticated_at field. This is a value that is patched into the User struct during calls to Hello.Accounts.get_user_by_session_token/1 and later evaluated by sudo_mode?/2. This feels like a performance choice, connecting values earlier in the call stack instead of repeating a database call later, but I’m generally suspicious of virtual fields as they lead to many questions when trying to understand how the fields are populated.

The second entity is Hello.Accounts.UserToken, and this schema creates a container of sorts that will be used for a variety of tasks.

  schema "users_tokens" do
    field :token, :binary
    field :context, :string
    field :sent_to, :string
    field :authenticated_at, :utc_datetime
    belongs_to :user, Hello.Accounts.User

    timestamps(type: :utc_datetime, updated_at: false)
  end

When you authenticate, in addition to the Phoenix session / cookie, a UserToken record is created. The reasoning for this is documented in the build_session_token/1 function:

  @doc """
  Generates a token that will be stored in a signed place,
  such as session or cookie. As they are signed, those
  tokens do not need to be hashed.

  The reason why we store session tokens in the database, even
  though Phoenix already provides a session cookie, is because
  Phoenix' default session cookies are not persisted, they are
  simply signed and potentially encrypted. This means they are
  valid indefinitely, unless you change the signing/encryption
  salt.

  Therefore, storing them allows individual user
  sessions to be expired. The token system can also be extended
  to store additional data, such as the device used for logging in.
  You could then use this information to display all valid sessions
  and devices in the UI and allow users to explicitly expire any
  session they deem invalid.
  """
  def build_session_token(user) do
    # ...
  end

However, this UserToken schema is used for more than just sessions.

When the system sends an emailed magic link to log in, that is a reference to a UserToken. Again, the power to expire these is very handy.

The system even uses UserToken when changing an email. The wanted new email address is encoded in the link sent over email.

Closing thoughts and nitpicks

So that is a quick visual overview of what you’ll find in Phoenix 1.8’s update phx.gen.auth code generator. Formal documentation has more detailed information and if you want to follow the community discussions that led to this change see this issue and PR.

I have mixed feelings about the change overall.

I think my primary concern is that this adds friction to the deployment of Phoenix toy projects that want user registration. Requiring the developer to acquire transactional email services is one more thing to deploy, and there are plenty of projects where I’d like user registration but desire to keep the dependencies as small as possible.

When I first heard about this change, I thought it would be opt-in, but there is no option to prefer email/password as the primary user flow. It is not a giant leap to generate code and then pull some of it back, remove the magic links, and introduce email/password during registration (I’m doing that for my current Phoenix sandbox), but an official option would be welcome.

Other small nitpicks I’d encourage others to consider when adapting this code for your own projects:

I think button labels should have a consistent case. This project has a mix of title-cased buttons and first-word-only capitalization. Many also have a left-pointing arrow, which adds some visual flair to help promote a primary page action but can be visually overwhelming when you see multiple buttons using it, like on the log in page.
I’m not sure why it says Change Email but Save Password. I wish it were consistent with the verb Change. I thought maybe it would only say Save Password when the password was missing, but in my experience, it was a static button label.

If you welcome this kind of nitpick criticism of your own project, I am available for Elixir Consulting. 😅

Open for Software Dev Coffee Talk

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 26 May 2025 16:26:55 -0400

One of the joys of self-employment is having a little extra control over your day-to-day schedule.

In the past, during the time between paid projects, I have enjoyed casual open meetings with folks around the software developer community.

Right now, work is light, and I have extra room to chat, so I figured I’d promote the opportunity.

If you have an interesting side project in the works, an Elixir or LiveView question, or just want to chat about software development, schedule a call.

Schedule time on my calendar: https://savvycal.com/zorn/pairing

Returning to Self-Employment

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:21:54 -0400

My full-time employment is coming to a close, and I am once again rebooting my self-employment life.

From web comic name.

What Happened?

If you’ve been following along with my now updates, it has been clear that my full-time job was not in a great place for a while.

The short story is that when I interviewed and eventually accepted the job, I had a well-considered list of things I was aligned with and looking forward to, including:

small company / profitable startup
in-person retreats to support an online/remote team
opportunities to be involved in the product design work
dedicated tech debt time
weekly team educational events

Six weeks after joining, a large corporation acquired us; six months after, a private equity firm acquired that public corporation.

Suffice it to say, the things I was looking forward to never materialized. I stuck it out as long as I could but decided it was time to move on. “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

What’s Next?

Instead of looking for a replacement full-time gig, I am once again returning to a mix of consulting/freelancing while investing in personal product development initiatives.

Ahead of this, over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some blog infrastructure updates and also did a revamp of my Elixir Consulting page. I’ve also started promoting my availability on various socials and LinkedIn.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to increase my presence in the Elixir community. I’ll shadow the Elixir Slack and Elixir Forums, helping where I can, and produce educational content for the blog. If there is an open source project you need help with or want someone to pair with, please reach out.

I suspect this community outreach will consume about 70% of my time. The other 30% will be allocated to personal education and product development, which is currently in journaling / research mode.

A Nervous Excitement

I can’t share this without commenting for the records of time – it is a scary time to be looking for work.

I do not go into this with ideal world circumstances, but it is what it is.

I am more fortunate than most: I have fair savings, and I don’t have many major debts.

I suspect it will take some creative approaches (productized services, tech gig work) to regain regular income streams. While it will be difficult, I am looking forward to having some space to use my creative muscles again. Being a corporate Jira code monkey truly took a toll on my psyche.

Ranked Vote Flick Demo

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:58:04 -0400

Took a few moments tonight to record a short demo of RankedVote.app (Project name: Flick) tonight.

Flick is a simple Elixir / Phoenix LiveView app that helps capture ranked votes.

This project was built to help the Elixir Book Club pick books, but it is open to all.

I’m going to moving on to other side projects and seems as good a time as any to capture this in action.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Using Google Sheets to Catalog Expenses for Budgeting Considerations

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 11:07:02 -0400

I try to revisit my budget every six months or so, and having just wrapped up my taxes, which provide helpful totaling of where the money went last year, it was a good time to rebuild the numbers.

In the past, I’ve used Soulver for some of this, and while I still like that app, this time, I took a shot using a Google Spreadsheet.

I liked how the expense spreadsheet came out and thought there would be value in sharing a demonstration of it.

I’ve recorded a video of its creation to help those who might not be spreadsheet experts and to capture my thought process regarding cataloging expenses for future scenario experimentation.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Video Summary

Track each expense with a Description, Cost, and Occurrence (Monthly or Yearly).
Mark each expense as Hard, Medium, or Soft to express the importance of this expense to you (how hard would it be to live without).
Use bank and credit card statements to help you capture all things.
Use a column to convert Yearly costs into a Monthly equivalent, the base time unit we work with here.
Add a Scenario checkbox column to help you experiment with what expenses can be removed to reach your target goal.
Utilize features like share, comments, and versioning to work with others.

Resources

The Google Sheet from the video
Previous blog: Budget Revisit 2022
Previous blog: Self Employment Estimate Numbers

How to Use a Modern Version of Hugo on Render's Static Site Service

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 11:03:15 -0400

I host this site at Render.com. Specifically, I use Render’s Static Site product. It’s a good product and free for most usage. It features an auto-configured SSL certificate, global CDN, pull request previews, and many other nice things. I’m also paying Render to host some Elixir things and enjoy the simplicity of fewer things to manage

When you read the docs, Render provides instructions on what to do if you are using Hugo to build your static site. Unfortunately, their version of Hugo is locked and a bit dated as I type this. (I observed version 0.124.0 when the current version of Hugo is 1.46.5.) Some other static allow you to set a HUGO_VERSION environment variable, but sadly Render does not support this.

Render allows you to supply a custom build command, and I’ve taken the opportunity to install an updated version of Hugo per deployment so I can keep it current. Here is the script and some other notes to keep in mind.

Using a custom build command

You can read more official docs about the build command, but in short, you set it up in the Settings for your site. Instead of a single command, you can point it to a build shell script from your project’s repo.

My build script looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This script is used by Render to build the app for production deployment.

# set up an exit on error
set -o errexit

# Save the initial directory
ORIGINAL_DIR="$PWD"

# Install npm dependencies
echo "Installing npm dependencies..."
npm install --verbose

# Install specific version of Hugo
HUGO_VERSION="0.145.0"  # Change this to your required version
echo "Installing Hugo ${HUGO_VERSION}..."

# Create directory for Hugo download and installation
mkdir -p "${HOME}/bin"
mkdir -p /tmp/hugo
cd /tmp/hugo

# Download and install specific Hugo version
wget -q https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
tar -xzf hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_Linux-64bit.tar.gz

# Move Hugo to a directory you have permission for
mv hugo "${HOME}/bin/"

# Add the bin directory to PATH
export PATH="${HOME}/bin:${PATH}"

# Verify installation
hugo version

# Return to project directory
cd "$ORIGINAL_DIR"

# Now you can add your Hugo build commands here
hugo --logLevel info

In addition to installing Hugo, I also install some npm packages, including Tailwind and the Tailwind Typography plugin, which I am using for my Hugo template HTML. One thing to keep in mind here is that Render does honor and expect a NODE_VERSION inside your environment settings to hint what version of node to use. This static site was defaulting to a pretty old version of node when I started without a NODE_VERSION environment variable, and that seems to be based on when the static site service was initialized.

I do a bit of extra logging to help me debug, but overall, this script is pretty straightforward. Make sure to grant execution permissions with chmod a+x build.sh to the shell script when composing it.

Inefficiencies

Installing Hugo (and node things) for every deployment is excessive and will be charged against my pipeline minutes, but for the simple needs of this site, which is published a few times a month I doubt it will add up to anything much. If you want to optimize this, consider Dockerizing the deployment and perhaps even assembling the static content in a continuous integration system like GitHub Actions. (I was planning on that at first, but this build command approach was more straightforward for now.)

How I Got Rid of My Google-Hosted Web Fonts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:19:13 -0400

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some infrastructure updates to the website, and one of those changes was to drop the use of Google’s linked web fonts and instead host custom fonts from my own server in the spirit of improving the privacy of my site visitors.

Here is how I did it and some of the problems I ran into.

Picking your font

The first custom font I had in mind was Ubuntu, a bold sans-serif font that I like for my name in the header. You can see samples of this on Google’s site, but to download it, I take advantage of the google-webfont-helper site, which lets me quickly customize the exact styles I am interested in using and offers me a list of various CSS methods of use. I use the more modern CSS approach, as seen in the following snippet.

/* ubuntu-regular - latin */
@font-face {
  font-display: swap; /* Check https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display for other options. */
  font-family: "Ubuntu";
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: url("../fonts/ubuntu-v20-latin-regular.woff2") format("woff2"); /* Chrome 36+, Opera 23+, Firefox 39+, Safari 12+, iOS 10+ */
}

/* ubuntu-700 - latin */
@font-face {
  font-display: swap; /* Check https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display for other options. */
  font-family: "Ubuntu";
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 700;
  src: url("../fonts/ubuntu-v20-latin-700.woff2") format("woff2"); /* Chrome 36+, Opera 23+, Firefox 39+, Safari 12+, iOS 10+ */
}

Source: assets/css/main.css

Aside: I still need to add a proper license display for this font usage. That is still forthcoming.

Using your font with Tailwind

The other notable infrastructure update was to make it so I could use Tailwind within my Hugo templates. To reference my font, I use the following Tailwind utility class:

<h1 class="font-[Ubuntu] text-6xl font-bold">{{ site.Title }}</h1>

If you want to use a font more broadly, I’d recommend editing Tailwind configuration so you can express fonts with better abstractions at call sites, but for this one-off header, this is fine.

Avoiding Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC)

After deploying my new self-hosted fonts, I observed flashes of unstyled content. Specifically, Safari would display the header copy in a serif font and then swap it into Ubuntu. Both Safari and Firefox would flash the new header background texture image as I clicked from page to page.

I did a little reading and landed on the following solution, which has me use <link> elements included in my <head> to help hint to the web rendering systems more early in the drawing process that it will need these resources before the first paint.

<link
  rel="preload"
  href="/fonts/ubuntu-v20-latin-700.woff2"
  as="font"
  type="font/woff2"
  crossorigin
>
<link
  rel="preload"
  href="/fonts/ubuntu-v20-latin-regular.woff2"
  as="font"
  type="font/woff2"
  crossorigin
>
<link rel="preload" href="/images/dark-mosaic.png" as="image">

I think these are working well.

The font preload explicitly needs crossorigin for CORS things, but the image did not, which I find interesting.

I’ll probably be doing more with my fonts and the overall design of the site in the coming weeks, but this was a good nugget of progress.

Resources

If you want to avoid hosting a font, consider limiting your options to more likely supported options from the OS. Dreamhost has a blog post outlining some good choices for each family style.
If you want to learn more about fonts (and basic design), I highly recommend The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin P. Williams. Its teachings stand the test of time.
I mentioned background textures, and if you are looking for some, check out this helpful gallery.

2025 Tools Audit

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0800

It is good to take inventory of things from time to time. Here is a list of the tools I use regularly as of April 2025.

I welcome hearing your suggestions for tools I should consider in the future.

None of the links below are affiliate links. I ain’t got time for that shit.

Hardware

2021 Apple M1 Max MacBook Pro, 16-inch with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.
- Laptop is treating me well. Never observing notable slowdowns on normal activities. I would like to revisit a jump to desktop Linux someday as my relationship with Apple continues to deteriorate. That however is a large switching cost. I might consider reinitializing my old Framework laptop and try some things later in 2025.
Keyboard: Das Keyboard 4 for Mac
- I’m fairly satisfied with this. Have had it for many years now. Having experimented with a few other keyboards while building my gaming PC, I am considering experimenting with alternatives for a different feel but a low priority when I’m generally trying to save money right now.
Mouse: Logitech Performance MX Wireless Mouse
- This is an older discontinued model but one I’ve been very happy with. I’ve replaced the internal rechargeable battery a few times but it has held up great. I have a newer MX Master 3S model for my gaming PC. It fits my hand as well.
Microphone: Shure SM7B
- This is complete overkill for for my daily needs but I had intent on building more video content at one point, and it was purchased as part of that project. I do use it a lot, but mostly for Zoom and Discord calls.
- I also use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen USB Audio Interface to handle the input.
Camera: Canon VIXIA HF G21 Full HD Camcorder and Elgato Cam Link
- This is an older 1080p camcorder that I connect to my laptop via a HDMI adaptor for use as a standard laptop camera input. It is rather bulky and sits upon a collapsed tripod behind my main monitor. It generates good enough video quality but feels a bit like an overdue hack deserving of replacement someday.
Monitors: LG UltraFine
- I use a pair of 24-inch LG UltraFine monitors mounted on Fully Jarvis Dual Monitor Mounting Arms. These monitors are working ok. There is some screen burn-in, and compared to the new gaming monitor I have, they feel a little dated but are more than fine for the coding work I do. The monitor arms are really nice and keep the screens at a much higher eye height for me. I recommend investing in monitor arms, Jarvis or otherwise.
Laptop stand: Rain Design mStand Laptop Stand
- I use my laptop open when connected to the monitors and then place the laptop on this stand to get some extra height (though not even with the main monitors on arms). This gives me three monitors in total (one for terminal, one for code editor and one for the browser).
13-inch iPad Pro (M4)
- I bought this in 2024 after using my previous iPad Pro for about 8 years. I went for the higher-end version, primarily for the gorgeous screen, but I also like the camera unlock and overall feel. I use this daily from my recliner, mostly for web browsing and PDF reading. I have a pencil and always have aspirations of sketching things but never really happens.
iPhone Xr
- I’ve been milking this older phone for a while, and it still works great. The battery is good, and no major screen issues. I figured I’d keep using it until OS updates stopped, which I expected this past year, but it still got them. I suspect those will stop and I’ll need a new phone soon™. Might consider something else than the iPhone, though.
Eero Wireless router
- I also use the yearly pro Eero services to block ads network-wide. It is not perfect, but it helps a lot.
Gaming PC
- I blogged about this with details before. It is holding up great and providing high-end graphics for Civ7 play (as well as some limited Red Dead 2). I had one night where I ended up having to debug and reinstall fan drivers, which is kind of expected when it comes to a custom build and ongoing Windows updates.
Steam Deck
- I have not used this as much as I would have liked. The main game I played on it was Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster. I feel like someday I might load it up with some ROMs and use it as an emulation hub for now it is collecting dust. I am considering using it for some evening Lunar gameplay when it comes out.
Playstation 5
- I play this all the time, mostly MLB: The Show, from my living room. I have a few other games for it, including the two Final Fantasy 7 games, but it is mostly baseball.
Switch
- I play this in phases, usually when a new games comes out or I get nostalgic. Have been considering a fresh Animal Crossing island reroll. Also have a few unopened games (Tears of the Kingdom, Metroid Prime) that I really need to dig into.
Backpacks from Waterfield
- My large backpack is a Pro Executive Laptop Backpack from Waterfield. I use this when I am packing a bunch of things, including travel. I also have a slim folio bag from them as well, which is great as a conference carry or when I just want the laptop and nothing else. I’m not sure they sell my exact folio anymore, but it is close to this one.
Batteries
- I mostly lean on my Anker power bank (forget the exact model, but it’s 90W version). I also have a Yeti 500X and solar panel from GoalZero. This is mostly for major powerless emergencies (CPAP gear, etc), but I hear they work great camping as well.

Office Furniture

A few months ago, I bought a Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk. I use the standing mode only for phone calls but I guess it’s nice to have. Otherwise, it is a fine, if overpriced desk. Previously I used a pair of full wood butcher block IKEA desks and honestly, they were a way better value. Sadly I don’t think IKEA sells good wood desktops anymore. Most models seemed composite. I still use them, but they are a side desk and my gaming desk now.
For a chair, I use a Steelcase Leap Plus. I’ve been using these chairs for years. They (like many chairs) are pricy but worth it given my profession. Steelcase also got honors from me for honoring warranties and sending out repair people for one model with some wear and tear issues well into its ownership.
I use a few Coway air filters. One in my office and others in my bedroom and living room. My allergies can get bad, and this helps keep things somewhat in check.

Local Software

Firefox Web Browser
- (Safari as secondary; Iridium to debug Chrome issues.)
Spark for Email
- I use the “classic” version and none of the new AI crap. Feel like this is a tool I need to move on from.
VS Code
- I’ve started to experiment with Cursor and would like to tinker with Zed as well.
Spotify
- I don’t like using Spotify. It does do a fair job allowing me to mix local music files with streamed files (which is a selling point that drew me to it years ago), but it also randomly removes music I have favorited. I’ve considered replacing it a few times (my music needs are kind of basic) but have not done so.
OmniFocus for managing to do items.
Obsidian for a personal notebook.
Calendar.app (connected to a Google Calendar) for some basic calendaring.
Slack for some industry and friend groups.
Discord for some industry and friend groups. We also host Elixir Book Club here.
Postgres
- I install with Postgres.app.
- And use Postico 2 for browsing Postgres databases.
iTerm terminal with fish for shell prompt.
Sourcetree for git repo work.
1Password for passwords.
Acorn for simple image manipulation.
Audacity for book club audio archive editing.
Backblaze for automated backups and some S3-compatible storage.
Balsamic for wireframing.
BBEdit for large text file manipulation / searching.
Books.app for PDF reading on my iPad. I enjoy that highlights and notes easily transfer between my iPad and laptop for reference during book club.
Docker for Docker things.
Dropbox for file backup and sharing across devices. I use Dropbox to get PDFs to my iPad, backup my files, share folders with my Gaming PC and sometimes to share arbitrary files with people.
Espanso for OS-wide text expansion of snippets.
Grammarly for helping me spel gud.
Keynote for slide presentations.
Livebook.app for Elixir notebooks.
MindNode for mind mapping exercises.
Magnet for window management
OmniDiskSweeper to clean up large files on my hard drive.
Paw for API exploration.
Responsively App is used to test web page designs at different sizes.
- I don’t use this a ton, I tend to just manually set the viewport size in Firefox while I experiment but this can be handy on occasion.
Screenflow for recording and editing screencasts.
yt-dlp on the command line to download media files.
Homebrew for package management.
- Very interested in experimenting with NixOS for this kind of thing in the future.
Soulver for personal budgeting notebook.
Steam for buying and launching games.
- Obviously use this more on my gaming PC.
SuperDuper! for hard drive backups.
- Really bummed that bootable backups are becoming a thing of the past, but this is not SuperDuper!’s choice.
Zoom for video chats. It continues to be the most stable video tool I know.
Instapaper for read later tracking.
feedbin for RSS tracking.
SavvyCal for meeting links.

Software Services

Hover for domain management and most of my email accounts.
Google Workspace for the zornlabs email.
Render for some web hosting.
AppSignal for error capture.
Plausable for web analytics.
updown.io for uptime monitoring.
GitHub for repo management and CI/CD. I pay for Copilot and some sponsorships.
Verizon FIOS for internet.
Verizon for cell phone.

Conference Notes: CodeBEAM America (San Francisco) 2025

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:56:13 -0800

After a run of bad luck where I had to cancel Elixir-related conferences at the last minute (once because of the smoke storms that hit NY, and once because I got COVID before the conference), this week I enjoyed some time at CodeBEAM America 2025 in San Francisco.

I had a great time at the conference. The content was high quality and well presented. The in-person attendees totaled around 100 people, with another 150 online. I got some well-enjoyed real-world face time with a few old friends, online book club peeps, and maybe even some future clients.

Notable Talks

A few notable talks that landed for me:

Jenny Bramble and Adrian Dunston did an excellent talk, “Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues,” reviewing how to approach production incidents, communicate with your peers, question assumptions, and ultimately learn from the experience. The pair was well prepared, and the content well delivered.
James Arthur code dropped Phoenix.Sync built on the back of ElectricSQL. I recently learned of Electric while catching up on the Local-first Conf videos just a few weeks ago. It was cool to learn that Electric is built using Elixir back then, but seeing some Phoenix-specific tooling drop was even more exciting. Kicking these tires will be high on my priority list.
Eric Saxby had a talk called “Acceptable Upgrades,” jam-packed with great code organization and testing strategies. I captured many handwritten notes, but the last one was to get the slides, as I could not capture them all.
Jason Axelson followed this up with another test-focused talk titled “Choosing an effective testing structure,” which had a bunch of great tips and library suggestions.
Digit did a talk titled “Nerves ❤️ Flutter” reviewing how the SmartRent Thermostat/Smart Home hub was built, and it was awe-inspiring. The nerves_flutter_support repo was made public as well to help people build on this.
Mitchell Hanberg gave us an update on the new Elixir Language Server, now named Expert. The now blessed official team has been hard at work building a new language server foundation built on the best of the previous three projects. A release still feels a few months away, but the update and teaser were much appreciated.
Kevin Barrett and Sloane Perrault did a talk, “CRDTs and the BEAM: Eventual Consistency Through Acronyms.” Having CRDT in the title, this was a session I’ve had circled on my calendar for months. The talk was an excellent review of how they are utilizing CRDTs to power the delivery of screen.garden, which allows real-time collaboration of standard Obsidian Markdown.

Conference Format

The talks were a mix of 40-minute and 25-minute sessions with ample time for hallway track discussions. A great balance.
There was a great 40-minute block each day for “Birds of a Feather” sessions. Early in the day, people voted on topics, and then the round tables where we ate lunch were signed for spontaneous discussions. I attended a table on WebAssembly, learning about wasmx on the first day, and then a table talking about Ash Framework and Igniter on the second day.

Vibes

While the majority of attendees seemed work-aligned with Elixir, there was also a healthy mix of Nerves, Gleam, and Erlang folks.
Everyone was very friendly and welcoming. There were people who had history and clumped together, but at the same time, I observed many people making space for new people to enter the circle and join in.
Presenting in pairs was popular and more so impressively executed. Everyone seemed well in sync with their presenting partner.
The chaos of the real world was not front and center in most talks (which is fine with me as I enjoy the escape), but it did leak through at times. I recall a specific moment when Ingela Anderton Andin was doing an OTP update. She was remote, presenting from her home in Sweden over video. There was some chatter at the end about how the conference would love to see her return in person in the United States in the upcoming year. There was an uneasiness in her reaction. Acknowledging without fully verbalizing the state of international relations. Seeing the forthcoming calendar of BEAM-related events, many happening in Europe, I had a similar response. I don’t know if United States citizens will be welcome there in 6 months.

Followup Learning Projects

Related to some discussion and possible project work, I bought the Ash book and started reading it on the plane ride home. I’ve worked with Ash before, but using the book to refresh my memory. I may even consider porting some of the Flick domain to Ash as a space to play around.
People were hyped about Cursor well over GitHub Copilot for AI codegen things. I need to experiment more with it.
Need to tinker with Phoenix.Sync.
I totally forgot about burrito. It was mentioned during Digit’s talk, and I should totally check it out in relation to building local-first software.

Burrito is our answer to the problem of distributing Elixir CLI applications across varied environments, where we cannot guarantee that the Erlang runtime is installed, and where we lack the permissions to install it ourselves. In particular, we have CLI tooling that must be deployed on-premise by consultants into customer environments that may be running MacOS, Linux, or Windows.

While I disliked the travel, and boy was I grumpy after the travel day on Wednesday, the conference was a tremendous success. This was my first time at a CodeBEAM event, and I highly recommend it.

What is Local-first Software?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:11:28 -0500

Local-first software is a term that came out of a research lab called Ink & Switch back in April 2019. In a wonderful paper, they explored some ideas that resonated with me.

In today’s post, I want to talk a bit about the problems local-first software solves and explore an abbreviated definition of how to identify local-first software. I’ll close with some resources to learn more and a quick review of my next side project.

Let’s start by talking about the problem.

The Problem

Over the last twenty years, the balance of power between software users and software providers has become incredibly one-sided.

Modern companies, through the software they provide, have tremendous leverage against their users. This power shift comes primarily through ubiquitous centralized data. The outcome of this is that the user is disenfranchised through loss of data sovereignty, privacy, security, and long-term software availability.

Why did users give up this power so easily? For collaboration. Collaboration is the killer feature of the modern web, and frankly, it was much easier to build when we agreed to centralize the data.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think we as a whole really knew what we were building in those early days. We used language like “connecting people,” and it was never about gatekeeping. But as collaboration and social networking features started to mature, we found ourselves in a world that was off balance.

The Solution

Local-first software aims to describe an approach to software that better empowers users. From the paper:

We believe that data ownership and real-time collaboration are not at odds with each other. It is possible to create software that has all the advantages of cloud apps, while also allowing you to retain full ownership of the data, documents and files you create.

We call this type of software local-first software, since it prioritizes the use of local storage (the disk built into your computer) and local networks (such as your home WiFi) over servers in remote datacenters.

Later in a conference talk, Martin Kleppmann provided a more succinct definition:

In local-first software, the availability of another computer should never prevent you from working.

He expanded:

If it’s local-only, it’s not local first.
(Local-first implies multiplayer, or at least multi-device among a user’s devices)

If it doesn’t work with the wifi off, it’s not local-first.
(Local-first implies offline support.)

If it doesn’t work when the app developer goes out of business and shuts down their servers, it’s not local-first.

For more, I highly recommend reading the original paper and watching the recent conference talk.

The Technologies That Seeds this Dream

If you have ever been involved in data distribution, data integrity, syncing, merging, resolving conflicts, or any of the other nightmares that surround this story, you might read the definition of local-first and walk away thinking it’s a pipe dream. Yes, this is a very challenging technical problem, but exciting advancements exist in Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).

Wikipedia summarizes:

In distributed computing, a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) is a data structure that is replicated across multiple computers in a network, with the following features:

The application can update any replica independently, concurrently and without coordinating with other replicas.

An algorithm (itself part of the data type) automatically resolves any inconsistencies that might occur.

Although replicas may have different state at any particular point in time, they are guaranteed to eventually converge.

Over the last decade, research and development on these algorithms have matured, making real-world production deployments possible.

Multiple implementations of these algorithms exist, with Automerge being a popular starting point.

If you want to learn more about Conflict-free Replicated Data Types I recommend watching CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency and the follow up CRDTs: The Hard Parts

To be clear, local-first does not require specifically CRDTs, nor does using CRDTs make your software local-first.

Why this Excites Me

In my senior years, I have become very cynical and negative about the technical industry I participate in. Overall, I question whether all of this has made our lives better. When I compare the positive and the negative, I have trouble finding balance.

I am also a realist, understanding that I am a grain of sand on the beach of civilization. I try to focus on the things I can positively impact and not get overwhelmed by the things outside my control.

Thinking about my work, I align with the problems and solutions local-first software promotes. When I consider how I want to spend my day coding, do I want to code yet another centralized system some private equity firm can crunch and mold to its will and profits above all others? Or do I want to contribute, even a small slice, to the creation of long-lived software that empowers users?

What’s Next?

With work on Flick slowing down, I’d like to define my next side project, and I think it will be a local-first research project. I want to define a time box and outline experiments and prototypes to test out some of these ideas and see how they can work in practice. In the end, I hope to have a software deliverable of some value and a series of blog posts explaining what I’ve learned along the way. I’m still shaping what this will be, but I thought I’d start the journey with a definition of local-first.

Resources

A Few Good Memes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:46:05 -0500

Yesterday I took to r/ProgrammerHumor to reply to this post about code review. I used a meme I crafted back in September and posted this meme as I was preparing for quarterly performance review season. It since has gotten some replies that have me laughing out loud. Recording for prosperity.

Intelligent-Touch936 writes:

We live in a world that has code, and that code has to be perfect. Who’s going to ensure that? You? You, with your lenient comments? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your feelings and you curse the review process; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that my critique, while harsh, probably saved the project. And my existence, while meticulous and unkind, brings us closer to a flawless system. You want me to be nicer? You can’t handle the nicest! Because deep down in places you don’t talk about at stand-ups, you want me on that review. You need me on that review.

We use words like “optimize,” “refactor,” “debug.” These words are the backbone of our development process. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to someone who rises and sleeps under the very quality code that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you grab an IDE and get to work. Either way, I don’t give a damn about what you think you’re entitled to!

Prosecutor: Did you force push main?

Defendant: I did what I needed to do.

Prosecutor: DID YOU FORCE PUSH MAIN?

Defendant: YOU’RE GODDAMNED RIGHT I DID!

Phoenix LiveView: Presenting DateTime in User's Time Zone

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:47:37 -0500

This past weekend, I added a feature to Flick (RankedVote.app) where we now present domain-specific DateTime values, like published_at and closed_at, on the live view page using the user’s time zone. I thought I’d capture some notes on how this was accomplished, some known limitations, ideas to solve those in your own work, and a set of resource links to learn more.

Elixir time zone basics

Out of the box, when working with Elixir DateTime values, you can only create values relative to the Etc/UTC time zone. If you want to represent values in other time zones, you will need a time zone database.

The Elixir docs discuss this and link a few options. For this post and the Flick project, I choose tzdata, and the following paragraphs will reference it specifically. However, the Elixir runtime is very flexible if you prefer another.

To add the dependency to your project, you’ll add it to the deps list in the mix.exs file.

# mix.exs
defp deps do
  [
    # ...
    {:tzdata, "~> 1.1"}
  ]
end

Then, you’ll need to configure it as your :time_zone_database in the config/config.exs file.

# config/config.exs
config :elixir, :time_zone_database, Tzdata.TimeZoneDatabase

With that in place, you can create values in a time zone.

iex> DateTime.new(~D[2016-05-24], ~T[13:26:08.003], "America/New_York")
{:ok, #DateTime<2016-05-24 13:26:08.003-04:00 EDT America/New_York>}

The user’s time zone

When I say User here, I refer to the web browser client requesting a web page from our server.

Sadly, when displaying a DateTime value in this user’s response, we are hampered by the fact that we do not know their time zone. The time zone is not included with the HTTP request.

Assuming the browser renders the page in an environment that executes JavaScript, the most approachable way to get this is via a function call like:

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;

MDN Reference for DateTimeFormat.

Aside: Curiously, the time zone and locale details of the user’s environment are not part of a permission prompt flow even though they leak sensitive data IMO. If viewing the page, assume you are giving up that info.

So, how do we use this relative to our live view page?

The first thing we will do is edit our assets/js/app.js file. We want to query the browser for the time zone and send it to LiveView via the params of the LiveSocket.

// assets/js/app.js
let csrfToken = document
  .querySelector("meta[name='csrf-token']")
  .getAttribute("content");

// Add this.
let time_zone = Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;

let liveSocket = new LiveSocket("/live", Socket, {
  longPollFallbackMs: 2500,
  // And `time_zone` here.
  params: { _csrf_token: csrfToken, time_zone: time_zone },
});

From your live view module’s mount/3 function, you can access this time_zone value like:

  def mount(params, _session, socket) do
    # ...

    # The `time_zone` value will only be available when the live view is
    # rendering a `connected?/1` socket, so make sure to define a default.
    time_zone = get_connect_params(socket)["time_zone"] || "UTC"

    # ...
  end

Once you have the time zone value, any domain-specific DateTime you are storing in UTC can be converted using DateTime.shift_zone/2 for display to the user.

For the needs of my side project, I made a dedicated module called Flick.DateTimeFormatter, which helps me shift the DateTime values and format them to an expected style. It looks something like:

  def display_string(date_time_value, time_zone) do
    case DateTime.shift_zone(date_time_value, time_zone) do
      {:ok, date_time_in_time_zone} ->
        Calendar.strftime(date_time_in_time_zone, "%B %-d, %Y %-I:%M %p %Z")

      {:error, reason} ->
        {:error, reason}
    end
  end

With this in place, I can display a DateTime value from any live view in the user’s time zone.

A full implementation can be found in the Flick PR if you want more reference materials.

This is a half solution.

You might recall in a code comment above, I said:

The `time_zone` value will only be available when the live view is
rendering a `connected?/1` socket, so make sure to define a default.

You might also recall that when a user requests a URL, the live view first renders a non-connected DOM state. This DOM is delivered to the browser, and only then is a WebSocket established, and thus the live view becomes “connected”.

The outcome of this and the design of our solution is that the user will see the DateTime value rendered in UTC first (our default) and then flash into the browser’s time zone as the WebSocket becomes connected.

That kind of sucks, but for the simple needs of Flick, this felt acceptable and is where I left it.

Designing a more complete solution.

In a previous project, I built a meetup group platform. It had to display lots of DateTime values, and this kind of flashing would not have been acceptable.

For that project, we created a stack of fallback time zones.

When a user created their meetup group, they defined a default display time zone for the group. This was our fallback default.
When a web visitor was on the page, we executed JavaScript that would PUT the observed time zone we saw and then on the backend inside a standard controller we would store the time zone inside the session. This would be our ideal default, and would generally be available on everything except the user’s first page load of the site.

A Hook-based approach.

LittleAccountOfCalm of Reddit also suggests:

Pardon me, but why not render a <local-time phx-hook="LocalTime" id={@id} class="invisible">{@date}</local-time component, that has a js-hook like:

Hooks.LocalTime = {
  mounted() {
    this.updated();
  },
  updated() {
    let dt = new Date(this.el.textContent);
    this.el.textContent = Intl.DateTimeFormat("default", {
      dateStyle: "medium",
      // timeStyle: "short",
    }).format(dt);
    this.el.classList.remove("invisible");
  },
};

I recall seeing approaches like this before and you correct that this is just as reasonable of a solution for Flick’s needs. I vaguely recall requirements that made it a non-option for my other project (maybe due to time zone presentation in email copy) but a great addition to the post. Thanks for sharing!

Other Resources

I’ll leave you out with some related resources. Good coding, and if you have any questions, reach out.

Elixir’s DateTime docs are great and worthy of re-read.
My Flick PR where I added this feature.
Date and Time · Elixir School
I gave a talk Working With Time Zones in an Elixir Phoenix App back in 2020 at a local meetup. I have the video, but the embed on that page is currently down. Slides are there, which might be interesting.
There was an amazing talk at ElixirConf 2022 Kip Cole - Time algebra: a new way to think about and work with time. This strays from the practical demonstrations of this post but was a memorable talk that impressed me.
DockYards had their own recent demo blog post, which aligns with many of the things shared here: Getting and Displaying the User’s Local Time in LiveView
Simon Willison: Storing times for human events

Errata

I originally posted this with some links to a private repo. I’m not in a place to make that repo public but will recreate the linked code below.

// assets/js/app.js
// "When a web visitor was on the page, we executed JavaScript that would PUT the observed time zone we saw..."
window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", (event) => {
  if (document.head.dataset.timezone == 0) {
    let user_timezone = Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;
    console.log(
      "User timezone was unknown on dom load. Sending user timezone (" +
        user_timezone +
        ") to server.",
    );
    fetch(
      location.protocol +
        "//" +
        location.host +
        "/timezone?iana=" +
        encodeURIComponent(user_timezone),
    ).then((response) => {
      console.log(response);
    });
  }
});

# lib/guildflow_web/controllers/subdomain/timezone_controller.ex
# "... and then on the backend inside a standard controller we would store the time zone inside the session."
def index(conn, %{"iana" => iana}) do
  if Enum.member?(Timex.timezones(), iana) do
    conn
    |> put_session("timezone", iana)
    |> render("index.html", user_timezone: iana)
  else
    user_timezone = get_session(conn, "timezone")

    render(conn, "index.html",
      user_timezone: user_timezone,
      page_title: "User Session Timezone Status"
    )
  end
end

On Asking Multiple Questions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 13:20:55 -0500

On the socials @jerzone shares:

My super power is carefully combining a number of relevant questions in the same message so the person doesn’t have to spend a lot of time going back and forth with me on individual questions.

Everyone else’s super power seems to be picking out the least relevant of those questions and responding in an oblique fashion.

In general, I prefer asynchronous communication. The freedom it gives the participants to contribute to the conversation at a time that best works for them can be helpful and sometimes outright required if you are collaborating with folks outside your time zone.

That said, the delay in getting a proper answer can be frustrating.

I used to attempt to preload questions in my own emails/messages to people. Sometimes it would be as simple as a flat list of questions, and other times, I’d give them a logic path for if yes, then question x, or if no, question y. I have learned that this is a mistake.

My experience dictates many people do not work well with this complexity. They miss questions or details entierly. The eventual awkwardness of repeating questions is enough that I will do simple, single questions, one at a time.

This lack of comprehension could result from our distracted culture, which for many includes answering SMS messages and interacting with phone notifications non-stop. I feel disempowered to fight those winds.

Sometimes, I find a peer where multiple questions will work, but that is something that is earned and not assumed.

Best Vinyl of 2024

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 10:14:11 -0500

In March of 2024, I purchased a record player after seeing one at my cousin’s place.

I am not an audiophile; in fact, I have partial hearing loss in my left ear. Nonetheless, I like the physicality of playing a record. The intent of putting the vinyl down on the platter, lining up the needle, and letting it play out without the distractions of a computer or phone. Taking the time to enjoy the wonderful visuals of the album art and (sometimes) styled coloring of the vinyl as the music plays out.

I constantly fret about the relationship I have with technology, and I like how grounded this feels in the real world.

Over the year, I have acquired about 20 records, but here are some that stand out.

Stardew Valley Soundtrack

Soundtrack Info, Expansion Soundtrack Info

Stardew Valley has become one of my favorite games of all time, and its soundtrack is a notable reason why. Like many of the instrumental records you’ll see on this list, I enjoy listening to this while I read my books or otherwise enjoy a nice fireplace day. The music has a wonderful mix of upbeat and somber tracks, and the alum art and vinyl presentation capture the mood well.

Red Dead 2 Soundtrack

Score Info Music Info,

Another all-time favorite game, the Red Dead 2 soundtrack and song albums bring me back to 1899 every time. I love the ambient music of the soundtrack that mixes soft exploration songs and intense gunfight anthems. When the vocal song hits, I get a major kick of nostalgia for those larger-than-life game moments and endings. These albums were not in print and easy to find, but I’m happy to have acquired them. They are regularly on rotation in my house.

Random Access Memories, Daft Punk

Album Info

I have enjoyed Daft Punk growing up. I recall bobbing my head to Discovery on my iPod during many walks and workouts. Even in recent times, I regularly enjoy the Tron Legacy soundtrack (I have it on vinyl as well) – but there is something special about Random Access Memories. It fits no genre and explores sound in a unique way that is hard to express. Spending time listening to this on a nice set of speakers and giving it your focus is special. While we all have music preferences, this is the recommendation you could give to anyone who says they love music.

Six Evolutions - Bach: Cello Suites, Yo-Yo Ma

Album Info

I’ve been listening to Yo-Yo Ma for years. My first introduction to him was during an iTunes demo, and I did not turn back. The Cello Suites: Inspired By Bach was one album I listened to many times, often while I coded. I could not find it on vinyl and ended up picking up Six Evolutions in its place. I’ve enjoyed this now as well. It’s a great album to throw on while journaling or looking for inspiration.

Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert

Album Info

This was the surprise of the year for me. While many of the albums I’ve picked up I have a deep history with, this came to me serendipitously through a YouTube video.

Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert started as a total disaster. Not only was he exhausted and hungry, but he had to improvise an entire concert on a broken, unplayable piano. This concert would go on to be the best-selling solo jazz album and the best-selling piano album of any genre.

After sampling the concert online, I bought my copy.

I enjoy piano albums but have not done much jazz piano. It hits differently and is enjoyed. I love the story behind the concert, which adds to my appreciation for what is happening during the concert. It inspires me to embrace constraints.

How about you? Any special music hit you this year? I’d love to hear about it.

New Gaming PC

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:22:54 -0500

In the closing days of summer this past year, I started to get an itch about building a new gaming PC. In this post, I’ll share what I built and some notes on its assembly.

Assembled computer powered off.

Assembled computer powered on.

Inspiration

I had been playing a few games on my Mac laptop over the summer, including Civilization VI and Stardew Valley. Civilization VII was formally announced in June, triggering an interest in a new gaming PC. While I could technically play Civ7 on a Mac, it would likely play much better on a proper gaming PC.

It had been 8 years or so since I last built a gaming PC (a top-end of its time 1080 Nvidia-based tower). The main games I played on it back then were MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. I also enjoyed many hours of City Skylines and Portal 2.

In recent years, I shelved the gaming PC and have, instead, enjoyed my game time via other outlets, such as my PlayStation and Switch. The idea of a new gaming PC for Civ7 and a space to tinker with those MMOs again was intriguing.

Components

PC Parts list.

Various PC parts laid out for assembly.

For this build, I wanted to lean more toward a visual presentation. My last build was very economical, a traditional black tower with no real frills. It would be fun to give this some personality. It’s a white build with some limited RGB lighting that would lean towards a purple hue.

I chose the Lian Li O11 DYNAMIC EVO RGB case. I have seen this tower a few times on various YouTube videos. I really enjoyed the spacious interior, the glass sides, and the sleek lines. As I started working with this case, I was impressed with the build quality and layout. I love having the motherboard on one half with a hidden chamber for all the various wires and fan controllers.

I chose the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor for CPU, my first AMD processor ever.

For graphics, I debating a lot of options. Ultimately, I chose a more expensive choice than I originally planned, picking the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. I picked this for the extra video RAM (16 GB), which I hope will help in the future. We will see how well games like Civ7 (and a possible Red Dead 2 with mods) actually utilize all this horsepower. For now, it sits there, almost bored with my current gaming choices and their simple needs.

For the monitor, I went with the Asus ROG Swift OLED, a 31.5-inch screen running at 240 Hz. This thing is gorgeous. Since getting an OLED TV in 2020 and my iPad Pro earlier this year, I have found it hard to consider other display options. I love the rich colors and the deep blacks. I like the glossy finish too; it makes colors pop.

I went with various Lian Li RGB options for cooling fans, including three of the LCD-display variety. I currently use the temperature and load metrics, but I might use some GIF memes in the future. Getting the right mix of white color, reverse airflow, and sizes was actually harder than I expected. I compromised on sizes (I wanted 140mm but had to get 120mm) and normal direction (mounting in reverse to get the airflow I needed).

The final meaningly decision was CPU cooling. I went with an air-cooled solution, a Thermalright Peerless Assassin. Water-cooled all-in-ones are popular and can squeeze out extra performance, but I dislike the complexity and the motor noise moving the fluid around. I prefer the simplicity of airflow, and considering the space my case provides, I expect it to be more than enough for my needs.

Assembly

It has been a bit since I last built my last gaming PC, so I took my time and watched a lot of YouTube videos to help me get comfortable with an approach and answer some questions.

I have big hands, so work like socketing the CPU and applying thermal paste can be daunting, but I took my time, and it worked out.

Handling the graphic card is similarly stressful since it is so large and expensive. You need to put pressure on it to get it into the PCI slot, BUT NOT TOO MUCH PRESSURE! (Aside: I broke a small tab of my old 1080 graphics card before, and happily, it did not cause an issue – but the memory and worry persist.)

The other stressful thing about the graphic card is the power. I’ve seen Steve’s coverage of these 12VHPWR plugs, and this design is an absolute shit show. Again, I approached this carefully, ensuring everything was secure and not overly stressed in the cord bend (another advantage of having such a large case interior).

When I first attempted to power-on the computer, I did not get it to POST.

POST, short for power-on self-test, is a series of tests and procedures your PC runs through before loading the operating system.

I saw red lights on my motherboard and was very nervous. I assembled everything inside the tower, so disassembling and debugging what was causing the computer to not POST was very intimidating. Luckily, I worked on simpler debug steps first, which meant reseating the RAM. This required removing one of the CPU fans, but it was a low-impact first thing to try – and lucky for me, that resolved the issue. The RAM seems fine, I just needed to reseat it. (FWIW, I did give the PC plenty of time to configure the memory on those first attempts. I am aware that as you change the memory layout the motherboard needs to cycle/relearn the memory speeds.)

If I were doing this again, I might suggest buying a test bench setup or otherwise doing a sanity POST verification of the components before putting them in a case.

After I got the computer to POST, one issue I did run into was fans. I misunderstood the wide range of fan models Lian Li was selling and ended up buying a mix of fans and controllers that were not fully compatible. I made a midday MicroCenter run to buy compatible alternatives and had to reinstall them a few times to get it all worked out. Ultimately, I had to install two separate fan controllers (one for the LCD fans and another for the simple RGB fans).

The full desk shot.

Windows

Not having a readily available Windows computer around, I followed some instructions to download the Windows 11 installer and make a bootable USB drive from my Mac. This worked fine for me, though sadly, I did not get a working network driver for the motherboard’s wifi chip from Windows, so I had to download some manual drivers onto a separate USB drive to get that working. Once I was on the wifi, I could get all the other drivers directly from this machine, as well as the many OS-level updates.

I had a Windows 10 license from my old gaming PC, which worked fine for registering this copy of Windows 11.

Windows 11 is frustratingly pushy about trying to get you to create your local account via an online Microsoft account. I used a few suggestions to avoid this, but it seems like an ongoing nag I get from time to time.

One of the biggest problems I ran into was the EFI boot partition. So, EFI is what Windows uses as its boot loader, and when you install Windows, it tries to be helpful. It self-discovers all the hard drives in your computer and will attempt to set up what is needed. What I observed is that when I did my clean install of Windows, it saw a working EFI partition on the USB installer and would not set one up on my main SSD. Thus, my system would boot on a power cycle if I had the USB installer plugged in but would not if removed.

I did 4 or 5 clean installs of Windows, trying to nudge it in the right direction. I tried to pull out the USB drive at a specific point during the installation, but it never worked as I wanted. I ended up following some instructions to manually create an EFI partition on my SSD and finally got everything to boot on a clean power up with no USB drive plugged in.

Tools

During this assembly, I loved using my iFixit tools. Having all the various screw types and extenders really came in handy. I’ve used this set for two notable projects now (this and my Framework laptop) and continue to appriciate how well they work.

It’s easy to overlook, but make sure you have many USB drives if you do a build like this. I did not and had to do a data dance when creating USB drives to flash the motherboard with the latest BIOS and other things. Keep that Windows 11 bootable USB drive around for future issues.

Final Thoughts

I’m really pleased with my build. I had to make a few visual compromises with the fans, but overall this turned out just as I had hoped.

So far, my main games have been Civ 6, Stardew Valley (trying to finish perfection on my latest farm), and World of Warcraft (rolled a new gnome mage on the new Classic servers).

As 2025 approaches, I’m looking forward to Civ 7 and a playthrough of Red Dead 2 with some mods to shake up the gameplay. There is a rumor that MLB: The Show might get a PC release this year, and if so, I might play it here.

Download MP4.

If you have a game suggestion or any follow-up questions, reach out.

Personal Elixir Code Aesthetics

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 20:25:46 -0400

With my side project Flick hitting an MVP milestone and inspired by some conversations during Elixir Book Club, I thought I’d take a moment to document some code aesthetic choices I made in this project.

The order below is not ranked in importance. In fact most of this is nitpicky, but still my preference.

Whitespace between import and alias.

Alphabetically ordered alias declarations.

Avoiding multi-alias declarations.

  # lib/flick/ranked_voting.ex
  import Ecto.Query

  alias Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot
  alias Flick.RankedVoting.Vote
  alias Flick.Repo

Whitespace should be done with intention to separate distinct concepts; and for me, import and alias are distinct concepts.

I also list my alias declarations in alphabetical order, enforced via AliasOrder and use a preferred order across use, import, alias, and require via StrictModuleLayout.

I prefer to avoid multi-alias declarations like alias Flick.RankedVoting.{Ballot, Vote} since it makes searching the code base for module names harder to do. This is enforced with MultiAlias.

(Generally) prefer multiline do/end functions.

defp page_title(:edit), do: "Edit Ballot"
defp page_title(_), do: "Create a Ballot"

Unless I can express a group of functions in a simple stack (like the above code) I generally prefer multiline do/end function declarations. One reason for this preference is that my code editor can collapse the whole module in a nice way, making during exploration easier.

# This could be one line, but I prefer multiline do/end.
def get_ballot!(ballot_id) do
  Repo.get!(Ballot, ballot_id)
end

Use consistent DSL layout in test modules.

# test/flick/ranked_voting_test.exs
describe "update_ballot/1" do
  test "success: updates a ballot title and questions" do
    # ...
  end

  test "failure: `question_title` is required" do
    # ...
  end

  test "failure: can not update a published ballot" do
    # ...
  end
end

Test files can generally end up 2 or 3 times the line count of the module under test. To help keep this code organized and easy to navigate I use a style where I will list the function under test using describe and then various success and failure expectations in each test. For functions like list_ballots/1 that can’t fail, one might drop the success label, but looking at my code as it stands today, it looks like I kept it. 🤷‍♂️

I have far less consistency with my LiveView tests. Sometimes the describe breaks out new vs edit logic, other times it breaks out with or without authentication paths. I’m still evolving this and welcome ideas and good examples.

Invest in test fixtures

Arrange, Act, Assert. To help keep your arrange logic neat and tidy, invest in good test fixture tooling. These test fixtures should provide functions for entity creation in your test files as well as the known list of argument defaults (for tests that need to do something more custom but do not want to be burdened with a complete understanding of every argument).

These fixtures should use the actual domain context paths for creation and not raw SQL injection unless absolutely needed for performance or edge cases.

# test/support/fixtures/ballot_fixture.ex
defmodule Support.Fixtures.BallotFixture do
  @moduledoc """
  Provides functions to allows tests to easily create and stage
  `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entities for testing.
  """

  alias Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot

  @doc """
  Returns a map of valid attributes for a `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity,
  allowing for the passed in attributes to override defaults.
  """
  @spec valid_ballot_attributes(map()) :: map()
  def valid_ballot_attributes(attrs \\ %{}) do
    Enum.into(attrs, %{
      question_title: "What day should have dinner?",
      possible_answers: "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday",
      url_slug: "dinner-day-#{System.unique_integer()}",
      published_at: nil
    })
  end

  @doc """
  Creates a `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity in the `Flick.Repo` for the passed in
  optional attributes.

  When not provided, all required attributes will be generated.
  """
  @spec ballot_fixture(map()) :: Ballot.t()
  def ballot_fixture(attrs \\ %{}) do
    attrs = valid_ballot_attributes(attrs)
    {:ok, ballot} = Flick.RankedVoting.create_ballot(attrs)
    ballot
  end

  @doc """
  Creates a `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity in the `Flick.Repo` for the passed in
  optional attributes and then publishes the ballot.

  When not provided, all required attributes will be generated.
  """
  @spec published_ballot_fixture(map()) :: Ballot.t()
  def published_ballot_fixture(attrs \\ %{}) do
    attrs = valid_ballot_attributes(attrs)
    {:ok, ballot} = Flick.RankedVoting.create_ballot(attrs)
    {:ok, published_ballot} = Flick.RankedVoting.publish_ballot(ballot)
    published_ballot
  end
end

Aside: I hate how the typespecs here use map() for the attribute map. I want to make that more detailed in the future, see issue #4.

Use tiny_maps to save horizontal line space in tests.

test "success: submitting valid form creates ballot and redirects", ~M{view, ballot} do
  # ...
end

When composing my test descriptions, I like to get the test "..." do on a single line. To help achieve that, I use the tiny_maps library to help me express repetitive argument maps with a more concise syntax: ~M{view, ballot} expands to %{view: view, ballot: ballot}. I generally limit this syntax sugar to test files but would not be against using it in the main source in the future.

Compose code to prefer clean line breaks

I love that Elixir ships with an opinionated formatter. However, even with the formatter, you still have a lot of influence on how your code is composed. I prefer it greatly when expressions are clean one-liners or otherwise avoid excessive indentation when breaking up complex terms.

To help explain, let me walk you through a test from Flick.

test "success: submitting valid form creates ballot and redirects", ~M{view} do
  payload = %{
    question_title: "What's your favorite color?",
    possible_answers: "Red, Green, Blue",
    url_slug: "favorite-color"
  }

  response =
    view
    |> form("form", ballot: payload)
    |> render_submit()

  # Assert upon submit the page redirects, and the ballot was created.
  assert {:error, {:redirect, %{to: redirect_target}}} = response
  assert "/ballot/favorite-color/" <> secret = redirect_target
  assert %Ballot{} = RankedVoting.get_ballot_by_url_slug_and_secret!("favorite-color", secret)
end

First, let’s take note that response is captured in its own line group. Technically, you could compose render_submit() to happen on the same line as assert, but by capturing response using its own line group, it helps separate the act vs. assert test concepts and avoids a very complex indentation variant.

# A complex multiline expression with lots of indentation, I am trying to avoid.
assert {:error, {:redirect, %{to: redirect_target}}} =
         view
         |> form("form", ballot: payload)
         |> render_submit()

Next, let’s look at the pipe feeding response. You could compose the code like this:

response =
  view
  |> form("form", ballot: %{
      question_title: "What's your favorite color?",
      possible_answers: "Red, Green, Blue",
      url_slug: "favorite-color"
  })
  |> render_submit()

I dislike this composition since it breaks the pipe. By moving the payload value assignment to its own line group, we end up with a cleaner pipe that, in my opinion, reads better.

payload = %{
  question_title: "What's your favorite color?",
  possible_answers: "Red, Green, Blue",
  url_slug: "favorite-color"
}

response =
  view
  |> form("form", ballot: payload)
  |> render_submit()

Embrace pipelines with custom utility functions.

# lib/flick_web/live/ballots/index_live.ex
def mount(_params, _session, socket) do
  socket
  |> assign(:page_title, "Admin: Ballots")
  |> assign(:ballots, Flick.RankedVoting.list_ballots())
  |> ok()
end

defmodule FlickWeb.LiveViewPipes do
  @moduledoc """
  A collection of functions to help express pipes when processing live view responses.
  """

  alias Phoenix.LiveView.Socket

  @spec ok(Socket.t()) :: {:ok, Socket.t()}
  def ok(%Socket{} = socket), do: {:ok, socket}

  @spec noreply(Socket.t()) :: {:noreply, Socket.t()}
  def noreply(%Socket{} = socket), do: {:noreply, socket}
end

Many LiveView functions require tuple return values like {:ok, socket} or {:noreply, socket}. To help allow call sites to be composed as a single pipeline, I use some utility functions like ok() and noreply().

Be consistent between module names and filenames.

If I have a module called Flick.RankedVoting.RankedAnswer it lives at the filepath lib/flick/ranked_voting/ranked_answer.ex

While I have good consistency inside my core domain contexts, this consistency fails with various Phoenix things. For example, FlickWeb.Ballots.EditorLive lives at lib/flick_web/live/ballots/editor_live.ex. I dislike that Phoenix generators put these modules in a folder called live that the module path does not express. I may fix that in the future.

Related blog post: LiveView Modules Must End in Live

Write professional documentation.

  @doc """
  Publishes the given `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity.

  Once a `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity is published, it can no longer be updated.
  Only a published ballot can be voted on.
  """

All public functions, especially those that represent the formalized domain API for your system, should get documentation.

Each documentation block should start with a single-line, terse summary, as those are used by ex_doc and other developer tooling to summarize function indexes. Every so often, look at the collection of function summaries of a module and try to make them all use consistent phrasing like “Returns noun given thing…” or “Raises Blah when stuff…”.

If referencing another module, function, or callback, use backticks to help the documentation system generate hyperlinks.

Use rewrap tools to hardwrap characters to 80 columns to help with GitHub diffing and more presentable Markdown.

Document your decisions.

Programming is all about tradeoffs. When making an intentional design or process decision with other valid approaches available, consider documenting what was considered and why you went with your approach. Your future self and peers will thank you.

I’ve documented some things related to timestamps, schema shape, and fixme/todo so far in Flick.

Make sure each FIXME has an issue URL.

Related to the above decisions, Flick allows FIXME comments but requests all FIXMEs include a link to a GitHub issue documenting the concern.

Avoid abbreviations and prefer expressiveness.

Prefer expressive variable names like _ballot over _.

Prefer expressive variable names like ballot_params over params when you think it helps improve clarity.

Words matter.

Invest time in an expressive and consistent ubiquitous language for your project. Continue to edit it over time as the terms evolve.

Find consistency in your project code regarding terms like create vs. new, update vs. edit, submit vs. save, params vs. attributes.

Do your best to align with existing Elixir community norms.

Craft typespecs to express your domain.

All public functions should have a typespec. Private functions can also have typespecs, depending on whether they will help with code clarity or change confidence.

Spend time and make those typespecs match the domain. For example, when accepting the identity of a Ballot use the Ballot.id() not a Ecto.UUID.t().

  # lib/flick/ranked_voting/ballot.ex
  @type id :: Ecto.UUID.t()

When building types for my main domain entities, I tend to build the main t() around a persisted entity value that is brought into memory from a Repo, and thus all post-creation values like id or updated_at are typed to their expected value, without the need for an | nil addendum.

To help write typespecs for non-persisted structs of this schema type, I make a schema_t() variant.

  @typedoc """
  A type for a persisted `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` entity.
  """
  @type t :: %__MODULE__{
          id: Ecto.UUID.t(),
          question_title: String.t(),
          description: String.t() | nil,
          url_slug: String.t(),
          secret: Ecto.UUID.t(),
          possible_answers: String.t(),
          published_at: DateTime.t() | nil
        }

  @typedoc """
  A type for the empty `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` struct.

  This type is helpful when you want to typespec a function that needs to accept
  a non-persisted `Flick.RankedVoting.Ballot` struct value.
  """
  @type struct_t :: %__MODULE__{}

Spend time writing typedoc documentation, it can be a helpful space to talk out the reasoning behind some of the types.

In addition to writing typespecs, when composing functions I also prefer pattern matching the struct and using guards to be explicit about incoming argument expectations.

  def change_ballot(%Ballot{} = ballot, attrs) when is_map(attrs) do
    # ...
  end

Dialyzer is not a runtime enforcement tool, but these are. They help enforce expectations earlier in the call stack and thus help you become aware of when things are not as they seem sooner.

Document your dependencies.

To help future you know why various dependencies were added to the project, add a minimal description before listing it.

  defp deps do
    # ...

    # For Observability.
    {:appsignal_phoenix, "~> 2.5"},

    # To Render Markdown.
    {:earmark, "~> 1.4"},

    # For security scans.
    {:sobelow, "~> 0.13", only: [:dev, :test], runtime: false},
  end

Document and validate function options.

  # lib/flick/ranked_voting.ex

  @doc """
  ...

  ## Options

  * `:action` - An optional atom applied to the changeset, useful for forms that
    look to a changeset's action to influence form behavior.
  """
  def change_vote(%Vote{} = vote, attrs, opts \\ []) do
    opts = Keyword.validate!(opts, action: nil)

    # ...
  end

If you offer a function that accepts options as the final argument, document them and validate them.

Validation helps ensure call sites do not include unexpected or typoed option keys and offers a clean space to provide a default value for the said option.

Aside: Not currently demonstrable in Flick, but is in some of my work project, I usually write rich typespecs for my options as well.

Compose PR titles for clarity and consistency.

With Flick, I work in focused PRs and have those PRs titled for clarity regarding what is changing. I like using prefixes like fix chore feat. These PR titles are enforced with a specific GitHub Action workflow. These PRs are squash merged and make for a (hopefully) readable main branch.

In the future, I might even be able to automate this to help with release notes.

Strive for database precision.

Be detail-oriented when building out your database tables.

If something can not be null, be explicit NOT NULL.

If a string can be really long, use :text. If you do use :string (which has length limits), then enforce those length limitations in Ecto.Changeset so the value is not trimmed quietly.

Virtual fields on Ecto schemas are almost never the right answer.

That was quite the hodgepodge of suggestions and tips. I had others, but they did not fit, or I don’t have good open source references yet.

If you liked these or disagree, let me know.

LiveView Modules Must End in `Live`

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 20:32:57 -0400

When working with LiveView you’ll notice people naming modules with the suffix Live, as seen in module names like FlickWeb.Ballots.IndexLive or FlickWeb.Vote.VoteCaptureLive.

A student I was mentoring once asked me what that Live suffix was for and if it was required.

We drafted some simple LiveView demos with modules that did not end in Live, and things worked fine. I had a gut feeling that this was required, but I could not put my finger on it.

Today, I was reminded when and why you need the Live suffix.

When using the live/4 router macro, you can optionally include an action like :new and :edit as seen in the examples below.

live "/ballot/new", Ballots.EditorLive, :new
live "/ballot/:url_slug/:secret/edit", Ballots.EditorLive, :edit

This action name will be available in the live view’s socket.assigns.live_action and can be a helpful signal when you are utilizing a live view for multiple purposes, such as a form for creation or a form for mutation, depending on the URL.

Should you use action names, your LiveView must end with Live. If it does not, you’ll see a compiler error like:

== Compilation error in file lib/flick_web/router.ex ==
** (ArgumentError) could not infer :as option because a live action was given
and the LiveView does not have a "Live" suffix. Please pass :as explicitly or
make sure your LiveView is named like "FooLive" or "FooLive.Index"
  (phoenix_live_view 0.20.17) lib/phoenix_live_view/router.ex:479: Phoenix.LiveView.Router.inferred_as/3
  (phoenix_live_view 0.20.17) lib/phoenix_live_view/router.ex:409: Phoenix.LiveView.Router.__live__/4
  lib/flick_web/router.ex:36: (module)

Looking over the related source code I kind of suspect this assumption could be removed in the future, but seems like a low impact and pain level so, meh.

I am happy to rediscover and document this. Hopefully, the explanation was helpful.

June 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:46:11 -0400

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about June 2024 (and some early July things too).

Work

Stress about the future private equity acquisition of my current employer looms. There is a high probability of being laid off in early 2025.

My mindset has reverted to treating the employment more like a contract. I am a professional and give them a professional effort. I do my best to have a positive impact on the team. I have however pulled back on long-term corporate growth/responsibility plans, which is sad. I wanted this switch to full-time employment to be more long-lasting.

Outside of work, I need to find focus and figure out what’s next.

The June work itself has been varied. Individual contributions towards a large product refactor. Specifically, I have been working to recompose some of our LiveView modules so that they are more organized and also posting notes about ideas for authorization using on_mount hooks other members have taken the lead on. During my chore time, I’ve been investigating production exceptions and working with the leadership to see how to edit the schemas/database table to avoid invalid states.

Side Projects

Like last month, a few short coding sessions on Flick, but not as much as I would have liked.

I keep rethinking the schema design I want. In my last coding session, I even pulled back the ballot to include only a single question to simplify the UI layer.

I am feeling a little time pressure to get something working so I can use this for the Elixir Book Club’s next vote.

Tech Education / Books

Reading A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition with the Elixir Book Club. About halfway through. It’s a great book and focused. It does not waste your time with excessive pages and gives you much to think about per each small chapter.

Still working through the Obsidian Field Guide.

Started reading MYST: The Book of Ti’ana (fiction) during my vacation on the beach.

Read another chapter of Radical Candor, which I started in April but kind of forgot about.

Did not do much Postgres reading this month. I want to get back into that one.

Video Games / TV

Lots of Stardew Valley. I’m in Winter, Year 2, on my new 1.6 farm.

I play an occasional game of MLB: The Show, but I’m not doing the week-by-week grind like last year.

Bought and played some of the new Riven remaster.

Finished Dark Matter. I liked it a lot.

Started Better Call Saul. I’m in the middle of season 3.

Baseball

Watching and listening a bunch. They are the best team in baseball!

Walks and Exercise

Some walks but not much. I want to get into a swim schedule in the coming weeks.

Other Notes

I posted last month about some mind fog, lack of focus/drive, and that has continued but is a little better. Need to get into a rhythm towards some new projects. I need purpose.

I did enjoy a week down the shore in June with my sister. Mostly just beach time, but it was great, and we had great weather.

What’s Next?

After some vacation and holiday time, I have some full 5-day work weeks ahead. Need to find a productive rhythm both in and outside those hours.

Later in August I will be headed down to ElixirConf, which will be fun. If you see me, please do say hello.

May 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 13:14:12 -0400

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about May 2024.

Work

Stress and uneasiness.

Code wise, mostly focusing on Highchart implementations as the team works towards finishing up a specific epic story.

Side Projects

Had a few short coding sessions on Flick, but not as much as I would have liked.

Tech Education / Books

Finished reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software for Elixir Book Club.

We picked A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition as our next book and I’m four chapters in. I read it a while ago, but recall enjoying it. It is a much easier read than the DDD book. I find some of it’s recommendations a bit surface level, but still a good book to get your brain thinking about your own work.

Started the Obsidian Field Guide. Also made the decision I’m going to use Obsidian but also OmniFocus (for task tracking) and not attempt an all-in-one solution.

Started reading The Art of PostgreSQL and also working through some of these tutorials as I work to skill up my Postgres usage.

Video Games / TV

Continue playing Stardew Valley 1.6. I’m in Winter of my first year.

Small amount of MLB: The Show, but not even coming close to finishing programs or the season XP. Reading online, people who are focused on grinding are having trouble keeping up.

Finished For All Mankind on Apple TV+.

Started Dark Matter on Apple TV+. I read the book a few years ago and enjoyed it. Enjoying the show as well. First time in a long time I find myself anxious for new episodes weekly.

Baseball

Watching and listening a bunch. Phillies are on fire. Reminds me of so much fun during the 1993 season.

I was able to attend the Rhys game and that was awesome.

Walks and Exercise

A few walks, but need to do more. No VR lately. Will likely unsub until next Winter.

Other Notes

Overall, my head is not in a good space. When I’m busy, I generally get through and do the needed work. On those off days, though, I sometimes find myself frozen, without the drive to get through some of these projects I’ve defined for myself.

Some of this is natural—the ebbs and flows of life—but this occurrence is driven explicitly by unease in multiple parts of my life right now. Getting closure on these things would be good, though I don’t expect that to happen fast.

What’s Next?

Headed down the shore for a few days with my sister in June. Also purchased ElixirConf tickets for August. Got some Phillies tickets for August as well.

April 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 04 May 2024 11:42:19 -0400

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about April 2024.

Work

Meh. 🤷‍♂️

As I was reminded during our annual compliance training, we aren’t allowed to talk much about what we do, which sucks. I have good things I’d like to share; I have bad things I’d like to share. I might even drop this section of the monthly post in the future, depending.

Take me out for a beer if you want more on my personal vibes.

One technical share: I’ve been spending notable time building many frontend components with LiveView. Some use the LiveView JS Commands, and others use LiveView Hooks to feed frontend charting libraries. Before taking this full-time job, I had not been doing much frontend work, so these have been useful learning opportunities.

Overall, I am still in a deep thinking mode to understand my long-term future, what I want to do, and what options are available to me. I am also trying to balance my own growth desires with a humble appreciation that there are many in my industry looking for work. It’s hard out there.

Side Projects

Made some first commits towards a new project called Flick. It will be a small ranked voting app to help with book club voting. There is a bit of time pressure to get it working since we need to vote on our next book soon™.

Tech Education / Books

I’m actively reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software for Elixir Book Club. We have three chapters left to go. Overall enjoying it, but bummed I don’t have the space and time to apply it much at work. Might be able to apply these concepts in some personal side project things over time. We’ll see.

Still referencing the book version of Productive Field Guide as I try to better brainstorm and plan my personal projects. Did some quarterly planning last weekend.

Have not yet started the Obsidian Field Guide, but I continue to use Obsidian a bit at work and on my personal laptop. Still not sure if it will stick. Changing some writing habits (and hotkeys) takes time.

Started reading Radical Candor after it came up during a 1:1 chat at work. I was anxious after giving a fairly sharp code review, explaining the proposed solution did not align with the community norms around PubSub. It’s hard to be so direct, but my manager thought I did well and had a good balance, hitting Radical Candor. Over the next day or so, I got some face time with the contributor, and it all worked out. Anyways, I thought I should check out the book for more context.

Video Games / TV

Had a few gaming sessions of Stardew Valley and my newest farm. Still in Spring Year 1.

Playing a bit of MLB: The Show 24 but not nearly as much as I was last year. Disappointed at the increase in packs on the store verses in the programs. Shameless cash grab.

Continued watching For All Mankind on Apple TV+. Almost done with season 4, which is the last one currently available. It’s been good. It’s not must-see tv, but if you like the space environment and drama, it is worth checking out.

As a follow up, I might check out Dark Matter. I read the book a while ago and curious how they shape it as a TV show.

Baseball

Watching / listening to a fair bit of baseball. Phillies were on the west coast last week which lessened my attention but I enjoyed a full game on TV last night. Technically we took first place today which feels glorious.

Walks and Exercise

I did some VR workouts during the month and one good walk last weekend. However, my legs were bothering me afterward, so I’ve been a little slower lately.

Other Notes

I had jury duty this month and ended up in a three-day trial. Everyone jokes about the inconvenience of jury duty, but there was a seriousness to this criminal trial that quickly took hold once I was picked. Probably one of the most constructive outcomes of my time this month was doing my civic duty and helping these people find some form of justice. It was sad and very emotional.

What’s Next?

More morning walks. More focused use of my free time towards some well defined personal projects that came out of quarterly planning.

Hopefully, these notes are interesting to you (or me in the future). If you have any questions or feedback, let me know.

Impactful Books

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 14:39:36 -0400

A local developer Slack had an icebreaker post asking for programming books that impacted your career. I figured I’d share mine in a more long-lived format. Some are more timeless than others.

Web Development and Programming

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman – I recall reading this in 2003 when I was just out of college and starting to invest full-time in my web development career. This book brought order to the chaos of the web design patterns of the time.
Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns by Vladimir Khorikov – This was a powerful book that helped me solidify my perspective of testing, what I want out of it, and how to accomplish those wants.
Elixir in Action by Saša Jurić – While it was not my first Elixir book, it was by far the one that sold me on the language and run time. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. The new third edition just came out. I can’t wait to reread it.
Thinking In Systems by Donella H. Meadows – This is not a programming book, but good exploration of perspectives you should keep in mind when building things.
Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Aaron Hillegass – While I earned a living building web applications using PHP and Rails, outside of work, I was (as a hobby) learning how to create GUI apps on Mac OS X. This book was a life-changing experience for me. First, giving me a space to learn Cocoa, which eventually became my full-time work, but then secondly, when I joined Big Nerd Ranch to become a teacher myself.
Clean Code by Robert C. Martin – This book gets some shade these days, but I recall it being one of the first books that started to get me to question the aesthetics of my code and I think highly of that event.

User Interfaces

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug – I loved how approachable and immediately actionable this book was for my early work.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman – This book forever changed how I look at doors.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin P. Williams – Wonderful introduction to core design concepts.
Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan – Great focused review of common presentation patterns.

Product Development

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick – Will help ensure you know how to ask questions and get feedback. TL;DR: Everyone is lying to you.
The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries – This is not a product development methodology but a great collection of values by which to organize your processes.
Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman – Sharp, focused advice on how to work backward and get that project shipped.
Shape Up by Ryan Singer – Curiously enough, I’ve joined multiple teams that tried Shape Up, and it did not take just before my joining. Personally, I do think there are some good aspects to shape up, like pitch writing and UI breadboarding. If I had sovereignty over a team project, I’d like to get more experience with this style.

Honorable Mention

The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky – Writing this list, I can not recall specific essays, but I have vivid memories of enjoying this collection. It represents to me a golden age of technical blogging. I miss those days. Maybe it is time for a re-read?

Is there something I missed? Let me know your favorites.

March 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 19:43:02 -0400

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about March 2024.

Work

Work is ok. Chipping away at our big project. Some things feel like they take forever as I need to unpack our complex domain and/or more advanced LiveView things.

Feel like I continue to improve my impact with the team. Getting well known for in-depth code reviews. Also trying to mind the balance of providing deep feedback without coming off like an asshole.

My big goal for the month is to get my head around PowerSchool’s career ladder and then figure out what I should be doing to advance in rank/compensation.

Side Projects

Nothing to report.

Tech Education / Books

I’m actively reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software for Elixir Book Club. I’m enjoying it and hope to start expressing some of what I’m learning at work and elsewhere soon.

Still slowly working through the book version of Productive Field Guide. I filled out my roles and arete. Next up is shaping some projects and wanted outcomes.

Have not yet started the Obsidian Field Guide, but I am using Obsidian a bit at work and on my personal laptop. Still waiting to see if it will stick. Changing some writing habits (and hotkeys) takes time.

Video Games

Enjoying MLB: The Show 24. Been focusing a lot on the BR program, but man the grind is slow. I think it closes in 10 days so if I want to finish will need to give it more of my time.

Started a new farm using Stardew Valley 1.6, but only a few days in.

Baseball

Baseball is back. Took off on Friday to watch opening day (though the Phillies lost). My first game in-person is Friday, April 12th.

Walks and Exercise

No walks, but I’m hoping the weather will welcome that soon.

Keeping up with Supernatural for some exercise about twice a week.

Also, got a nice swimming session in last week at the YMCA. Should try to make that happen more often.

What’s Next?

Nothing too crazy on deck for April. Been keeping up with life management things (taxes, dentist) and expect more of that. I have jury duty mid-month.

Hopefully, these notes are interesting to you (or me in the future). If you have any questions or feedback, let me know.

February 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:25:14 -0400

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about February 2024.

Work

As shared last month, the big recent work news was not only my new full-time job (which I started in December 2023) but also the Allovue acquisition by PowerSchool. Based on that, February saw continued adjustments at work, and they will continue in March.

I’ve about wrapped up my first 90 days at Allovue. Those were laid out with lots of mini-goals. Now, I’m kind of anxious to define my growth plans and what I should focus on outside of individual contributions and team support. I’ve started tinkering with improving our AppSignal integration, but I need to firm up the deliverables and timeline – AND make it happen when daily chaos is easy to succumb to.

Side Projects

StudyHall is still inactive. Nothing much changed from the last month’s review. I am considering a smaller voting app to work on in its stead so I can build something (and explore my book club lessons).

Tech Education / Books

I finished watching the Productive Field Guide by MacSparky. I enjoyed the perspectives and approaches shared. I am now working through the book version and am slowly exploring some of the personal journalism exercises. I consider the course open for me.

I purchased a follow-up course, the Obsidian Field Guide. I want to work through it as I contemplate a move from Notion to Obsidian.

Another recent change is a dedicated attempt to focus on my personal stuff for 1 hour before starting job work. I did this for a few days and really enjoyed the morning brain time to dedicate to my own things. A few of these days was for boring tax stuff, but still glad to get it done, and avoid trying to do it in the evening when I’m exhausted.

Video Games

I’m jumping around MLB: The Show 23 (vs. CPU postseason), Civilization 6, and FF7: Remake.

I bought FF7: Rebirth, but I’m going to try to finish my other playthrough before jumping in. No spoilers!

Looking forward to MLB: The Show 24 and Stardew Valley 1.6, which both come out in March.

Baseball

I am watching a few spring training games. I took off work for opening day, though I’m only watching from home and not going to the park.

Walks and Exercise

I haven’t gone on any walks, but I have been keeping up with Supernatural for some exercise. I hope to start going on morning walks as the weather gets warmer.

What’s Next?

I was supposed to use February as a goal-setting month, and while I did not get there as fully as I wanted, I did enjoy the self-exploration of the Productivity Field Guide, which helped me reflect on who I want to be first. I’m getting there.

Hopefully, these notes are interesting to you (or me in the future). If you have any questions or feedback, let me know.

January 2024 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0500

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about January 2024.

Work

In last month’s review, I shared my early notes on my new job at Allovue. Well, the BIG news of January is that PowerSchool acquired Allovue. I have not been laid off (a relief considering my very recent hire date). My employment title, salary, and benefits are mostly a 1:1 carryover at the new company.

In the short term, once we get through the HR and operational changes, I suspect things will return to normal as we continue to focus on specific projects already planned for 2024. In the long term, I don’t know how things will land. We are going from a 50-ish person company crafted with a particular kind of culture to a much larger 3500-person, publicly traded, corporate company.

Actual coding work is getting better. I’m getting more comfortable with the accounting product domains and accelerating my contributions. Most of these have been in the form of Phoenix components, and live component refactors while delivering some new features to our Budget app.

I’m also sprinkling in some tech lead style work, shaping discussions for the team to work through coding styles and patterns. Specifically, this month, we made some headway with localization work, which has already started but continues evolving.

Looking ahead towards February, I’m hopeful to start to better design some personal development on observability and see if we can improve our use of AppSignal.

Side Projects

There has not been any real progress on StudyHall, though I spent a recent Saturday brainstorming ideas for the new year.

I’m debating walking back from Svelte to LiveView for the UI. My general feeling is that considering the limited time I’ll be able to spend on StudyHall with my new job, I cannot expect to carve out enough time to learn and keep current with Svelte. It might be better for me to just double dip into my LiveView knowledge and experience I’m already using and advancing at my job. The decision needs to be driven by whether I view this project as an educational experiment or a legitimate side hustle that I want to be profitable. I don’t know where I land on that currently.

I’ll also share that I’m exhausted once my workday is done. Finding energy for much of anything productive off work hours has been challenging. Some of that will fade as my onboarding phase starts to end, but it will also take more discipline to create stronger boundaries for my time, work hard to avoid mindless YouTube time, etc.

Tech Education / Books

Finished reading Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves for Elixir Book Club. I still have yet to finish all the code work from this, but I hope to wrap it up soon.

Finished reading Myst: Book of Atrus.

Stalled on reading Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence.

Started reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software for Elixir Book Club.

Started watching/reading the Productive Field Guide by MacSparky.

Video Games

Some MLB: The Show Battle Royal, a fair amount of Civilization 6, started a replay of FF7 Remake.

Still looking forward to Stardew Valley 1.6, which is coming soon™.

Likely to buy FF7 Rebirth but might delay playing it until I finish my replay of its previous installment.

Very much looking forward to MLB: The Show 24 – though sad to see it is not the system revamp version we wanted.

Baseball

I am thirsty for baseball season. I bought a pair of game tickets for 2024. One is the first Brewers game to show love for Rhys Hoskins.

Walks and Exercise

I’ve been getting back into Supernatural, a VR workout game. I have been playing it regularly over the past month and enjoying it. It’s an excellent substitute for morning walks while I wait for the weather to get warmer.

I have been thinking about the YMCA pool. I want to get back into a habit of a morning swim again.

What’s Next?

Last month, I shared my interest in looking towards January and the new year with a hope for stability, and with the surprise job acquisition, January was anything but stable. Here is hoping February is better at this.

Moreover, the goal is to come out of February with a better plan of attack for the new year. Do some soul-searching to understand my priorities and develop habits to get me there.

Hopefully, these notes are interesting to you (or me in the future). If you have any questions or feedback, let me know.

December 2023 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 16:09:46 -0500

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about December 2023.

Work

This month, I started my new job, putting in about three weeks before the holiday, which the company was fully closed for, which was nice.

The first week was a lot of general onboarding activities and some social/cultural events. After getting the code, I started to make some small technical contributions. However, I avoided any fundamental changes to the domain logic of the app (as I still had/have a lot to learn about education accounting).

In week two, we had two all-hands online company events, which served as a way to share progress, goals, and execution plans. I appreciate the transparency and big picture of these shares. Later, I even had an opportunity to have 1:1 time with the CEO and get more details. I always view myself as a well-rounded developer interested in the business as much as technical details, so all of this felt very good.

In week three, I started to bite into more significant tickets, which included a fair amount of time refactoring Live Components into Functional Components and other page layout cleanup (in prep for future work). I gained more experience with planning, organizing, tracking, reviewing, and merging work through all this. I’m still moving more slowly than I’d like, hoping that will pass soon. This week, I also did a lengthy product tour with one of the product managers (the first of a few meetings), which was very helpful.

Week four was, of course, the Christmas break.

Side Projects

StudyHall continues to be very stagnant, spending my spare time this month on Christmas things and resting (new job info consumption can be very draining day-to-day).

Tech Education / Books

Finished listening to The Martian audio book.

Still reading Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence though slower as of late.

Still reading Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves for Elixir Book Club, which also included some limited hardware acquisition and assembly.

Still reading Myst: Book of Atrus.

Video Games

Jumping around a bit.

Bought and played Mario RPG. Still playing MLB: The Show some. Started Red Dead 1, but not too far in. Reinstalled Civilization 6 on a bit of a whim over the holiday break. Also started a brand new Stardew Valley farm one night (though I’m viewing it as a temp farm and will likely re-roll once the 1.6 update comes out).

Walks and Exercise

Pretty low activity. I am tracking about one good walk a week.

My work schedule is pretty flexible, so I should be able to start getting some regular exercise in before work, BUT like anything – I need to make it happen.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead to January, my big goal is to get into a flow with my new job. Secondary is a goal to determine my priorities in my new limited side project time. Do I want to continue to StudyHall or focus on something more contained? I’m not sure.

I also need to continue to hand off some small client work to new folks.

I also have to get a handle on my new income, budget, and benefit changes aligned (alongside the cancellation of my previous health insurance).

Hopefully these notes are interesting to you (or future me). If you have any questions or feedback. Let me know.

November 2023 Review

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 12:08:16 -0500

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about November 2023.

Work

The big news is the announcement of my new job.

I applied on August 28th and did four interviews, including a two and half hour coding session (a mix of PR review, ticket grooming, and actual coding exercise). Was given the offer letter on November 13th.

To the people who are juggling multiple job applications at the same time. Yikes. That is a lot of work.

Anyways, with the acceptance of the job offer, I’ve been off-boarding my current clients. The one is pretty much done, though I offered to do a handoff meeting with my replacement in the next week or so. The other client will start looking for a replacement in January as they are trying to resolve some other open company issues. My work there is mostly just making sure the lights stay on, so I do not expect much overhead problems while I ramp up on my new gig.

I start on Monday, December 4th.

Side Projects

StudyHall has been very stagnant. I’m just not finding the energy for regular progress in recent weeks.

Not specifically a side project, but it kind of has that vibe: this month, I attended Philly’s Barcamp event. It was a lot of fun, and seeing so many people I hadn’t connected with in a while felt great. The day flew by. I wish that we had a centralized after-party for more hallway-track conversations, but maybe next year.

Tech Education / Books

Finished Wireframing for Everyone.

Finished Genetic Algorithms in Elixir with the Elixir Book Club.

Finished my second reading of Refactoring UI, though, to be honest, I kind of burned through the end to get it off my currently reading list. It’s one of the better UI books and a speedy read. I started a second reading a few months ago when I was focused on wireframe things for StudyHall, and then it just sat there (virtually, on my iPad).

Still reading Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence,

Started Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves for Elixir Book Club.

Started Myst: Book of Atrus on a whim, looking for something light. It was a book I read almost 20 years ago, and recall finishing it in a single weekend.

Phillies

Well, since looking back at my last journal entry, I have the sad responsibility of reporting that the Phillies did not win the National League Championship series and did not return to the World Series.

Baseball playoffs are about staying hot, and the Phillies just got cold. Losing two in a row at home to close it out still seems unthinkable. How did that happen?!

Video Games

Finished my playthrough of Red Dead 2. Anxious to start Red Dead 1, but I’m playing around with a few other games first.

I got both Mario Wonder and Mario RPG. Both are fun. I only played Mario RPG once (I rented it at Blockbuster back in the day), so it’s a pretty fresh playthrough for me.

Curiously, I have gotten back into MLB: The Show. I took off during set 4 (post all-star game) but have been active during set 5 (finishing most programs, including my first BR program). Set 6 starts December 21st, and that will unlock all the set cards, allowing you to build a team with anyone, which should be fun.

I bought Sea of Stars based on some friend’s recommendations but have yet to play it.

Walks and Exercise

It’s pretty low activity. I am tracking about one good walk a week. Sadly, it’s getting colder, so if I want to return to form, I’ll probably have to start walking indoors at the YMCA like last year.

Following up on the Ring Fit, I did it for about two weeks but found the leg strap did not stay in place, which was frustrating. If I want to find an in-house cardio thing, I might have to look at my old Quest VR or some Apple fitness things.

My journal entries averaged about once a month, so perhaps this new monthly recap format might be a better fit. We’ll see.

Announcing my New Full-Time Job

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 18:05:27 -0500

I have some big news: Starting December 4th, I’ll be working full-time as a Senior Elixir Developer for Allovue, where they build web-based accounting software for school districts.

This change is particularly significant because I’ve been self-employed as a freelance consultant for most of my career.

Frankly, finding consistent Elixir contracts over the last 18 months has been challenging. I’ve had some ongoing client work, but I have generally described the situation as underemployed to friends and family. While I continue to enjoy Elixir, compared to my historic iOS and Rails contracting, I found companies preferring full-time employees or more extensive consultancy team assignments. Sometimes, I was lucky enough to get subcontracts for such teams, but being outside of those relationships disadvantaged me.

With that context, I started to keep an open mind and consider different job openings a few months ago. When it came to Allovue, I felt aligned with what they were doing and looking for. The interview process took some time, and I kept my expectations in check because you never really know how these things will turn out.

When I eventually got the offer and considered all my observations about the opportunity, it was a good fit. My primary responsibilities will include:

Mentoring the junior contributors.
Owning individual threads of Elixir and LiveView work.
Helping explore larger product and architecture decisions.

I’ll share more as things get going. It’s going to be an exciting new year for sure.

How to Run a Successful Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:21:13 -0500

I’ve been a member (and organizer) of many professional-oriented book clubs in my career. I find them a valuable way to connect with peers, keep up with my reading goals, discover new ideas, and learn from other points of view.

Running a book club can be a relatively low-cost and high-value experience. To help, I thought I’d document how I tend to prefer book clubs. These recommendations lean more towards work and professional book clubs and not the social and entertainment variety — though I’m sure some ideas translate.

Picking your books

If you want to get started, I’d recommend just picking a book you are interested in reading and forming a group around it. You might consider trying to assemble a group and letting them pick the first book, but I think it’s better to attract people with a specific title than a foggy concept.

As you finish a book, ask the group for next book suggestions and develop a prospect list. I recommend asking folks to submit a ranked vote against the prospect list (allowing people to vote with priorities), and then you, as the moderator, can choose a book using those signals. You might even consider non-books, like video courses, and work through the material as a cohort.

Aside: I actually built my own tool to run these ranked votes. You can use it too. It is free with no account creation necessary: RankedVote.app

Remember, you don’t need to pick the book that wins the vote. Sometimes, identifying a book that you identify will generate better discussions, benefit members who need help in that area, or draw more people to the club (introduction books tend to draw a bigger audience) might be a better choice for the group’s needs.

Scheduling and Group Size

Like early book choices, you should just pick a good time for you and get started. Be mindful of time zones if you want to attract people across continents. Also, avoid other meetup groups of the same topic that might overlap. I personally like weekly for work-related book clubs, but if the group is more casual, I think bi-weekly is fine, too. Eventually, as you start new books, you can revisit the schedule to accommodate better those who are showing up.

The ideal group size is probably 8 to 10 people (to ensure you have enough conversations), but you can get by with as few as 2-3 when getting started. Also, expect people to fall off during a book. It happens as people have other responsibilities and interests, and usually, this book club is rightfully a low priority. Don’t let it get you down. If they drop, wish them well and welcome them back when you start a new book. Don’t take it personally.

Venue and Video Tools

All the book clubs I’ve ever participated in or run have been online. For venue, I prefer Zoom for video quality consistency (and recording tools), but Discord is nice for having a place for people to chat between meeting times.

In recent book clubs, we’ve started recording the sessions. I make it clear that the meeting is being recorded and why. I also offered the attendees the option to request that parts be scrubbed if needed.

The main goal of the recordings is to help people who miss a week or two stay connected for an eventual return. We may also start to clip some of the conversations for social sharing and promotion, but it has not happened yet.

We publish the recordings inside our chat system and not on the public internet. I’m a little hesitant to post a full public recording as it will shape the discussion, and sometimes, people like to vent about their current work or past projects. Frankly, just having any recording will impact what people say, so you may choose not to do this to keep the floor more open—still figuring this out myself.

Running a Meeting

The format for most of my book clubs is an hour-long meeting. We try to rotate volunteers to summarize each chapter before opening the discussions. A typical meeting covers 2-3 chapters with 10-minute chapter summaries and 10-15 minutes of discussion per chapter. We do not enforce this schedule. If the room is having productive, even off-topic discussions, we let them play out. If I am summarizing a chapter and have a PDF version of the book, I often like to share my screen so they can see the page visuals and code snippets of interest.

I’ve heard of other groups that mix in a bit of out-of-meeting work. Something like a shared Google document where people are encouraged to capture their notes and thoughts outside the meeting so the meeting time can focus on the most valuable interactions. I even have a peer who was working on software that helps structure that kind of workflow, though I have not used it myself.

In general, a shared collaborative Google doc (or substitute) is valuable for any online meeting, in my experience.

Marketing and Promotion

I think it’s helpful to have a website presence to point to when promoting the book club. You don’t need much more than a single page sharing:

The goals of the club.
The current book.
When and where you meet, ideally with a calendar-friendly link.
Who to contact with questions.

Check out the Elixir Book Club page for a sample. GitHub and GitHub Pages are a great solution for this.

When it’s time to promote your club and/or a new book choice, I would promote it to the same circles in your community that share educational content and links. Think forums, Slacks, Discords, social media accounts, hash tags, etc.

Shared Responsibilities

In addition to volunteers doing chapter summaries, if you can find other ways to get other people involved in the management work of the book club, (eg: updating the website, editing the recording, etc) the chances for the book club to continue well into the future goes way up. Elixir Book Club has been going strong for years, even as different leadership has come and gone.

Those are my notes. I hope they inspire you to start or join a book club. If you have any thoughts or tips I missed, do consider shooting me an email. Thanks.

Journal -- October 20, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:07:56 -0400

Monday, October 20, 2023 – It’s been over a month since I did a casual journal – so here we go.

Work

Work has been good. Still in an underemployed amount of client work phase, but working more hours this month than last, so I’ll take that as good news.

For my main client, I’ve been focusing on API consumption-related features, getting our Microsoft features out into production, and getting started on some Slack logic.

I still hope to land more hours and will start promoting again soon.

Side Projects

Course Dreamers blog has been quiet. There was a post on September 22, Your Student Finished the Course; Now What?, but nowhere near the weekly goals I originally was shooting for.

StudyHall has gotten most of my attention in recent weeks. You can check out the completed items on the project board or raw commits for an overview. I also recorded a YouTube review of October progress.

My recorded work through the Exercism JavaScript track has slowed, but did see a few videos recently. I hope to jump back in soon.

While I fell short in some goals, I feel good about my limited progress.

Tech Education / Books

Still reading Wireframing for Everyone (almost done), Genetic Algorithms in Elixir (half-way done, and keeping up with the book club), and have also recently started Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence. Alongside that book, I also worked through some Honeycomb tutorials.

You can follow me on GoodReads for more book progress (though I am considering other options).

Phillies

The Phillies have been doing great in the postseason. Each game is a significant energy investment but well worth it. Tonight is game 4 of the NLCS.

Video Games

Working through a playthrough of Red Dead 2 (mainly focusing on the story, though I did upgrade most of the camp options). I’m also playing Majora’s Mask on the 3DS (which curiously feels like a fall game for me).

Next up: Red Dead 1 PS4 port, Mario Wonder, Mario RPG remake, and Sea of Stars.

Walks and Exercise

Doing a little better. Walking a bit and also playing with Ring Fit Adventure on Switch. Not sure I’ll keep up on that one. I’ve found the leg strap hard to keep in place and very distracting. Still, as the cold weather continues to mount, I will need some kind of indoor cardio.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and your interest.

Journal -- September 11, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 20:24:24 -0400

Monday, September 11, 2023 – A regular check-in of personal things.

Work

Work has been relatively busy.

My one client, who is in a maintenance-type contract, had multiple downtime issues recently. I was able to deal with the Elixir incident personally but was more on the sidelines for an Android build issue.

For my other part-time client, I continue to hack on API consumption tasks (about 10 hours a week), with a recent focus on Microsoft Graph and Slack. One nugget of good news is that I am now working in the main parent repo instead of an isolated one, making some things more manageable. In addition to my active API work, I’d like to spend a little time helping them evolve their CI/CD and production observability, but we’ll see.

I still need more hours. I spent some time reaching out to some prospects but still waiting for solid leads.

Side Projects

Posted two new blog posts on Course Dreamers since my last journal entry, How to Keep Student Attention During an Online Course and Your Course Needs Regular, Interactive Feedback Loops To Keep Students Out of Tutorial Hell, but not hitting the content goals I have for myself. I should post one article a week and a few other links.

I finished up my experiment projects with Ash and Svelte. I also posted a few YouTube videos talking about them: Early thoughts on using Ash Framework to produce a GraphQL API and Reviewing my decision to try Svelte/SvelteKit over LiveView for StudyHall.

With those experiments done, I kicked off my new project, StudyHall. I describe StudyHall with:

Goal: To create open-source software and an accessible platform that allows people to teach the art of programming.

It’s all vague as I’m still in the research phase. You can check out the main project repo and project board. I am working on some tech things, but I plan to spend most of my upcoming time on wireframing and brainstorming ideas.

I also bought a new microphone, hoping to do some podcasting for Course Dreamers.

Tech Education / Books

To help my currently soft JavaScript skills, I finished working through the Fireship Modern JavaScript Course and am working through the Exercism JavaScript track and recording myself doing it. I also want to do something with TypeScript, but I don’t know what resources I’ll use.

I started the VS Code Magic Tricks Course on Fireship a few weeks ago but have yet to make much progress recently. I want to give it some more of my time and finish soon.

I finished reading Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software and posted a new review.

I finished reading The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital and posted a review.

I finished listening to the audiobook Upgrade by Blake Crouch and posted a review.

Currently reading:

Wireframing for Everyone - to help me get into a good drawing mindset as I explore some courseware UI ideas.
Genetic Algorithms in Elixir as part of Elixir Book Club.
Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money - an old audiobook I bought a while ago and thought I’d check it out. It’s ok but pretty introductory so far.

You can follow me on GoodReads for more book progress (though I am considering other options).

Phillies

I’m excited for the last few weeks and the start of the playoffs. The wild card feels solid, but we need to finish strong. I have been going to a bunch of games. I will be at tomorrow’s Braves game with my sister and maybe the Mets next week.

Video Games

I’m not playing MLB: The Show as much. Maybe I just needed a break.

Casually playing Read Dead 2, and Stardew Valley on some nights, but nothing too crazy. I ordered the Red Dead 1 PS4 port and will likely play it after my current playthrough of Red Dead 2.

Walks and Exercise

I am doing better and have been walking a few days a week. I hope to start to mix in some other activities like swimming and basketball soon. I also need to follow up with better eating, but happy to make some progress.

That was a lot of stuff. Once again, I am reminded I should do this more often.

Journal -- August 6, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 15:17:32 -0400

Sunday, August 6, 2023 – A quick recap of recent personal things. Nothing earth-shattering, just a regular journal.

Work

Work things have been a little busier since my last update.

My one retainer client (who could be considered a maintenance/fire alarm type of contract) had some curious push notification behavior to look into. It has yet to result in any actionable code changes, but it had me work some hours and document those findings.

For another client, which is relatively new, I’ve been working about 8-10 hours a week, helping them shape some Google OAuth and API consumption. This might expand to more hours or responsibilities, but I’m just part-time helping them move some concepts forward for now.

Those hours are inadequate for my needs, so I need to put more energy into availability promotion this upcoming week. I will also make an extra effort to attend some Elixir meetups this week to socialize more.

In addition to promoting my Elixir skills, I’ll push a little into Svelte work, selling my interest but not specifically my experience. It would be cool to get some more production time in, even if sacrificing the hourly rate a bit.

Speaking of rates, this past week, I changed my published rate from:

My rate is ~~$125-$200~~ $100-$150 per hour, with discounts available for ~~good alignment or~~ open-source initiatives.

I am not happy about that, but it’s just an outcome of the economic realities I see.

Side Projects

I officially have moved on from Franklin and ElixirClub, spending some time in recent weeks to close down website and mark repos as archived.

I also updated my side project index page, promoting my new active side project interests, which for now is represented by my new in-development blog, Course Dreamers. The site is pretty bare-bones at the moment but is described on the about page as:

Course Dreamers is a new blog where I share my research, observations, and links regarding the work of programmers and technically-minded folks building online courses, some for the first time.

I have taught in various forms across my career, including onsite corporate workshops for iOS development (at Amazon, Google, and TripAdvisor) and as an adjust professor at Drexel University teaching modern web design (for the time, back in 2004).

Teaching and building courses can be an extremely rewarding extension of your programming career – but it’s a challenging skill like any other. Course Dreamer aims to help you on that path to producing loved and successful courses for your students.

I hope to get into a groove posting content soon™ and eventually start kicking tires on some courseware ideas.

Tech Education / Books

I paused working through the MVP Elixir course and instead put some time into the Svelte course on Fireship. Overall, I got some good experience from the course and even posted some other observations on Course Dreamers.

I don’t know what course I’ll be working through next. Here are a few on my radar:

VS Code Magic Tricks Course (Fireship)
Modern JavaScript Full Course (Fireship)
Beginner’s TypeScript

The JavaScript/TypeScript courses would be for improving my foundational Svelte understandings. The VS Code one is more of a preparation for possibly offering my own collection of VS Code tips in some fashion.

After a few slow months of book reading, I’ve started getting some good hours in, including:

Wireframing for Everyone - to help me get into a good drawing mindset as I explore some courseware UI ideas.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Originally, I read this in August of 2020 and am re-reading to get into a good open source mindset for the courseware project.
The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital - I’m a casual member of the MicroConf community, and this is a book by the principal organizer there. It’s not explicitly written for my current scenario (since it assumes product-market fit and helps you grow large), but I feel like I get some valuable insights. Nothing crazy new if you are already listening to those podcasts and conference videos, but overall a nice, lean, focused book so far.

You can follow me on GoodReads for more book progress (though I am considering other options).

Phillies

When they are good, they are good. When they are bad, they are really bad.

Still enjoying the season. I went to one of the Orioles games last week and will be headed to a Nationals game on Tuesday.

Video Games

Still grinding MLB: The Show content regularly. Still struggling in ranked play, with fastballs I can’t catch up to.

I played about 28% of Final Fantasy 16. It has been so-so, and while I expect to keep at it, I’m wondering if some other game will take away my attention.

I put a few game sessions into a new character on Red Dead Online. I had the itch to play cowboy and wasn’t sure if I wanted to kick off a whole new story mode. Eventually, the online grind (along with it being a dead game) pushed me to kick off an actual story mode playthrough last night. Not sure if I’ll keep at it or not. I do love putting on the headphones and getting lost in that world.

Aside: Besides being a dead game that no longer gets support from Rockstar, it is infuriating how the quest reward structure of Red Dead Online works. If you are given, say, 15 minutes to do something, you get less money if you do it quickly. The system incentivizes you to sit there, do nothing, and only finish the quest after 12 minutes for a maximum reward. I can’t believe they did not fix that mistake during development. It’s so dumb.

I’m also keeping an eye out for a possible Read Dead 1 remake/remaster that is being rumored. Would love to play that (I never did).

Walks and Exercise

Still only walking about once a week. The loss of stamina, compared to where I was when I was doing four times a week, is very noticeable.

I enjoyed some walks down the shore at the end of June, but the need to get better back at home is apparent.

That’s it for today. Thanks for your interest.

Early Svelte Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 17:25:51 -0400

After more than five years of giving my full attention to Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView as the primary toolkit I use to build web apps, over the last few weeks, I’ve started to sample some other tech stacks, with an initial focus on Svelte and SvelteKit. Here are some early thoughts.

Why the move?

This move comes from an ongoing, uneasy feeling that the current LiveView ecosystem lacks the significant and diverse set of choices for libraries that I find myself looking for to help me stand up new UI ideas quickly. LiveView will allow you to build almost anything; you just have to make it yourself.

I do observe improvements to the core LiveView technologies that may help improve community offerings in the future, but for now, this is how I see it.

Additionally, there is a particular set of user interactions that I am interested in providing in my user experiences (file uploads, drag and drop, rich animations) that, while possible in LiveView, none-the-less require JavaScript – and then I ask myself why not just work in that environment from the beginning?

I also feel like the WebSocket nature of LiveView has some unfortunate tradeoffs regarding offline or flaky network/phone environments. It hasn’t been a significant blocker in my production work, but it is always part of the conversation. If I were to build something with a more common mobile web experience target, I’d be worried about the WebSocket tradeoff.

To be clear, Elixir and Phoenix, in general, I’m still very positive about. Suppose I were to use a different frontend technology. In that case, I suspect I’d still use an Elixir/Phoenix project to provide a GraphQL API, manage jobs, push notifications, emails, and all the other platform needs. I might even still use LiveView for an admin area.

Why Svelte?

Similar to an approach that led me to Elixir many years ago, I took some time to review the current state of web frontend technologies. If I were to follow the herd I’d probably pick React and/or Next.js, but there was just something special about Svelte for me.

A few notable things:

First off, Svelte is a component system and SvelteKit is a web framework.
Svelte components are compiled and executed in the browser space using standard JavaScript. There is no typical React-like runtime, and the code generated is much leaner than the historic SPA JavaScript bundle sizes.
You can do server-side rendering to provide SEO-friendly HTML for non-authenticated pages.
The style of building Svelte components is light and approachable.
There are significant animation tools within Svelte to provide a dynamic presentation of UI elements.
The Svelte project and community seem lively and are not overpowered by an individual corporation.
The technology is a little on the younger side, which does hamper the community library interest that kicked off this search, but I’m seeing enough and seeing good momentum that I think I’ll be happy.
The store model for reactive data seems well structured.
There was a great set of interactive tutorials that helped me get stated. Afterwards I also worked through the Fireship course (though I’m not sure I’d recommend it).

A few negative tradeoffs and concerns on my mind:

Generally speaking, I do not love the JavaScript ecosystem. I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible over the last 15+ years (avoiding it with ease during my Apple time and avoiding it a lot during my Elixir time).
Stale npm projects can get dangerous quickly as modules go missing or dependency issues are introduced. Even working on the just released Fireship course, I hit issues trying to deploy; though this was more an experimental Firebase deploy thing than a Svelte thing; but it speaks to my worries of npm in general.
The lack of testing tools in the standard SvelteKit project template is a little worrisome.

My next steps are to wireframe a new project idea I’ve been pondering and then get hacking to see how I like it. You can only do so many tutorials.

Learn one new language a year.

This Svelte experiment is also good for my consulting/career. It’s been harder to find regular consulting work, and expanding my technical skillset might lead to a few more opportunities.

I’ve always promoted the idea of learning one new language a year, even when you will not be applying them right away. In 2021 it was Rust, and in 2022 it was event sourcing. It feels like 2023 is the year of Svelte.

Circle Sign-Up Forms and Credit Card Fraud

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

I’m a long-time fan of work done at freeCodeCamp and was sad to read this article a few years ago about how someone had used their online donation form to test/validate stolen credit cards (for later sale on the dark web). The amount of headaches this kind of thing causes (for all parties) is a nightmare. Refunds need to be issued, credit card fees paid regardless of refund status, cleaning up one’s accounting and membership books.

A few years later, it was my time to join the party.

Closed now, but in early 2023, I ran a paid-for community called ElixirClub. We ran the group on a platform called Circle. Circle integrates with Stripe for credit card subscriptions, and there was a public sign-up page to join my community.

On June 10th, I started observing lots of new member sign-ups. Most failed because of various expected credit card reasons (bad CVV, expired, etc.), but some were going through. Stripe has documentation on this phenomenon.

My initial action was to shut down the sign-up form, contact support for both companies and follow Stripes refund recommendations as speedily as possible.

I won’t detail my full interactions but suffice it to say:

Stripe was helpful over email and later via phone support. They instructed me on how to issue the refunds and how this concern should be addressed at the web form level. I explained that I was at the mercy of a third-party tool, and they encouraged follow-up so as to make sure this was resolved as best as possible to avoid future issues.

Circle’s response was less encouraging. It took them multiple days to respond and closed the conversation with: “I added this as a new feature request here, we will discuss and triage it for the next quarter.”

Next quarter?

Now my community, ElixirClub, was very small and very quiet, so it was easy to observe and react to the fraud since there were no real sign-ups anyways – but I feel so bad for the successful Circle community manager who can not do anything to add the needed technical friction to their own sign-up forms and cannot turn if off either.

I’d be shocked if this was not affecting other Circle users.

This is not a feature request; this is a high-priority security issue, and Circle’s failure to see it as such is embarrassing.

ElixirClub is closing for other reasons, so I’m off Circle, but sharing this in the hope it helps awareness of the general issue and nudges Circle to give this problem the attention it deserves.

Shutting Down ElixirClub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0400

After six months, today I announced ElixirClub’s closure. For context and for those many souls who did not know:

ElixirClub is (was/hopped to be) an outcome-oriented community that helps Elixir developers finish their side projects.

I ran the site on Circle, hosted some weekly events and async project update threads – but the hard truth is that I was not able to create even the modest-sized community that I was aiming for.

There are reasons and lessons to be learned about pricing, pitches and what not. Ultimately it was very niche target and did not have a strong marketing angle.

I thought it was best to close it down, issue refunds (automated and manual) as best I can and move on. To what? I have no idea.

There is a awful bad taste anytime you put you and a side project of yours out there, …and it fails.

It’s been many years since I had a solid side project win and I’d be lying if I did not also share, I feel like I’ve lost some of the side project drive I’ve had in the past.

I am trying to “just keep swimming” as it were and even today have a new little side project in the wings, but I’m really hoping for a win soon™.

Journal -- June 12, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:16:24 -0400

Monday, June 12, 2023 – Time for the regular check-in to braindump what I’ve been up to and what I’m thinking about. Who reads this stuff?

Work

I continue to look for contract and/or full-time Elixir work. Hire me!

It’s been a quiet and slow spring, but there are small signs of promise. Took a few more calls and emails in the last 4 weeks than the 4 before that.

Not too much else to share. In general, just feels off since normally I turn away work and have people come to me. It’s been strange to have to flip it and do the outreach myself.

Franklin

As posted, I’ve put Franklin on-hold while I consider if I really want to move away from Hugo. I suspect I will stick with Hugo.

One related idea is to stick with Hugo and then maybe create a LiveView (or maybe Svelte?) UI experience to let me stage PRs for the Hugo-powered blog to help overcome the weight of editing stuff in VS Code. There is a project called Keystatic which is playing around with similar ideas. I dunno if the pain is really that large or worth my time but we’ll see.

Tech Education

I finished working through the LiveView course and started the Elixir MVP course. Also started tinkering and reading up on both Ash and Svelte. I even joined Fireship.io to check out some of their content.

ElixirBookClub continues to work through Software Design X-Rays: Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis. We finished Chapter 5 on Sunday.

Next Side Project?

I continue to fiddle with ideas and audiences. Part of this has me revisiting the 30x500 course I worked through before. The audience I am considering is “digital course builders”. I feel like I align with them, have been a member in the past, and would be interested in building some sharp tools to help them out. It’s all research at this phase. I’m planning to start blogging to that audience soon and will share when it’s public. (That content will likely not be posted here, but I dunno – maybe it should be?)

Walks and Exercise

Slacking. Been walking about once a week. Weather is great now, which is no longer an excuse. Next week I’ll be down the shore and planning to walk in the mornings there. Beach and boardwalk should make for a nice new environment.

EMPEX

I did not attend EMPEX as I was planning. I saw the NY smoke issues, and even from what I was experiencing in Philly, it was bad. I have some historic asthma issues and had to make a call mid-day Wednesday, and in that moment, I did not want to put myself in a situation where I’d be traveling in the smoke.

It’s a shame because by Friday (the day of the conference) it had cleared up a lot. Oh wells.

Vacation

Next week I’ll be headed to the Jersey shore with my sister for a week. Should be fun. Looking forward to some quality beach and pool time.

ElixirClub

No big movement on this front, though I did have an issue with fraud credit cards which was fun. I’ll probably make some bigger decisions about this and PhillyElixir when I get back.

Phillies

The up-and-down emotional ride of 2023 continues. Still watching a lot of games day to day, sometimes just listening to the radio broadcast while grinding content in MLB: The Show.

Need to figure out my next game at the park. I have tickets for the Braves series, but I’ll be down the shore.

Video Games

In addition to playing MLB: The Show I’m also finishing up Breath of the Wild. I have like 4 more shrines to get to 120, and then I think I’ll go to the end-game boss and maybe try some of the DLC. Not sure what will be after that.

Really psyched for Cities Skylines 2, FF16, FF7: Rebirth, which have all seen trailers recently.

Side Project Launch Cold Feet

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:55:49 -0400

Almost a year ago I documented my interest in re-building this blog in an Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView app for the purpose of learning event-sourcing and some new UI concepts. The good news, that project is functionally complete. The bad news, I’m not sure I want to launch it.

When I posted the project outline in “Challenges and Risks” I said:

Not using an out-of-the-box blog system will put notable stress on me to maintain the code and deployment. It will likely be more complex and costly than it was hosting a static website.

That stress is here and front in my mind. To migrate I’ll have to destructure my simple markdown/image folders into a more complex database and S3 storage system and then maintain it. I’m not sure I want to do that.

The public outcome of this project is nothing crazy new / innovative. It’s basically the same kind of website I have today – just more work for me to maintain. I dunno what I want to do.

For now, I think I’m going to step back from Franklin for a month or so and rethink it all. Should I decide to shelve the project, I’ll still be happy with what I learned along the way and could easily extract some things (like my GitHub Actions) into new projects pretty quickly.

I am also starting to debate a new side project but will post more on that when I have my thoughts better shaped.

Notes about Technical Debt

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 10:42:07 -0400

The Elixir Book Club is reading Software Design X-Rays: Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis.

This past Sunday, we had our first meeting, reviewing chapter one and sharing some interesting discussions on technical debt. I wanted to capture some thoughts while they were fresh in my head.

What is technical debt?

So the book starts by defining technical debt as:

a metaphor that lets developers explain the need for refactorings and communicate technical trade-offs to business people. When we take on technical debt we choose to release our software faster but at the expense of future costs, as technical debt affects our ability to evolve a software system. Just like its financial counterpart, technical debt incurs interest payments.

Personally, I would add the concept of decay and entropy in addition to mindful choice. Often, code that is eventually identified as technical debt was added to the system with a less perfect understanding of the requirements, or the requirements changed after the fact. Perhaps the developer leveled up their skills and has new ideas about approaching the problem and avoiding previously accepted trade-offs.

Software libraries are also deprecated over time and need to be updated/replaced. Otherwise, you must deal with open security issues or the troublesome constraint of integrating old libraries with newer industry expectations.

Working towards a tech debt framework

The eventual goal of the book is to give you a framework to look at large codebases and understand what areas of the codebase would benefit from addressing technical debt the most. It uses git’s version history as a source and wants to provide statistical signals you can use in addition to (and in favor of) exclusive emotional reactions.

Sounds like a reasonable start. It tracks the same way I want production observability signals to help me understand the system.

What the book does not get into is the discussions around getting time allocations in sprints to address technical debt. Depending on your circumstances, that is a more meaningful blocker than figuring out how to spend that technical debt time. The book club discussions ran on this for a while.

Selling

Technical Debt Meme

Saw this meme over the weekend, and it’s a good discussion starting point for the common perspective challenges of technical debt.

You may see the house in that broken state, but the owner might see a working house and need help understanding what all the fuss is about. We don’t share the same vision of the system. We each have our own perspectives and biases.

To continue the construction metaphor, yes, the inner wiring of the house might be decrepit and a fire hazard, but the owners are not electricians. They see and use abstractions like light switches and heat regularly without issue. They don’t see nor understand the system’s inner workings, and it’s your job to express your perspective: to help them understand how things work, why it might be a good idea to replace the wiring, and what failing to replace it looks like regarding managed risk.

I suspect many programmers don’t like being a salesperson, but you need to do it to be a successful voice on behalf of the system.

Last week, while attending Philly ETE, I saw a great talk on this topic titled Leading with the Platform: A Platform Engineering Approach to Tech Debt by Jess Mink.

Platform teams, SREs, tool teams, DevOps…we are the stage crew of a software company: we’re only noticed when we mess up.

This talk is about how platform teams have the potential to be proactive and lead projects across engineering so that things can be addressed they break, thereby reducing tech debt before it’s accrued, and they can be noticed for something positive for a change.

We’ll be talking about company objectives, data, thinking like a product manager, and how it benefits the company as a whole if other teams can get into the act and to pick up some of the platform team’s work.

You can also check out this article on how to sell technical debt and why positioning the business value of technical debt is crucial to getting buy-in and approvals.

Sprint planning and broken glass

While a product manager has the ultimate say and owns the sprint plan, various stakeholders still influence it. To simplify, let’s say we have one group representing the customers and the other representing the developers. Each group has their own short-term and long-term interests. A good sprint and roadmap will have a healthy mix of all four areas. If the weights of any of these four areas get too out of proportion for too long, things will get into a bad state.

Specifically to the short-term interest of developers, I’m a big proponent of giving individuals timeboxed ‘broken glass’ autonomy. This is a metaphor that comes from theme parks. If you are an employee, and your job has you walking the park day in and day out, when you see broken glass on the floor, you should stop and clean it up for the serenity and safety of everyone else.

A more strict and formal management style would have the employee report the observation, have it queued for review, and then (maybe) executed days or weeks later—a lot of overhead for a 20-minute clean-up job.

Giving programmers autonomy to identify, timebox, and execute pain points they experience in the codebase is both efficient and satisfying for the programmer.

Trust

“All this sounds nice, but my product manager does not trust the development team. They never approve technical debt work.”

Earning and having trust with coworkers is a foundational and challenging need. If the product manager does not have trust in the development team, ask those hard why questions.

For the developers:

Work hard to empathize with the product manager and the million spinning plates they are trying to keep up.
A common cause of friction is missed deadlines, so work with the product team to descope work and create small iterative loops with extreme priority. Always keep the system in a shippable state.
Be expressive about progress, letting the product manager dig deep when needed, but have a high-level understanding at all times.
Give them the information and choices, and when a choice is made, work to execute it professionally.

For the product managers and owners:

Be transparent with your whole team about the company’s status and goals. Don’t consider these ’non-programming status communications’ as wasteful. Developers make hundreds of decisions on the company’s behalf, with or without this context. The more informed they are, the better decisions they can make.
Create space for trust to be earned. Instead of assigning a sprint’s worth of tickets to a team, let the team choose the capacity.
Create space for empathy to grow. Encourage pairing across multiple job titles so people better know what all corners of the company feel like.

For more on trust, I recommend The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni.

Join us

If you’d enjoy discussing technical debt, join us for future book club discussions. We meet on Sundays every two weeks via our Discord. More info at: https://elixirbookclub.github.io/website/.

Journal -- April 2, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 11:07:25 -0400

Sunday, April 2, 2023 – The morning coffee has been consumed, and it’s time for some Sunday journaling.

Work

I am still looking for a new contract gig. I have some very light retainer work on my plate and have also started some paid-for mentoring sessions (though those are highly discounted, so it’s more of generosity than an actual income stream).

I should start planning a path of attack to find a new consulting client. This has always been a sore point for me. I’m not particularly good at knocking on doors to look for work. Most of the work I’ve found in my career has been based on personal relationships from previous work and community events (conferences/meetups). Over the last few years, as I’ve found my footing in the Elixir community, I have yet to be out there as much as I was for Apple platform development. My local Elixir meetup never grew like my Apple one, and for whatever reason, I haven’t put myself out on the conference circuit. All that and a slow economy have just made this more difficult than it used to be.

There is also a nagging feeling that I should be investing time into product development efforts, which I’ve really enjoyed in the past and tell myself I want to get back into – but I have no idea what I want to build.

On that topic, it would be nice to finish and deploy Franklin before I start on anything new.

Franklin

Made some notable progress on image uploads and S3 storage. Took a while but it is working in the editor as I wanted. To capture my thoughts, I recorded a PR demo.

Have since started working on a more significant EPIC ticket to work toward a content importer. Of the two options, I am going a more-code route which will take a little longer, but adding even a basic API will help me down the road, so I’m ok making the coding investment.

Overall, the project seems to drag on and on. I look forward to publishing it so I can move on to new things.

Walks and Exercise

I’m slacking. Walks have been down to one a week. It’s still frigid in the morning, so when I walk, it’s still at the local YMCA indoor track. When the weather improves, I’ll get better about more regular neighborhood walks, but I may be lying to myself.

It is not helpful that I’m pretty down on my audiobooks and podcasts lately. Nothing is grabbing me.

ElixirClub

The club has been really quiet. A few updates were posted (mostly me), and no recent talks. Not sure what I want to do here.

Phillies

Baseball is back, and while the first two regular season games have been embarrassing losses, I’m still enjoying it all. I have been using Twitter during games to trade memes with other fans (the sports people never migrated off Twitter). Not in love with using the bird site, but it’s the only place for this kind of near real-time Phillies banter.

Also, very much into MLB: The Show. Grinding the offline content (The Negro Leagues spotlight is excellent) and playing some competitive games against other humans, though my win percentage is a frustrating 40%.

Reaction time in MLB: The Show is essential, and my lack of twitchy responses and non-ideal TV setup has been challenging. The hope is that much of my failure is due to swinging at stuff outside the zone, so if I can improve that (which does not require massive reaction speed), I should at least get more competitive. That is the hope, anyway.

Video Games

In addition to MLB: The Show, I just picked up Metroid Prime Remastered in physical form. Have not opened it yet, but it looks like a fun release.

TV / Movies

Not a lot going on TV-wise. I have been watching a lot of YouTube content about baseball. Expect I’ll come back for Star Trek Voyager lunches soon™.

The House

I had the maintenance address a few small things and was so happy with the fast turnaround. After my last place, it is such a striking difference in professionalism. Love it.

That’s it for now. Yeah, the work stuff is unfocused, but I’m in good spirits overall. I will check in again soon.

Elixir Rap Song

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 14:43:35 -0400

Had too much fun asking ChatGPT to generate haiku poems and rap songs about programming tools and languages. Here is one about Elixir.

Compose a rap song about how much programmers love the functional programming language Elixir.

Verse 1:
Listen up y'all, let me tell you 'bout a language that's dope
It's called Elixir, and it's more than just a little bit of hope
It's functional programming, and it's built to scale
You can build web apps, IoT, and anything else you wanna unveil

Chorus:
Elixir, Elixir, it's the language of the gods
Programmers love it, they're never gonna stop
With its easy syntax and its powerful tools
Elixir's the one that rules, yeah, Elixir's the one that rules

Verse 2:
Elixir's got it all, from concurrency to fault tolerance
And the syntax is so sweet, you'll never want to go back to nonsense
It's got pipes, macros, and pattern matching too
Elixir's so efficient, it's gonna make your code dreams come true

Chorus:
Elixir, Elixir, it's the language of the gods
Programmers love it, they're never gonna stop
With its easy syntax and its powerful tools
Elixir's the one that rules, yeah, Elixir's the one that rules

Verse 3:
So if you want to build something that's fast and robust
Elixir's the language that you can trust
You can build real-time apps and scale with ease
Elixir's the future, it's the one that's gonna please

Chorus:
Elixir, Elixir, it's the language of the gods
Programmers love it, they're never gonna stop
With its easy syntax and its powerful tools
Elixir's the one that rules, yeah, Elixir's the one that rules

Outro:
So now you know why programmers love Elixir so much
It's the language that's got the perfect touch
If you're not using it yet, you're missing out
Elixir's the future, it's what programming's all about.

Journal -- March 12, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 19:17:56 -0400

Sunday, March 12, 2023 – Been a few weeks since the last journal. Let’s catch up on things.

Work

No new work details to share. I am still looking for my next gig. I have done a few calls with prospective clients and hope something might turn up soon.

I did sign a small monthly retainer for a previous client. This is a first for me, and I’m curious how it will work out. It mostly covers emergency maintenance though it might expand to other things in the future.

Franklin

I’ve been making good progress on my side project Franklin. If you look at Sprint 5, you’ll see I’ve been cranking out tickets at a much higher velocity of late. Feels good. Feels like I’m pretty close to a test deployment.

Walks

Is it spring yet? Over the winter, I’ve been pretty lax with my morning walks. I still get out 1-2 times a week but have been using the indoor walking path of the local YMCA. It serves its purpose, but I was hoping the morning temperatures would be warm enough to do my local outdoor walking path without bundling up. It seems like this will take a few more weeks.

On the one plus side, I got some new sneakers, and wow, they are much nicer on my feet than my last pair. This a good reminder not to settle on crap shoes when your feet complain.

ElixirClub

I put some new energy into ElixirClub this past week by planning, delivering, and publishing an education event on Creating Your First Elixir/Phoenix CI Check with GitHub Actions. It went okay, though I would have welcomed some more attendees. Perhaps it will find an audience on YouTube.

Otherwise, I’m giving some of the few active members personal 1:1 time to help them progress on their side projects.

Phillies

Very much enjoying watching the occasional spring training games and listening to a few podcasts sharing the same pre-season excitement. I bought some tickets for a few April/May games but have yet to be able to acquire home opener tickets.

Video Games

Related to baseball season, I’m counting the days until I can play MLB: The Show 2023. Finally put in my preorder. It will be playable on March 24th.

Until then, I’m working on my end-game Stardew Valley achievements. I might even record a farm tour when I finish. I have not done anything particularly noteworthy with my farm, but should I ever come back to Stardew after this run, I’m sure I’ll start a fresh new farm, and it would be neat to capture what I built over the last 100+ hours.

I’ve also played 2 hours of the Octopath Traveler 2 demo, though I’m still determining if I’ll buy it. In that 2 hours, the story felt a little slow. After watching a review of the first game, I doubt the sequel will be much better. The gameplay seemed neat, but unfortunately, I only had one character during the demo, so the fights felt very monotonous.

TV / Movies

I finished my re-watch of Quantum Leap. After watching the first two seasons sequentially, I picked a few notable episodes, many during season 5, to finish up. Some episodes held up to my memories (I love the evil leaper ones), while others, like Lee Harvey Oswald episodes, less so.

Still working through Voyager; currently, in the middle of season 2. I also started filling the gaps with random movies, including JFK, The Shawshank Redemption, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, and The Terminal. I go in phases where I’ll play movies in the background while I work, though only movies I’ve previously watched as I’m mostly looking for background noise rather than something to own my attention.

That’s it for now. Have a nice week!

Potential Consulting Client Questions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:18:42 -0500

There is a process that kicks off after I hear that a company is looking for help with their Elixir project. This process usually involves a series of emails and calls. During this process, the prospective client will have many questions for me. Some of these questions will be straightforward logistics: availability, costs, verification of technical skills, etc. Hopefully, they will also ask a bunch of questions to understand if and how I might be a good fit for the company’s values, culture, and needs – ideally filling a gap they have identified outside just of an additional set of Elixir hands.

I will have my own series of questions to understand the client’s current situation, what they are looking for, and if it’s a good fit for my interests.

When doing these kinds of interviews, it is essential to be deliberate about what questions you want to ask and what you are trying to learn from each answer. Time can fly by, and it can be easy to fall into a casual chat that might be entertaining but not helpful towards the decision to be made.

Additionally, this is the client’s first impression of you. If you can show up, be well prepared, and ask solid questions alongside implied suggestions for raising the bar, it will come off well.

Aside: I’ve worked as both in individual contributor roles as well as team management roles. All of these questions are relivent to both, but if I am in a manager-level role, I’m likely to have more influence.

Company Background Questions

Who is CompanyX, who are their customers? what do they sell, what is the pitch/positioning? Why do they serve these customers and needs over something else?

Why: Basic background questions. We all have some industries and customers that are more or less attractive to us. I have a personal value of Meaningful Work, so the better the client aligns with my perspective of this, the better.

Is the company owned privately or by venture capital/public stock? Is there a parent company? What phase is the company in? Is it profitable? Trying to find market fit? Is there a growth target on the horizon?

Why: Knowing the company’s financial situation helps me have some context around the project. For example, if the company is investing in exploration or market fit, there might be more appetite for quicker prototype turnaround over production-ready software.

What are the company’s core values? How are those values demonstrated in day-to-day actions?

Why: Having a detailed expression of your company values helps those who contribute to the company fill in the details as they do work. With the values defined, it is easier to reconcile a problem with a particular solution when you can ensure it aligns with the company values. Without defined values, people start to substitute their personal values, and when that happens across the organization, a lot of friction is introduced because the values and the solutions they derived do not align.

Name an aspect of the company’s culture that you love and something that you think should be better. What experiments is the company actively doing to improve that unsatisfactory element? How does the company come together to identify and work towards improvements to day-to-day processes?

Why: I have a personal value of Continuous Improvement, and so I would hope to work with a company that has some process in place for ongoing reflection and experimentation towards improving themselves. This can come in many forms, but a traditional format is regular team retrospective meetings or 1:1 meetings with team leaders.

Can I see or demo the software product I’d be working on? Can you give me a demo (live or previously recorded)? Are their publicly available customer support pages?

Why: I’m trying to look and see how polished the user experience is. I want to know some specific things: Does it work in multiple browsers? Is it responsive? Is it fast? How do the forms look and feel? What is the error/validation experience for these forms like?

Team Process Questions

How many developers are there? How are projects and teams organized? Is there an org chart? If so, can I see it? What about this organization style is working well? What challenges does it introduce? What does my position in this look like? To whom do I answer to?

Why: This is a kickoff question more than anything. My historic clients have extremes, some with 100s of engineers and large team structures and some with very small teams. The key questions are built to inform the knowledge of what they have and how I would fit in.

Is the team fully remote? Do we ever have in-person retreats?

Why: I’m working with the assumption that I will only ever work remotely, but it is good to know if the whole team is remote or if some work together in an office. I’m a big fan of retreats to help build camaraderie, so if the team is remote, I would hope they have retreats on occasion.

What is the company’s proficiency ratio between senior level / mid level / junior level developers? How does the company/team prioritize individual learning / improvement?

Why: Seeing a healthy mix here is an excellent sign. Specific allotments of time/resources are also nice. A good answer might include that education goals are captured in manager 1:1 sessions and, when possible, assignments are reworked to allow an individual to get experience in a topic of interest (ie: deployment, documentation, testing).

How do you plan and track work? Who decides what to work on / prioritize? What is the process like from napkin idea to deployed feature? How do you make time for refactoring / experimentation / learning new technologies? Where am I in this process?

Why: Again, I’m looking for alignment with my personal value of short feedback loops. Also good to understand my position in this flow. Ideally, I’m near the top and have an opportunity to influence the shaping of the features. I’m particularly good at discovering edge cases for new features, so the better a client can get that out of me, the better value for their dollar.

How do you measure/guess/estimate how much work can be done in a given timeframe/sprint? How do you understand the team’s velocity? Is this working well for you?

Why: There is a balance to be found regarding software estimates. It will be curious to hear how the company currently does this. I prefer measuring some kind of points / complexity size on tickets along with historical data to help inform the contributors what the team has been accomplishing sprint to sprint. But in that same breath, the group decides the sprint’s scope with possible stretch goals. It is NOT about Amy doing X points and Bobby doing Y points. It is about team velocity. Once you start pointing out individual numbers, team members stop doing acts of generosity (helping answer questions, pairing, code review) in preference of more selfish goals.

How do teams communicate internally? With other teams? How is knowledge captured and shared? Does everything live in Slack, or is there more structure?

Why: I hope there is more structure than just Slack. I’ve done Slack-driven development before and try to avoid it when possible. I don’t have firm requirements on the specifics of the other structure, but I value it being updated with the work as it is done and favor async processes as much as possible. I like the idea of ShapeUp pitches, as it does an excellent job of helping to shape the scope via appetite.

What regular events, meetings, or other team ceremonies should I expect? What happens at these events, and on what cadence do they occur?

Why: I have some specific questions about events I like (sprint grooming / retrospectives), but this is more open-ended so that they can fill in unique events.

Do you have a testing process before new work hits production? Dedicated QA teams?

Why: Good QA teams can add significant value to the software. Not every client I interact with uses them, but asking this and getting a positive answer is a good sign.

After deployment, how do you measure or understand the success of a new feature?

Why: Meaningful work (see Personal Values) is work that solves real problems for people. Verifying the features we worked so hard on are successful in production means a lot. Knowing how unsuccessful features are observed and tweaked is essential too.

Is there a company manual outlining all these processes and the reasons behind them? Can I see it?

Why: I’ve asked how they work over the last few questions, but have they documented it? Is this written down and well-understood across the company?

How does upper management communicate with the company at large? What is the cadence for scheduled communications?

Why: I get value from regular updates on the company’s progress at large. I don’t have a significant preference for the format, but quarterly updates would be a minimum acceptable threshold.

Does the project have dedicated UI designers? Do they work closely with the development team? Is there a standard process for handing off assets, specs, and motion simulations?

Why: While I can do a minimum level of competent UI work, ideally, there would be some people on the team who were focused on designing the user experience exclusively. I’m curious to hear how they interact with the development team and how mockups in a tool like Figma make their way into the code.

How is customer support handled? Do I have any interaction with the customers or their bug reports?

Why: I’m a more customer-focused developer than most (having built my own set of products in the past). Having some vision into the feedback and errors customers report helps me better prioritize future work. When building out a sprint of work, you need to find a balance in addressing customer bugs/feedback, code refactoring, general project de-weeding, and future enhancements. Excluding any of these at an extreme can, overtime, cause issues.

Technical / Code Questions

Do you use GitHub or some other version control? Is there a single repo or multiple repos?

Why: Kickoff question of sorts. I’ve almost exclusively used GitHub but I am curious about GitLab and others.

How do contributors merge in new code? What is the process? Can I see some recent pull requests? What kind of automated code checks do you run? (Test runners? Credo? Dialyzer? Sobelow? Code coverage?)

Why: I want to understand how they branch and do code reviews. I want examples of constructive code review comments and not endless chatter or empty approvals. I want to see that PRs are small and short-lived. I’m looking to see what kind of PR automations they run.

Do you require tests with code changes? What is your testing philosophy?

Why: My personal preference is to test, and test at the user-contract level way more so that validating specific implementation internals. Some places require a 1:1 module to test module design. Others do no testing or have left past test degrade and no longer run the test suite. Good to know where they stand.

How do you deploy? How often do you deploy? Are there dedicated stage-like environments? Can I deploy WIP branches to a temp environment?

Why: I’m looking for evidence of regular and automated deployments. The ability to deploy WIP branches is nice and has been valuable in past work, but it is not something you see everywhere.

How do you observe production? Log capture? Error capture? Telemetry? Flame graph per HTTP request? What aspects of the current observability system are working well? What would you like to improve?

Why: There is a large gradient of possibilities here. Understanding what they have and where they want to be is helpful. Personally, I’m interested in getting better at observability.

Do you write inline project documentation for modules and functions? Do you write other guides or docs that live in the repo? Is this documentation published anywhere? Automated publication? Can I see it?

Why: If they are documenting their domain-level modules and functions, there is a high likelihood they are investing in the codebase’s quality. The lack of inline docs is a bad sign for me.

How do you track work to be done? What kind of issue/ticket tracker software do you use? How do separate idea tickets vs. scoped/shaped tickets? Do you ever have ticket grooming sessions to answer open questions that block ticket implementation? Can I see the ticket board and some current/recent tickets?

Why: We asked broad questions about the process, but this is more specific. I’m looking for a clean separation of tickets in the idea stage vs. the scoped/shaped stage. A good scoped/shaped ticket has all the info the implementor needs to do the work: descriptions of the wanted behavior, things that we are not doing with this work, links to pitch documents, designed mockups, references to people who can unblock questions, a clear understanding of when the ticket is considered complete. Most complex work should happen across a series of tickets: how is that organized/tracked?

How do you track bugs? Who enters these bug tickets? How do you prioritize and schedule bug fixes? Can I see some recent bug tickets?

Why: I’m looking to see how detailed the bug capture is. If the bugs are being entered by customer support, how much info do they transfer? Do they attempt to verify the bug before it is handed to engineering?

Does the team do any pair programming? If so, what tools do you use to facilitate those sessions?

Why: I like pair programming but do less of it than I would like. I use VS Code Live Share but am interested in tools like Tuple.

Do you publish a changelog to the users? If so, how?

Why: Most of my recent clients have not done public changelogs, but depending on the product, I could see them being valuable and challenging to deliver at scale. Curious if the potential client has this need and how they are solving it.

Is there any high-level documentation for the structure or architecture of the application? Can you give me a short code walkaround? Are there specific areas of the codebase you suspect I would be working in more than others?

Why: It will be hard to grok any complex architecture during a single meeting, but getting an overview and some specific guidance on what you’d likely be contributing to is helpful.

Understanding My Role

Will I be in an individual contributor role or a team management role? What does that role look like, and what would my responsibilities be?

Why: I’ve done both, and they are very different. This was probably answered before but listed here for verification.

What observable characteristics would signal a successful consulting outcome? What would signal a negative consulting outcome?

Why: I am probably not their first consultant. Knowing specific quirks about the previous positive and negative experiences can significantly shape what I want to focus on for this unique client.

If I were interviewing for a full time job there were be a whole bunch more questions about compensation, perks, vacation and the like – but these are questions for potential consutling clients so I will not list them.

Hopefully this list of questions has inspiried you to dig a little deeper during your own initial project proposal calls. If you have something I am missing I’d love to hear it.

Github Action Talk

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:52:26 -0500

I’m going to be doing a talk about GitHub Actions for ElixirClub: Creating Your First Elixir/Phoenix CI Check with GitHub Actions.

The talk is free and open to the public. RSVP and join us on Zoom Wednesday, March 8th from 7:00 PM to 08:00 PM (EST).

This talk is for people curious about the basics of GitHub Actions and how they can utilize this automation tool to better verify code changes within their Elixir projects. The event will consist of a lecture, live audience exercises on GitHub, and close with time for questions.

GitHub Actions enables you to build custom automations right within your GitHub repo. These automations can be used for Continuous Integration checks (verifying the app builds with no warnings, all the tests pass, etc), Continuous Deployment (package your app for release, execute the release, etc.), and many other creative workflows. The service is free for public repos and has a generous allocation for free-account private repos.

RSVP

Journal -- February 13, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 20:53:09 -0500

Monday, February 13, 2023 – The only consistent thing in this world is change.

Work

Last time I posted a journal entry with news that I had started a new contract gig, but I’m disappointed to share that it did not work out. There was some interesting tech within the project that I was (still am) interested in getting more production time with (GraphQL/Relay), but there was a lot of misalignment for how I prefer to work. It resulted in some stressful days and missed expectations on both sides. After some deep consideration, I decided to give my notice in favor of looking for something else.

I’ll post more details on what kind of Elixir gig I will be looking for, but I wanted to share this first since it is a notable adjustment from my last journal post.

ElixirClub

ElixirClub has been quieter that I would prefer over the last two weeks. With my newly found free time, I plan to invest in some content creation and try to reach out to the current members to see what else I can do to help them move their projects forward. Maybe even some 1:1 pairing time.

Hobbies

Out of the blue I played Stardew Valley on Thursday night. It was a lot of fun. Played my 3+ year farm doing end-game things. I suspect I’ll play some more in the coming weeks.

For TV, I finished my long-running watch of Deep Space Nine, which was great. Soon after I started up season one of Voyager (which is mostly new to me as well). Also started cherry-picking some more notable episodes out of Quantum Leap instead of watching it fully through. Anxious to get to evil leaper and the JFK episodes.

I watched the Super Bowl last night and am bummed for the Eagles and my city. I’m not a huge football fan, but the city is for sure, so a big bummer.

On the flip side, baseball is just around the corner, and I can’t wait. Pitchers and catchers have their first workout this Thursday, and some spring training games start February 25th.

Related, I’m pumped for MLB: The Show 2023. It was greate to see The Negro Leagues feature too – that was something I explicitly asked for last year.

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

Elixir Context Accessor Function: Which Return Type Do You Prefer?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 13:55:42 -0500

During a recent Elixir Book Club meeting we had a back and forth discussion on a simple code style question:

When providing an accessor function inside your domain context, do you prefer a return type of {:ok, noun} || {:error, :not_found} or noun || nil ?

In my own historical work I’ve generally followed along with common Phoenix generator style of building out functions like get_noun/1 that return the noun or nil but moving forward I think I’ll be preferring fetch_noun/1 functions that use an :ok / :error tuple style return type.

The primary reason is expressiveness in the crash logs. Eventually there will be some crash and the stacktrace is going to show nil being passed into some function, and the function having an expectation of a real value type. In those moments it can take some time to understand where the hell nil is coming from. I think an error like noun_not_found will be more helpful.

I want to start keeping track of these personal preferences and so today I’ve also made a new guide for the Franklin project documenting Code Style: Context Accessors. There is some more background and reasoning about my preferences inside should you be interested.

While that guide expresses a preference towards fetch_noun/1 and the :ok / :error tuple return type, it also acknowledges that it might be helpful and supportive for the context to offer multiple accessor functions allowing the call sites to use whichever one is more appropriate. ` How about yourself? What return type do you prefer and why? Let me know.

Hacker Culture Movies For The Kids

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:12:51 -0500

At a recent Philly CocoaHeads Side Project Saturday event, which can best be described as a social club where the conversation jumps around in a chaotic nature amongst long-time friends and peers, we got to discussing impactful movies that helped define the computer hacking persona in our culture. Specifically, we were looking for recommendations for the younger members, born in the late 90s or 2000s, who have yet to enjoy these films.

For your amusement, a compiled list of hacker-culture movies to recommend to ’the kids'.

Note: If you want to watch any of these, I suggest looking them up on JustWatch, which can display what services you can use to stream, rent or buy.

Must-Watch Movies

Watch these right now.

WarGames - The only winning move is not to play.
Her - I need to re-watch, so I remember not to fall in love with my upcoming AI girlfriend.
Office Space - PC Load Letter?! What the fuck does that mean?
The Matrix - Remember, there is no spoon, and there are no sequels.

Good-Bad Movies

I enjoy bad movies almost more than good movies.

Hackers - Must watch for a fun take of hacker culture. HACK THE PLANET!
Tron - Wizard of Oz for a virtual world. Impressive effects for the time.
Tron: Legacy - The movie is pretty good, but I re-watch for the soundtrack almost exclusively. It is bonkers good.
Swordfish Some great camp here. Perfect good-bad movie.
Johnny Mnemonic “can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in his head.” LOL.

So-So Movies

These are ok movies but not must-watch.

Minority Report - This is pretty good, but not enough for my must-watch list.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence Beautiful movie by Spielberg in the eyes of Stanley Kubrick. Not for everyone but I enjoyed it.
Enemy of the State - This is a so-so movie I’ve watched multiple times on broadcast cable TV. It must be cheap to license.
Antitrust - Another popular cable broadcast movie I enjoyed more than I should have.
The Net - Only watched this once, but a fair representation of 90s “net” culture.
Snowden - I for one, welcome our CIA overlords.
Sneakers - Listed by multiple friends, I have yet to watch it.

Bad-Bad Movies

Only watch these if you enjoy pain. Sometimes I do.

Journal -- January 22, 2023

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 12:49:50 -0500

Sunday, January 22, 2023 – First journal of the new year. Sorry, it took so long—lots to cover.

Work

Things are good. I recently picked up a new contract gig, helping to mature the GraphQL API for [REDACTED].

… it feels like a really good fit. I’m anxious to get more production time with GraphQL and Absinthe. This project also uses the Relay pattern, so I’m working on getting more comfortable with that too.

I still have my previous gig going, though its hours will be lessening over the next few months to a more production observation type of role. This project is also the source of my React Native frustrations, and while I’ve made some progress on that front, I’ve started to push harder for the client to bring on someone else with more experience to take ownership of that aspect of the platform.

Given that, I’ve removed the consulting availability banner from the website. I’m fully booked now. 🎉

ElixirClub

ElixirClub officially launched in early January, and while I have aspirations of more members, I’m pretty happy with our initial circle. There are 6 of us in total. Rowland and I regularly meet for coworking sessions, and the rest keep up via the online forum, posting weekly updates.

I need to spend some energy reaching out to the other members and try to spark more activity outside the updates, as well as encourage more people to attend coworking (adjusting hours or adding weekend sessions if that might help). Overall, very excited to get this new group off the ground and anxious to continue to shape and evolve it.

Franklin

Via ElixirClub coworking sessions, I’ve made some small progress on Franklin. I’ve even started to get a bit of a mental nudge to push forward towards an actual release since there are aspects of my current blog deployment that are starting to show some concern.

I mainly speak of the recent CircleCI security breach and the fact that resolving the needed secret rotations was more complex than I would have liked.

DockYard Academy

When I was under-employed over the fall, I used my free time as a teacher assistant for the 12-week Elixir boot camp known as DockYard Academy. Looking ahead through February and March, I’m much less likely to be able to pop in as much. With that change, it was a coincidence that this past Friday represented the completion of their first beta cohort, with the students presenting all their projects. I got to see all the students show what they have learned through the completion of each’s capstone project. It was amazing to see how far they had all come.

I’ll still be on their Discord server and may jump in with an answer or two in chat, but I will likely be on my client project during their standard class times in the future.

There historically has been a lot of overlap in the class with the ElixirNewbie community, which has its own Discord server and Saturday hackathons. I see myself being able to pop in there for mentoring more often.

Hobbies

I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild a bit lately. This is my third time attempting a playthrough, and this is the farthest I’ve ever gotten. I’ve beaten two divine beasts, have the master sword, and continue working around the map. The exploration is fun, though I’ve been watching a Let’s Play alongside my playthrough to help me more quickly understand all the game mechanics. Ingame, they require you to discover a lot of things on your own, and this was one of the historical reasons I gave up because I didn’t know what was going on.

For TV, I’m continuing my watch of Deep Space Nine. Only have a few episodes left and have greatly enjoyed it. I have not kept up with my watching of Quantum Leap (I stopped mid-season two), but might return to it once DS9 is done. I’m also considering working out a list of BIG episodes and just watching those. In particular, I remember enjoying the JFK episodes and the evil leaper plot thread.

The Philadelphia Eagles are doing incredibly well and won their playoff game last night. Next week will be the NFC championship game, and I’ll watch it. I’m WAY more of a baseball fan than football, but it’s hard to avoid the fandom excitement around town during the playoffs.

Exercise

My morning walks have been much less frequent over the past month. Part of that is just the winter. When I have done my walks, I’ve been doing them on the indoor track at the YMCA. It is comfier, though the extra drive time adds up. Ideally, I’ll keep my eye out for the temperature to nudge up and start bundling up and walking closer to my house to save some time and let me finish the morning walks a bit earlier in the morning hours and, thus, better align with the start of my client workday.

Overall, things are busy but good. Now that the overwhelming onboarding weeks are complete and my new schedule is settling down, I can blog a bit more. It is always the hope anyway.

Boston 2022 Trip

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 14:22:17 -0500

After hosting a Christmas Eve party and visiting my Aunt’s house for Christmas Day, my sister and I went to Boston for a few days.

We took the train and stayed three nights. Highlights include a tour of Fenway Park, a visit to the Tea Party Museum, a Christmas light trolly tour, a beer stop at Cheers, a visit to the Boston aquarium, a tour of the Sam Adams R&D brewery, and multiple Italian dinners in Boston’s Northend. It was a full couple of days, but it never felt too rushed.

Our hotel was near the park, Boston Common. The small pond was frozen over, and many people were walking on ice.

Fenway Park will be hosting the Winter Classic hockey game later this week, so you’ll see them getting set up for that. Of the typically non-public areas we saw, the press box was particularly cool.

At the Tea Party Museum, you get a mix of live performances, videos, and interactive displays. They even let you throw tea into the river (though you have to pull it back when you are done with your treason).

Our light show trolly tour came back to the commons at night with a bunch of trees lit up.

The Boston Aquarium has a penguin display and some ice sculptures outside.

We went out from downtown to do a Sam Adams brewery tour. This specific brewery is no longer a production brewery but more of an R&D office. They have lots of non-commercial beers on tap to try out.

In recent history, I’ve been leaning on little magnets and trinkets as keepsakes. Here are some from my Boston 2022 haul.

Journal -- December 17, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 20:27:48 -0500

Saturday, December 17, 2022 – This weekend kicked off with some dedicated time to my office. On Friday, I caught up on a stack of mail/bills/paperwork, and then today got over the hump of cleaning up the office itself. It’s the first time since moving in during October that the office has been fully cleaned and set up. No boxes or random crap in the corner. It’s all tidy and feels great.

On Monday I am scheduled to take delivery of a new bookcase for the office. In the new year I’m also planning to look into some alternative lighting, better cable management, more wall art, and maybe a motorized standing desk.

With luck, the new office vibes will lead to some positive production toward my projects.

As for those, things are good – though I am trying to get a bit more billable work.

My current part-time client has been going fine on the Elixir/Phoenix side, where we continue to update libraries and dependencies, but the React Native stuff has been nothing but headaches. I have a paid consultant peer coming on board for a few hours to help me get over the hump and plan out more extensive updates.

ElixirClub early feedback is good. About ten people signed up for the site/email notifications. Will work over the next few days to schedule those initial events, work out some project update templates, and finish setting up the paywall. On track of an early January launch.

My volunteering with Dockyard Academy continues. I’ve been able to attend teaching sessions about twice a week to help answer student questions and provide some basic curriculum feedback.

Franklin progress is slow, but I might be able to make my Christmas deadline (documented in the README) if I focus better during the week.

Elixir Book Club is going on too. Tomorrow I will lead a discussion through chapter 4 of Testing Elixir.

Off projects, I’m enjoying working through season 6 of DS9, season 2 of Quantum Leap and have started a new playthrough of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’ve never gotten more than 10 hours into that one but trying to take it in with a different perspective this time.

A New Project: ElixirClub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 21:14:14 -0500

Today I am announcing a new project of mine taking shape. It’s called ElixirClub.

ElixirClub is an outcome-oriented community that helps Elixir developers finish their side projects.

Working on a side project by yourself is surrounded by risks:

personal loss of focus
no accountability
endless time extensions
exploding scope

Even a completed side project might be considered a failure if it does not find its audience or fails to provide a reasonable return on your time investment.

ElixirClub is a community where people can plant their flag, declare their side project goals, and meet fellow Elixir developers climbing the same mountain.

Through a mixture of accountability, education, and celebrations, you’ll be part of a group that fosters successful habits to an ultimately successful side project.

What to expect as a member?

All the below community heartbeats are designed to help you shape the work needed to see your side project to its planned completion and build a habit loop for regular progress.

✅ Weekly async project check-ins to share wins, plan next week’s work and ask questions.
📅 Weekly live coworking sessions, offering a mix of face-to-face accountability and dedicated mic-off time-boxed work time.
📺 Themed live (and recorded) events around side project management concerns and Elixir-specific programming interests.
📝 Written guides and suggested tasks to wrangle your project and find your flow.
🤝 A code review trading board that allows members to exchange code reviews.

Membership to the community will require a modest monthly subscription. This choice helps pay for the community software, helps people solidify their dedication to their projects, and helps fund my work creating content for the group.

Right now, my priorities are to chat with folks who are good candidates for such a group and work at preparing a productive home to host everything.

If you would like to hear more about this in the future, please email me mailto:zorn@zornlabs.com?subject=ElixirClubSubscribe, and I’ll add you to my manual notification list.

If you are really excited about the group, please reach out and book some time on my calendar: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat – I’d love to hear what side project you are working on.

Journal -- November 20, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 19:20:08 -0500

Sunday, November 20, 2022 – It’s another Sunday night journal entry. Let’s go!

Client work is going well, though my hours are capped at 8 hours per week (the other developer is 16 per week). This results in things moving slower than I’d like, but it is what it is—doing a mix of dependency updates, bug fixes, and a few minor features. I hit a wall trying to compile a linux/amd64 OTP 25 Docker image on my M1 Mac (I keep hitting internal emulation errors, likely from the JIT part of modern OTP) and may blog/rant about that soon™.

Personal project Franklin is seeing some small progress. I’ve been working on my second resource / CQRS context, Articles, as I try to get the site in a basic working order. See the active draft PR if you dare. Started making some naming and format changes from what I did in my first context, Posts. Post itself will be later refactored. I’ve decided to have Article be my long Markdown-flavored writing content and then a separate entity, SocialPost for my smaller, plain-text, cross-posted social timeline content.

It’s getting cold in Philadelphia, so I started going to the YMCA for some indoor cardio in place of my outside morning walks. It’s about a ten-minute drive away, adding some time, but it is much more enjoyable. I also enjoyed a swim in the lap pool one day.

For fun, I’ve been playing through the Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster on my Steam Deck. I’m not sure if I would place the remaster over some ROM hack alternatives, but I will mention the new soundtrack. It is very well done.

My eyes have been bothering me a bit over the last few weeks, and I broke down and got some reading glasses (which I’ve probably needed for a while). They do seem to help with books and iPad reading, but the distance/focal point is not right for the computer. I have an appointment next week with the optometrist and may get a prescription for my computer use.

Finally, I decided to turn off my social cross-posting to Twitter. I generally post content first to Micro.blog, and it cross-posts to Twitter and Mastodon on my behalf. Not happy with the direction of Twitter, and while I’m sure to lose connections with some people, it felt like something I had to do.

DNA is Memory

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 19:45:21 -0500

I’ve currently reading/listening to We Are Legion (We Are Bob) on Audible.

I’m still on the fence if I’d recommend it or not but really enjoyed this quote:

At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy.

Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life.

Pretty cool to think of DNA as memory.

My Standup Format

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 15:00:32 -0500

I find async standups to be a productive and low-cost ceremony in my development teams.

An async standup, in short, is each day, typically in the morning hours, team members are asked to post an update about what is going on in their work. This post is not about time tracking or otherwise work inspection but more an opportunity to take a breath, celebrate your wins, acknowledge your losses, ask for help and share your plans. A good outcome of standups is ensuring you get the help you need from your team to be successful .

There is an async standup format I’ve been using for over a year now, and since it seems to be sticking, I figured I’d take a moment to share it and explain why I like it.

❤️ Feeling: …
✅ Accomplishments: …
🥅 Goals: …
🆘 Help: ….

❤️ Feeling is a great place to share your personal, human mindset. “Got limited sleep last night because the kid is sick.”, “Feeling anxious about the upcoming proposal deadline.”, “So happy that the Phillies won last night!” Being open and expressive about how we feel can, over time, help build trust within the team.

✅ Accomplishments is a place to document your day-by-day outcomes. Many of these might be traditional progress towards some new code, but it can be just as valid to share that you discovered a problem and documented an open question somewhere.

🥅 Goals is where you highlight your plan for the day. I sometimes get overwhelmed at midday and then return to my goals to recenter and figure out what I need to be focusing on. It’s okay if goals occasionally carry over from day to day, though if this stresses you out, maybe end with a stretch goal that is almost expected not to be completed today.

🆘 Help: is probably the most critical line. Need a PR reviewed or some open questions addressed? Don’t be shy! Be explicit and ping specific people, “Hey @jim, I really need your advice about this PR feedback from @pam.” If you have no help requests, an affirmative “No blockers.” is good to see. I prefer this than to omit “Help” entirely.

🚨 Awareness is a line I’ll sometimes add to spotlight information I want the team to see. “Going to be offline this afternoon for a dentist appointment.” or “I’ll be on vacation next week, work with @dwight during my absence.”

Many of my past teams have posted our standups in a Slack channel. In my newest team, we’ve been trying to avoid using Slack entirely and instead are using GitHub Discussions. We have a dedicated monthly standup thread, which works well since simple issue numbers like #123 will auto-link to relevant issues and pull requests, and you can still @ mention people to kick a notification.

Before I leave, I’ll mention that this is not a format I came up with. It was observed during my subcontracting with Test Double. They were a particularly empathetic company towards project process, ceremony, and developer happiness. This standup format was one small example.

Curious to hear how you and your team do standups. Let me know.

2022 Phillies Recap and Thank You!

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 19:38:45 -0500

This weekend the Phillies lost the World Series to the Houston Astros. Of course, this is a disappointing loss, but overall I look back on the 2022 season with immense pride for my team and offer particular thanks for giving me so much enjoyment during a time of personal need.

Zorn at Citizens Bank Park wearing a Phillies cap.

With the loss of my mother in early February, I was greatly looking to the upcoming baseball season as a chance for escape. I’ve always been a baseball fan (my high school years being a notable peak), but this year’s distraction opportunity would be very welcome.

When the lockout prevented the start of spring training, I was discouraged. Eventually, that worked out, and the season kicked off a few games late. I invested much of myself into Phillies, even during those frustrating early months. I watched the games and listened to the local podcasts.

As the season continued, they eventually fired Joe Girardi, promoted Rob Thomson, and started climbing back into the wildcard race. Things were looking up.

I took baseball-themed vacations. I played baseball games on my Playstation 4. It was truely a summer of baseball.

When September hit, the Phillies were looking good for a wildcard spot, but we all started freaking out as signs of repeated September collapses were imminent. Somehow, along with some help from the similarly collapsing Milwaukee Brewers, the Phillies ended the season and were back in the playoffs after an 11-year drought.

While the fans were thirsty for some playoff wins, I suspect most, including myself, were pretty satisfied that they got in at all. Then the playoffs commenced, and game by game, the Phillies continued to find a way to win – all the way to the world series.

This October was so much fun, and I’m so delighted to have been able to enjoy it.

Thank you to the fans, the podcasters, the Twitter accounts full of memes/screencaps, and the entire Phillies organization for providing an unforgettable year.

Recent Estimating Work Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 13:12:04 -0400

This week I completed my third week with a new client. It was a notably challenging week since the main goal was to write up a significant project estimate, which was due by Friday. We delivered the estimate earlier this morning, and I think we did a good job. I’m sure the estimates themselves are WAY off from where reality will land, but that isn’t the goal as I see it.

The goal of this estimate is to, in a time-boxed format, create a framework for more meaningful discussions to happen. These numbers should not be looked at as facts but shape those first steps of discovery.

A few notes and observations:

While it brought on a bit of anxiety in the early part of the week, I think we greatly benefited from the time-boxed nature of the request. We knew we had to deliver something on Friday, which influenced how much fidelity we could give toward specific feature estimates.
We used typical Fibonacci story points for each fundamental feature/focus. We had a base point value and then a high point value. We also labeled each estimate as Low/Medium/High risk, which was meant to signal that, should the fidelity of this range be too large to make an informed business decision, we could do more discovery and sharpen those numbers.
This was tough for me since I am still new to the codebase. I was able to partner with the previous tech lead, and that helped a ton, but my number ranges were still significantly larger than if I had been on the project previously with a known team.
Once we had the base and high points, we totaled them and crafted some team scenarios. This was the worst part. Usually, I’m able to gauge a team point velocity based on historical observations, but this would be a team who would be new to a codebase and each other, so the numbers are very suspect. We did our best and tried to document uncertainty as transparently as possible. We noted that should this proposal be accepted, we should set up regular check-in against these numbers and adjust the team/scope/timeline as necessary.
We worked in an onboarding penalty to the team velocity, spread across many months. I think this was a good move and made the scenarios more realistic.
In our recommendations for team size, we noted the risk that an individual contributor may not stay on the team for the entirety of the project. Adding an additional contractor is not about a 1:1 increase in velocity but risk management. We want to maintain domain knowledge through expected staff changes.
In our scenarios, we did not document time towards routine platform maintenance (this is in production with real customers) or personal vacation time. We did document our non-documentation so that when it comes time for realistic scheduling, these can be considered.

For what it needed to be, I think the outcome document of the week will help the stakeholders.

It is by far not my favorite way to approach projects. For that, I’d probably lean toward something like Shape Up.

Journal -- October 30, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 20:15:52 -0400

Sunday, October 30, 2022 – It is Sunday night, and after a chill day, I wanted to catch up on some journal entries.

First off, my new client gig is working out well. The last two weeks were mostly about getting over the onboarding hump, asking many questions, and working through some bug issues to familiarize myself with the code base. Still have a lot to learn, but we are merging PRs, which is a good sign.

I’ll need to start deploying those changes this upcoming week and plan some version upgrades for Elixir, OTP, Phoenix, and more. I’m also sinking my teeth into a more significant project proposal draft. The challenge is hours. This part-time tech lead job is capped at 8 hours per week, which is very tight. I need to be very careful about which tech hole I want to jump into, knowing I have enough time to climb back out. I was allotted some extra hours during the onboarding phase, but that is over.

I’ll probably be shaking trees looking for something else to supplement this, so take this as an early ask: “anyone you know looking for Elixir help?”

Other recent victories include finishing the last of my old apartment cleanup and packing. I got that done last week, handed in my keys, and did a walk-through inspection with my previous landlord. Hopefully, I’ll get back the full security deposit as there were no complaints from her, but these people have been so shady with everything; who knows?

My entertainment time budget continues to be primarily filled with Phillies games, and I’d have it no other way. I was finally able to get a Steam Deck and have been playing a bit of Tunic but not enough to have any significant opinion yet (about the handheld or the game).

I posted this on my social feed but will share again:

📚❤️ I finished Project Hail Mary (via audiobook) and it was really good.

The sci-fi was fun and believable. The protagonist is someone you enjoy rooting for. I particularly enjoyed the voice actor’s performance.

Project Hail Mary on Audible

If you are looking for a fun sci-fi book, check it out!

Also shared on my social feed was news about a new cycle of the Elixir Book Club. If I can I’d like to take the meetings as a prompt to blog some thoughts on testing in general but we’ll see.

That’s it for now. Going to jump on my Steam Deck for about an hour then off to bed.

Have a nice week.

Elixir Book Club: Testing Elixir, Starts November 13th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:48:17 -0400

I am pleased to share the reboot of the Elixir Book Club.

Starting Sunday, November 13th at 10:30am (Eastern Time), we’ll meet for an hour via Discord to talk about our next book…

Testing Elixir

Testing Elixir Book Cover

https://pragprog.com/titles/lmelixir/testing-elixir/

I read this back in April of 2021 and thought well of it. It’s a good overview of the various testing tools available and how to apply them to Elixir scenarios and patterns (OTP, Ecto, Phoenix).

During the first meeting will review chapters 1 and 2. After that, we will meet to review two or so more chapters every two weeks.

To participate, you’ll need to join the Elixir Book Club Discord, and shortly I expect the main book club website to be current with our new book and dates.

Extra Credit?

If you are interested in software testing, I HIGHLY recommend this other book as well: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns.

Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns Book Cover

https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing

Where Testing Elixir will help you learn the tooling and explain the how, Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns will help you discover the why and ultimately assist you in crafting a resilient testing strategy for your projects.

I read this book in June 2022, and it hugely influenced me and how I want to test moving forward. It could serve as a great companion or follow-up book for people in our club, though the club’s focus is officially and exclusively on Testing Elixir.

Hope to see you at the book club!

The Curse of Test Fixtures

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:10:37 -0400

Please heed my warning or be cursed with coupled test code!

The general use case for test fixtures usually involves impure functions. These functions rely on an external collaborator and not just the incoming arguments of the function. Before the test runs, you want to put the world in a particular state. A common case is a database, your app’s repository of entities.

You have choices for how to make this happen.

One choice/tool I observe many Elixir developers reaching for is ex_machina, a fixture/factory tool. I’ve used it myself on many projects. It can be a productive addition.

In short, ex_machina lets you build a factory of fixtures, even fixtures with relationships to other fixtures. When the time comes, you invoke insert(:user) in your test, and your database is populated with the generated data. The world is now set for you to test your list_users/0 function.

This is (usually) a poor choice.

The problem is coupling. When you call insert(:user), you are hard injecting the database with an assumption of what it means in the domain to “create a user”. You probably have a real domain context that provides a create_user/1 function. Instead of using it, you couple this test, which needs a user already in the system, with assumed implementation details.

In the early days of a project, this raw database injection will likely be pretty close to what you have going on in create_user/1, but as the project evolves, these two paths can quickly diverge. The challenges and risks of maintaining parity between what it means to “create a user” through the domain context OR the factory’s raw database injection will become an expensive burden. Still worse, when you want to refactor create_user/1, you can’t – at least not without touching every part of the test suite that used fixtures and made assumptions about the database layout.

The much better choice is to, when needed for impure tests, use your domain contexts to influence the world.

Be extremely mindful of the API boundaries of your code. Test the boundaries and NOT the implementation.

Using real domain contexts to populate the world state can sometimes be slower. My suggestion is to swallow this slowness up front and only fallback to direct fixture injection when the testing performance needs are a good tradeoff for the cost of coupling. Since coupling will hamper refactoring, I consider that and HUGE tradeoff, and so it would take a significant speed difference to make me reconsider.

For more on this concern, check out Saša Jurić’s Clarity talk. He talks of helper methods he usually makes, like register!/1 at minute 38.

Closing Thoughts on my Exercism Video Project

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 16:34:58 -0400

It was August 2, 2022, when I recorded the first video and blogged about my Exercism Elixir video project. I decided to join an upcoming cohort that would be working through the Elixir track on Exercism, a place to learn programming languages via coding challenges. I decided to video record myself working through the exercises, hoping to share the experience with others.

And now it’s all done! I posted my final “Learning Exercise” video on October 19, 2022. I unlocked the full Elixir syllabus and consider the project closed (for now).

Not overlooking an opportunity to recap the project, I figure I’ll capture a few thoughts to celebrate.

First, it feels incredible to FINISH something. I’ve had many project stall or otherwise end in a disappointing manner. Being able to see this through was very fulfilling.

I chose the project scope with meaningful intent. I wanted something more than a weekend but not longer than a few months. Technically this took about ten weeks with some vacation and moving distractions mixed in. It turned out to be a pretty good length of time.

The cohort was ok. We had a shared Discord server and encouraged daily check-ins and questions. People did help each other, but I feel like there was a lost opportunity to get more face time events. I attended a few video meetings, but they were more presentations than socializing. It’s a shame I didn’t make a stronger connection with anyone. Hard to do that over text-only chat. In the end, they did post a survey, and I recall sharing some suggestions. With luck, they will continue to mature the cohort idea and offer other languages.

Recording the videos was more stressful than expected. A handful of exercises stumped me, and the sessions would go long. Even the simple sessions went pretty long. I would not expect many people to sit through those unless they were notably stuck on an issue and found the video matching an exercise title. I know at least one person who did; he mentioned he recognized me during a Dockyard Academy call and shared as much. That was pretty cool.

As I consider more video content, I must condense the value better. If I do record longer sessions (or streams?) I should break out clips as the primary form of sharing and less so the full archive.

For now, I consider the project closed and will focus on other things. I could see myself coming back to work on more exercises someday. There are a ton. I completed 40 of them to unlock the syllabus, and there are still 116 available. My hat off to anyone who finishes all of them.

Exercism Elixir Track: Take-A-Number Deluxe (GenServer)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 16:19:28 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about GenServer while completing the Take-A-Number Deluxe exercise.

Journal -- October 18, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 21:00:12 -0400

Tuesday, October 18, 2022 – It’s been three weeks since I posted a journal entry, and I have so much to share.

First off, the ever-distracting move is complete. I’m in my new place, and while I still have a bit to do to say I am unpacked and settled, I’m enjoying the new house—lots of space, with a dedicated office and the loft has plenty of storage to keep my various closets organized and not over-packed. There have been a few repair needs, and the new landlord has been great at promptly addressing things. Things are good.

I have a couple of todo items to finish in my old place before I hand back the keys. I’ll likely do some of that next week.

Next up is a new client contract. I landed a part-time gig, inheriting an Elixir/Phoenix/ReactNative project from a previous coworker. The initial period will have me serve as a tech lead, helping to shape and review the work of another part-time individual contributor. We have some general maintenance to do, and then in a separate flow, I’ll be working with the main stakeholders to plan out a more significant project proposal. It’s a good fit for me, a small startup where I’ll have an excellent opportunity to craft the work environment and processes I value.

Most of the new work is in Elixir/Phoenix space, but this project will kick me to sharpen my experience with ReactNative, at least good enough to edit/review our existing project. Not something I’m super enthusiastic about, but other techs, including CircleCI, Docker, and observation improvements, should balance out my excitement levels.

Last night I hosted the monthly PhillyElixir meeting after missing last month. I was able to deliver a work-in-progress version of my Elixir Documentation talk. It went well, and I got some great feedback. I need to figure out how I want to move forward. Ideally, I could propose the talk for a future conference and then work on version 2.

Finally, and most importantly, has been my focus and enjoyment of the Phillies in the playoffs. Since my last journal, they beat the Cardinals in the wild card series and the Braves in the division series. Tonight is game one of the National League Championship Series. It is so much fun watching these games and enjoying the city’s reactions day by day. Go Phillies!

Exercism Elixir Track: RPN Calculator Inspection (Links and Tasks)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:27:46 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Links and Tasks while completing the RPN Calculator Inspection exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Dancing Dots (Behaviours and Use)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:36:56 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Behaviours and Use while completing the Dancing Dots exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Lucas Numbers (Streams)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 11:56:22 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Streams while completing the Lucas Numbers exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Stack Underflow (Exceptions)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 11:52:35 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Exceptions while completing the Stack Underflow exercise.

Advice for New Consultants

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 10:34:09 -0400

Was introduced to a new member of the Philly CocoaHeads who is starting out as an iOS consultant. He asked for my advice and I figured I’d share it will you all too:

Nice to meet you too. I’ll keep my eye out for new work. I usually share gigs in the #gig-swap channel when they find me. I am no longer doing iOS development (doing Elixir / Phoenix web apps instead), but I hear about things from time to time.

My biggest recommendation is to network and meet as many people as possible. Be shameless about sharing your contracting availability and short-term goals. Most of the work I get is through my little circle of work friends.

Also, build in public as much as possible, blog what you learn to teach others and when you have time, don’t be afraid to approach the people/projects you care about and ask, “how can I help?”

Good luck to ya.

What did I miss? Let me know.

Exercism Elixir Track: New Passport (With)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:01:02 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about With while completing the New Passport exercise.

The Importance of Side Project Tiny Tickets

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:12:39 -0400

If you have an active side project, I highly recommend you invest some of your valuable and limited time into ticket/issue creation to plan out your work. Specifically, you should build up a collection of ready-for-work tiny tickets in the 10-20 minute time completion range.

So often, we look forward to long “deep work” programming sessions to make meaningful progress on our side projects, but they are few and far between. We have tons of other life responsibilities from work, family, and friends that will have priority on our time. If we wait for perfect work sessions to make progress, our side projects will take much longer to complete, and the risk of failure (due to personal distractions or loss of motivation) increases drastically.

You need to find ways to move your side project forward during the cracks of daily life, hopefully setting up the foundation of a productive habit loop. Have a little time before bed; here is a tiny ticket to do. Have time to kill waiting for a zoom meeting to start; find a tiny ticket to knock out. Many will be mindless dependency updates or small refactors but little by little, your project will grow.

If you have an active side project, I’d love to ask you some questions to help me with my research. Grab some calendar time here: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat.

Exercism Elixir Track: RPN Calculator (Errors and Try/Rescue)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:05:42 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Errors and Try/Rescue while completing the RPN Calculator exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Need For Speed (Alias and Import)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:31:02 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Alias and Import while completing the Need For Speed exercise.

Journal -- September 28, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 18:24:40 -0400

Wednesday, September 28, 2022 – Woke up around 8am and after a some breakfast headed out to run errands.

At Target I picked up a new shower curtain and bathroom mats for the new apartment. Going to try to prepare so that some minimal living conditions are all in place before the apartment move happens on Tuesday. I don’t want to be in a state where I have to hunt for things just to take a nice shower that first night.

I also picked up a few new clear bins. I’ll use then for my desk and monitors when it comes time to break those down, but I’d like to keep them functional as long as possible.

On the way home I stopped by the bank to get some cash for the movers. I got extra to cover any unexpected increases and to make sure I can tip them well. That is such back breaking work, it is the least I can do.

Back home I packed up a fair amount of the kitchen and assembled some new boxes I ordered from Amazon overnight. Should be good now with plenty of extra bubble wrap to encase the larger TV.

I’ve been skipping my walks so far this week after having my upper leg bother me Sunday into Monday. Its doing much better now but will probably give it another day or so of rest before trying any longer hike.

Overall this week I’ve been prioritizing time sensitive packing but finally feel caught up and going to try to focus on some work stuff over the next few days.

On Saturday I get the new apartment keys and will move over a few fragile items (like wine glasses some computer monitors I’d prefer to handle myself.

Some Early Thoughts on LiveView Native

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0400

This weekend I finally had some time to experiment with LiveView Native, working through the introduction tutorial during a Side Project Saturday event run by my local Apple developer group. After working through the tutorial, I demoed the results to my Apple friends. We had some great discussions about the pros and cons of the approach. Those discussions locked in some of my early hot takes, and in this post, I’ll try to capture and share some of my early thoughts and concerns.

What is LiveView Native?

LiveView Native is a project that aims to empower exsiting LiveView developers with the ability to deploy native applications using LiveView, with an initial focus on iOS and Android apps.

There are a lot of technologies at play, so I’m going to take a moment to summarize the players involved:

Elixir is a functional programming language that runs in the Erlang/BEAM virtual machine. This runtime excels at providing concurrent and fault-tolerant systems.
Phoenix is a popular framework used to build web applications in Elixir.
LiveView is a feature of Phoenix that lets people build interactive, real-time, and collaborative web experiences. It leans on an architecture where a websocket keeps the browser connected to a process on the server. As a user interacts with the page, events are sent to the server process, and then a declarative/reactive UI is updated based on the new process state.
Swift and SwiftUI are the primary programming language and UI framework pair for building modern/native iOS applications.
Kotlin and Jetpack Compose are the primary programming language and UI framework pair for building modern/native Android applications.
React is a frontend JavaScript framework used to create single-page web applications, a competitor to LiveView.
React Native is a framework used to build React-powered apps inside a web view wrapper running on iOS and Android. Because of its web view wrapper, React Native is known to be memory expensive and sometimes exhibit sluggish performance.
- Correction: I’ve been corrected by friends that “[React Native] doesn’t run inside a web view, but instead renders native iOS/Android views.” and thus my ignorance spotlighted. I feel like I got my understanding of this via as the comparison of LiveView Native using “native views” and React Native using “web views” so I want to walk back and try to be accurate and say once again, I don’t use these frameworks and I do not know what I am talking about.
- Update 2: This seems like a fair technical review of how React Native works.
Dart and Flutter are a programming language and UI framework pair that lets you build cross-platform mobile applications. The unique take of Flutter is that it does all of its own UI drawing, allowing for a much more controlled and speedy UI render. It can use component libraries to emulate its host OS, with varying degrees of success (re: uncanny valley effect).

Now, with all that said, what is LiveView Native?

In a traditional LiveView, we have a server process and a client web browser. The LiveView renders a template of HTML influenced by the process state and sends it down the wire. As new events are processed and the state changes, very terse diffs are sent to the client browser, allowing the user’s UI to be updated.

LiveView Native substitutes the client web browser for a native client view running on iOS or Android. Instead of writing templates in HTML, we write them in SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose. LiveView will continue to own responsibility for figuring out the view diffs while the mobile apps will render these SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose views just like they would if built more traditionally.

There is no web view like you’d see in a React Native app, nor is there any new UI framework like you’d see in Flutter.

It’s a unique take on the problem that unlocks potentially impressive solutions, but like any technology, you must understand your compromises.

Worlds Are Colliding!

I’ve been working with Elixir since 2017 and LiveView since it was announced in 2019. Before Elixir, I spent more than a decade doing Apple platform development, first on the Mac and then on the iPhone. By the end, I was teaching iOS programming classes at places like Amazon and Google via my job at Big Nerd Ranch. So when this announcement came out, I felt like worlds were colliding and said as much.

I have many historic pessimistic opinions on multi-platform frameworks that try to sell “write once, deploy everywhere.” I’ll get into some of those later, but first, I’ll share my tutorial observations.

My Day with LiveView Native

During the first half of Side Project Saturday, I worked through the Your First LiveViewNative App tutorial. This tutorial has you build both a Phoenix project and an iOS project.

In the Phoenix project, you build a CatsListLive live view with SwiftUI-specific heex template content.

In the iOS project, you’ll add some of the LiveView Native package dependencies and then configure the default ContentView to load the swifty LiveView view class, which points at a localhost:4000 URI via configuration.

When you launch the iOS app, the LiveView view class inside of SwiftUI will connect to the Phoenix server, which makes a live view server process for CatsListLive and then sends down the template. When received inside of iOS, the view hierarchy is injected, and then regular old SwiftUI will render it just as if it had complied typically.

You may notice that the SwiftUI code templated in heex has things like phx-click="toggle-favorite". When the button is “clicked” in the iOS app, the event is sent via the websocket to the live view process on the server, the state is updated per standard LiveView lifecycle mechanics, and then the template is re-rendered, and diffs are applied.

Another interesting thing in the demo is the use of navigationlink and traditional Phoenix routes and redirects to handle the “NavigationController” like push and back button behavior all iOS users are accustomed to.

Once I completed the tutorial, I presented the project to my peers. As I expected, there was general curiosity about how it worked compared to other multi-platform solutions (like React Native and Flutter). We clicked around the LiveView Native dependencies and reviewed how things were being built. I explained how the view diffs were very tight and not just some text-based XML diff. They asked questions about other SwiftUI view modifiers and how animations would be handled, which I did not know yet.

There was also a reaction of “this feels like a lot of complexity with many failure points” and “is this worth the complexity cost?” For them, I think that is an expected response. These people have embraced Apple platforms and are already building with Swift and SwiftUI. They have no appetite for learning Elixir, Phoenix, or LiveView for this new way to run an app or any genuine appreciation for the unique niche it can solve (real-time and collaboration experiences).

However, this tool is not really built for them. So who is this being built for? Time for hot takes.

What pain is LiveView Native is trying to solve?

The marketing site for the project states:

LiveView Native empowers developers to build native and web applications seamlessly with Phoenix. Now there’s no need to manage multiple teams or juggle multiple frameworks: The same developers can manage both, cutting down delivery timelines and freeing up resources to focus on innovation.

Given my experience, I find this statement to be suspect.

Any developer trying to build a LiveView Native app with no historic native mobile development experience will need to overcome a significant list of concerns.

They will need to compose templates with pseudo-SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose layout code. These UI/layout frameworks are drastically different from the HTML/Tailwind layout code they use. It’s a steep learning curve.
They will need to work around the lack of client-side JavaScript events (coming soon, maybe?). They may miss the inability to leverage existing JavaScript solutions already in use in their current LiveView solutions.
They will need to resolve offline experiences and real-world spotty connectivity/reconnection issues for phones in buildings/tunnels/elevators. (This is true of web-based LiveView as well.)
They will need to overcome the complexities of the Xcode and Android Studio IDEs, both extremely deep topics.
They will need to learn all the trials and tribulations of app store review and deployment. This may be the most significant risk (see below).
They will encounter harder-to-debug problems because of the complexities of this stack. There is no browser console to inspect/change things. Debugging is very different in Xcode/Android Studio.

I’ll also add that I have many friends already working in SwiftUI natively in Xcode daily. While SwiftUI can provide an unexpected boost to productivity for basic needs, there is a point where it falls down, and it is not easy to compensate for. If you observe the iOS developer community, this is a massive point of conflict and discussion. Depending on your LiveView Native layout’s complexity, you might be in for a world of pain.

Will Apple approve this?

I hate app store review and distribution exclusivity. It was one of the primary reasons why I left the platform years ago.

My concerns around “will Apple approve this?” was one of the first questions that came to mind watching the ElixirConf keynote announcement. The fact DockYard had already gotten an ElixirConf chat app through review was impressive, but unfortunately, past review approval does not guarantee future outcomes. I’ve seen many apps approved for years that suddenly get blocked for doing something they’ve always done.

Looking at the App Store Review Guidelines, we find section 2.5.2, which states:

2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.

The fact that we are editing the UI in real-time, potentially adding, removing, or changing features, feels like we violate this section.

However, if you search the web, you’ll find plenty of posts talking about iOS server-driven UI and even this recent conference talk that explains:

Companies like Airbnb, Spotify, Flipkart, Swiggy and several others use a technique called Server Driven UI, which allows them to remotely update their user interfaces based on the response received from the server. This allows them to bypass the review process and keep their apps sync on multiple platforms.

In this session, you are going to learn how to get started with building a server driven UI in iOS.

So I don’t know. 🤷‍♂️ It’s one of those things Apple keeps vague and open to interpretation. Having chosen to leave the platform because of these controls, I am incredibly hesitant to return and bet my business on app store whims.

Conclusions

LiveView Native is an interesting project with a unique take on the multi-platform framework problem space. I have doubts it can overcome the “lets LiveView people do mobile without knowing mobile” shtick, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

I don’t plan to be too active around the project (have no interest bowing down to Apple for app approvals ever again) and instead will invest my LiveView learning time into the new component attributes / UI library opportunities.

Based on my podcast listening habits and general community awareness, LiveView Native is a significant project for the LiveView community. I expect many to tinker with this in the coming months, and I look forward to reading their blog posts and findings.

PS: I hope people don’t take my positioning concerns about the project as a personal attack. The tech itself is very impressive. I fear this project won’t be able to honor the simplicity promise it is being promoted with. Teams who DO accept the extra complexity and tradeoffs of this “stack” may be empowered to build software that would otherwise take more time – it’s just there is no free lunch; they will still have to know a lot about mobile development to do so.

Random Leftover Draft Notes

I recorded a companion video walking through some of the code:

One company that comes to mind for this sort of thing is Sketch. They build a native Mac experience AND lean on websockets with an Elixir backend to enable a real-time collaborative experience. They do not use LiveView but do benefit from the BEAM.
I was disappointed with Xcode that when I copied/pasted Swift code from the tutorial into Xcode, it did not run a code formatter on save. My friends say you can configure plugins to help with that, but wow, I’m bummed that it hasn’t been defaulted by Xcode/Apple yet.
When composing SwiftUI templates in a heex file, we intentionally use things like phx-click, which make sense given the goals of the project. Still, I can’t help but note that when I was a mobile app developer, most frameworks took pride in using terms like “touch” and “tap,” so it can feel odd to see “click” in this space. Seeing people say “click” was always a smell that something did not belong. Like when people say Iphone or xCode.
One niche I think is perfect for Flutter is when you want to build a very styled/themed UI and want it to be the same across iPhone/Android. Things like video game menu UIs or brand/movie tie-in things.
It was neat to see the LiveView Native team use Apple’s own DocC tutorial template tooling. I was aware this was out but had not seen it firsthand.
One pro for LiveView Native is that it does have a path to migrate to traditional SwiftUI should the project benefit from a more conventional approach. That is not true of the others.

Exercism Elixir Track: Captain's Log (Erlang Libraries, Randomness)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 13:36:32 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Erlang Libraries and Randomness while completing the Captain’s Log exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Bread And Potions (Protocols)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:32:09 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Protocols while completing the Bread And Potions exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Community Garden (Agent)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:41:57 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Agent while completing the Community Garden exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Boutique Suggestions (List Comprehensions)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:07:10 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about List Comprehensions while completing the Boutique Suggestions exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Remote Control Car (Structs)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 10:45:55 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Structs while completing the Remote Control Car exercise.

Journal -- September 18, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 11:10:58 -0400

Sunday, September 18, 2022 – It has been too long since a general journal update so let’s get into it.

The big item since my last journal was the ElixirConf trip, and I did a short recap of that already.

In the two weeks since ElixirConf, I’ve had some extreme swings in mood and focus. Some days I’ve been reasonably productive, and some days totally out of it. This past week I’ve tried to get some extra sleep, which seemed to help. I think the most significant factor is the lack of day-to-day responsibilities and client work. Usually, those bad down days will happen, but if I have responsibilities, like meetings, check-ins, or people expecting some work from me, I typically get over it. Without an active client gig, those flat emotions can sometimes get the better of me.

I did spend a bit of time on Monday shooting out emails to help drum up contract work, though no takers yet.

One way I am trying to fill the void is to help volunteer a bit with the DockYard Academy. They are working on their Elixir curriculum through some beta classes, and I’ve found a few ways to help (some merged PRs)

I’ve also kept up with my Elixir Exercism video series, usually publishing a video once a day. I plan to finish the “learning exercises” and probably change focus to other projects.

My Franklin blog project has seen some work done. I merged a PR that added the ability to update a post, and I have a local in-development branch that gets the LiveView UI working in a basic enough fashion. I’ll add some tests to that before making a new PR.

In apartment moving news, I’ve finally started packing some boxes. The move will be on October 4th, and I’m doing my best to box and label everything with care. Next weekend I’ll kick this into high gear and start living out of a suitcase, using paper plates, and so on as I box all the day-to-day life stuff.

Looking ahead to next week, I’d say my priorities are:

Packing more stuff for the move.
Get unwanted furniture picked up.
Continue posting Exercism videos.
Continue some part-time help with DockYard Academy.
Start investigating short-term income streams while I wait for a consulting gig to land.
Be more active in soliciting a consulting gig.
Enjoy the end of the baseball season. It’ll be gone before I know it.
Go to the Phillies game on Friday.

Exercism Elixir Track: Chessboard (Ranges)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 12:23:28 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Ranges while completing the Chessboard exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Newsletter (File)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:25:01 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about the File module while completing the Newsletter exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Top Secret (AST: Abstract Syntax Tree)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:44:14 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) while completing the Top Secret exercise.

This exercise was a tougher one for me. I cut out a bunch of head scratching, but it still ended up being almost an hour. Ugh.

Exercism Elixir Track: File Sniffer (Binaries)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 16:15:55 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Binaries while completing the File Sniffer exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Boutique Inventory (Enum)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 14:41:52 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Enum while completing the Boutique Inventory exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Basketball Website (Access Behaviour)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 17:07:30 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Access Behaviour while completing the Basketball Website exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Take-A-Number (PIDs and Processes)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 11:14:37 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about PIDs and Processes while completing the Take-A-Number exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Library Fees (Dates and Time)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:57:33 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Dates and Time while completing the Library Fees exercise.

ElixirConf Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 13:25:37 -0400

This past week I attended ElixirConf in Colorado. It was my first time out at an in-person conference since COVID lockdowns. As much as I hated the travel, it was great to see everyone.

I got a lot of face time with a handful of people I had worked with over the last two years and a bunch of others whose company I have enjoyed via online meetups, book clubs, and Twitter. Even a tiny in-person conversation adds an extra level to those ongoing “online peer relationships,” and I’m happy to have made many new connections.

* Yes, it would seem many Elixir companies are still hiring; though I’d say only half the talks mentioned that when historically, maybe 75% of the talks would so 🤷‍♂️ maybe there is a slight dip.

For more photos, check out this album started by Todd Resudek.

The conference content was fantastic, almost overwhelming.. I’ll note a few big takeaways below, but a complete review would be quite extensive and is out of scope for this post.

LiveView Native – Brian Cardarella of DockYard shared a new project that aims to provide a way to build mobile applications that can act as a LiveView client. Using this, you can connect a mobile application to a LiveView process on the server and then render native views based on heex templates, intermixing LiveView Native view renders with “normal” platform views (such as SwiftUI used in the demo). More info can be found on the LiveView Native marketing site, GitHub project, and related Hacker News thread. It is still pretty early tech but has a lot of people buzzing. I’ll share more thoughts after I get a chance to kick the tires.

Elixir 1.14 is out! It includes Kernel.dbg/2, a new macro for debugging, PartitionSupervisor for handling some bottleneck scenarios, improved errors on binaries and evaluation, slicing with steps, expression-based inspection and more.
Phoenix 1.7 is immanent. It will include verified routes and component properties. It also has Tailwind built-in as the default. Chris also shared a roadmap for future work which included plans to integrate some aspects of the phx_live_storybook project as well as a rethink of LiveView/Component messaging (which was a point of issue Miki Rezentes brought up in her talk and I’m in total agreement with – right now it’s a bit clunky).
I had an excellent time in my telemetry class on Tuesday. Still have to finish my last lesson, but I had some beneficial experiences adding custom events and attaching common library events through a informative collection of sample projects.
I sat in on many sessions showcasing the continued evolution of Livebook. Nice to see this tool continue to mature and empower education and knowledge sharing.
Mark Ericksen did a presentation walking through some tools that can help make normal Ecto usage apply to a globally distributed database environment, as one would see on fly.io. I have not done a fly deployment (yet), but this is something I should check out.
juvet is a cool little in-dev framework for making Slack bots.
Kip Cole’s talk on Time Algebra and a new library called Tempo was an unexpected and impressive talk.
David Bernheisel is preparing a paid-for extension to his Ecto in Production resource. I can’t wait to support it.
Owen Bickford talked about his new WebAuthn LiveView component, which simplifies integrations that want to lean on this new auth tech. Looks extremely useful, and as iOS starts to promote PassKeys, I think many will seek this out.
And a lot more which I don’t have time to document.

Conferencing during COVID is stressful. I masked up aggressively during the plane trip to and from the show. I did not mask while attending. Most people did not mask. I’d guess maybe 5% did mask.

The big value of the show for me was socializing with people, from hallway chats to lunches and even some code pairing. Masking during these interactions would have been a notable hindrance. I have a hard enough time hearing people with my bad ear in these rooms, let alone adding a mask to my own voice (or theirs). If the conference required masking or if I observed a community norm, I was prepared to do so, but in the end, I did not. I’ll live with that outcome, keep an eye out for symptoms, and take an at-home test over the next few days. Bummed this stress point is even here, but those are the cards we are dealt.

The last takeaway I’ll note is a personal observation I need to return to sharing. As an iOS developer, I did many presentations and conference talks but have not mirrored this behavior with my presence in the Elixir ecosystem. In part, during the early years, it was mostly imposter syndrome – as an Elixir newbie, who am I to tell these people anything – but those days are past, and I really need to start giving back some.

I expect the ElixirConf videos to be shared publicly on YouTube in the next few months. Keep an eye out for more info on their channel.

ElixirConf Talks of Interest

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 16:38:56 -0400

I’m attending ElixirConf this week, and in preparation, I looked over the session schedule to see what talks are of interest to me. I figured I’d share my notes in case anyone is curious about what’s on my mind. If you are also in attendance, please say hi.

https://2022.elixirconf.com/schedule

Tuesday

Tuesday is the training day. I picked Instrumenting Elixir Applications.

I’ve been on projects using observation tools like open telemetry and DataDog but have never been personally responsible for setting it up, so I have a lot to learn.

Wednesday

Wednesday starts with a curious “virtual-only” morning session list. I think this was done to allow the sister NervesConf “sub-conference” to do its thing in the meeting spaces. I am not attending, so will most likely look to watch some virtual sessions in the hotel lobby and make friends with other stragglers.

After José Valim keynote, we have tracks of three topics:

Robust, Distributed, and Parallel Processing for Enormous Images Using SuperVisor, Node, Flow, Nx, and evision.
Porting Legacy Backend Services into Elixir, Seamlessly
Building a HEEX component library

I’ll be attending the HEEX component library talk. Improving my skill set at building components is high on my interest list right now, and I’m curious to see what Matthew has to share.

I’m likely to watch the recording of the Porting Legacy Backend Services later as that is also something of interest to me. So often, I try to encourage people to avoid the big rewrite, and this sounds like a good match for that since the summary includes “while keeping the user experience the same during the whole migration process.” 👍

I don’t have a current need for scalable image processing but will keep the talk recording in mind in the future.

Next up:

Livebook smart cells are amazing
Classifying Bot IP Addresses in Phoenix
The Elixir Of Web Scraping

I think I’ll be going to the Livebook talk. I’ve only done some basic Livebook writing in the past, but I have some ideas about building LiveView/collaborative UX demo tools and it would be helpful to see what’s new.

The other talks sound useful but are not active topics for me right now.

For the final Wednesday morning choices, we have:

Make a Soundcloud like app in a week and make it fit in a seven dollar box
Dx - a pragmatic inference system based on your Ecto schema
Cryptography and Elixir

I’ll be attending the Soundcloud app talk. Curious to hear how that project has progressed and very interested in the topics around file uploading.

After lunch, we have two choices:

Ecto in Production - Migration Edition
Let’s talk to Industrial devices with Elixir & Nerves

I’m not doing an IoT or Nerves stuff, so this is an easy call for me. Improving large-impact Ecto migrations is a welcome focus, particularly given my client’s data sizes.

Next up:

Delightful Multiplayer Editing with Phoenix
Workflows and use cases for Elixir Nerves

Anxious to see how the Felt team is doing UI collaboration. This is one of the big reasons a project should choose Phoenix LiveView. It’s a great fit.

Next up:

Going Global with a Normal Phoenix App
Keeping your IoT fleet afloat with Sink

I’m curious to hear how Fly.io deployments are working out and will surely appreciate people sharing their edge cases and other considerations.

Next up:

Match Specs: Fast Functional Filtering with Matcha
Introducing Juvet: Building Bots in Elixir

That Match Specs talk seems too deep so for me. The Juvet one sounds interesting. Some of my product ideas are tools to make Slack more reasonable, so bot programming seems like a topic I would enjoy.

Wednesday’s final sessions:

Time algebra - a new way to think about and work with time
Making Elixir Honk: Implementing An Elixir Audio Library In Zig

I’m interested in both of these talks, though I’ll probably give the audio talk my attention. I’ve worked alongside Chris and am curious about what he has come up with. Also, have a passive interest in continued interest in Zig and what people are up to.

Thursday

Thursday starts with a morning keynote from Brian Cardarella.

Afterward, session tracks start with:

Onboarding New Elixir Members
In Production with Elixir, Rust, and WebAssembly
Caching with the Postgres WAL

I’ll probably watch the recording of the WebAssembly talk and attend the onboarding talk. I’m less confident I’ll be doing education as a business moving forward, but I’m still big on mentoring and curious about what this talk has to share.

In-between sessions, Test Double is offering a “Double Up with Test Double” session, and I might stop by to say hi and get some advice on my CQRS project.

Next track choices include:

“How to Grow your own Juniors”: A guide to mentoring in an Elixir Environment
Quick Iteration in Elixir - Tips from 6 Years of Professional & Hobby Elixir Development
WebAuthn + LiveView

I’m interested in all of these talks, but WebAuthn is high on my interest level. I’ll be there.

Next up:

Selling Elixir
Seems Good Enough to Me: Working with Testers to Derisk Elixir Upgrades
Wordle: Elixir Flavour

I’m curious about these talks, but none are on fire for me. I might take this slot as an opportunity to mingle a bit. We’ll see.

Next up:

Roll Cages, Pit Stops, and Victory Laps: The Launch of Elixir and LiveView at Scale on the New Cars.com
Self Taught to First Job!
E2E Reactivity - using Svelte with Phoenix LiveView

As a contributor to the cars.com project, I’m anxious to see Zack’s retrospective.

Next up:

Axon: Functional Programming for Deep Learning
Serverless to Serving Elixir: Migrating Serverless app to run on Phoenix
Have you got the ExFactor? Writing a refactor helper

I’ll probably go to the refactor talk. Kind of curious how that project works, though again, I might use this time for mingling.

Next up:

SOLID code isn’t flexible
Using Livebook to Teach Elixir
Review of using Elixir for 4 years in production

Very anxious to see Brooklin Myers’s Livebook talk. I hear he is using it a ton in the upcoming DockYard class. The other talks look cool too but I will have to wait till the recordings.

Final tracks for Thursday:

Learn you some pattern matching for great good!
Connect the Docs
Shifting Left: Secure Coding in Elixir Livebooks

I’m interested in all of these talks, but the one on documentation is close to my heart, and I will attend.

Friday

Morning track choices start with:

To MVP and beyond, a year in LiveView
A Javascripter’s trip to Phoenix and LiveView
Exploring Elixir Codebases with Archeometer

Probably going to stop by the Archeometer talk. Curious to see what that project is all about.

Next up:

Flame On: Profiling Elixir and Phoenix apps with Flame Graphs in Live Dashboard
Designing Data Intensive Applications in Elixir with Flow
Understanding common network protocols with Elixir

I would like to try out that flame graph tool but will probably attend the Flow talk since it aligns with my event-sourcing interests.

Next up:

I was wrong about LiveView
Searching Your Elixir Code
Embedded Web Apps in Elixir with LiveState

I’ll probably sit in on Jason’s talk. While I like LiveView and think it’s an excellent choice for many projects, I’m not sure I’m as all in (as it sounds like he is). I still feel like if the app lends itself to request-response it can be better to embrace that simplicity, particularly for user-facing pages that are often presented on mobile phones.

The day closes with closing keynotes from Chris Grainger and then Chris McCord.

It feels like this is going to be a packed conference. While I’ve outlined talks that interest me, I need to remember that the value of going in person is seeing others, so if I have to skip out on some of these and catch the recordings, I think that is fine too. I suspect the recordings will have a quick turnaround since they are already doing the virtual component, but we’ll see.

Exercism Elixir Track: DNA Encoding (Bitstrings and Tail Call Recursion)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 14:38:27 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Bitstrings and Tail Call Recursion while completing the DNA Encoding exercise.

Today’s recording did not go nearly as bad as the Regular Expressions one but I still struggled with the Elixir Bitstring syntax and this took longer than needed. Bonus round of disappointment, you’ll get to see me with a haircut I did not like (and has since been ‘fixed’).

Exercism Elixir Track: Wine Cellar (Keyword Lists)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 11:43:10 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Keyword Lists while completing the Wine Cellar exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Log Parser (Regular Expressions)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:26:42 -0400

This one went badly and took forever. I am awful with regular expressions and the lesson was painful for me to do. I can only imagine what it might be like to watch for others. However, in the spirit of transparency, here is the 1 hour 25 minute recording. Good luck with it.

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we ATTEMPT to learn about Regular Expressions while completing the Log Parser exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Name Badge (If and Nil)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 13:00:36 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about If and Nil while completing the Name Badge exercise.

Journal -- August 23, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 12:49:53 -0400

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 – As the great Barbra Streisand sings: “People; People who need people; Are the luckiest people in the world.” (1)

After a few needed days of rest from my vacation (love how that logic works) I had an enjoyable extended weekend catching up with folks. Saw a friend for lunch on Friday, attended the in-person Philly CocoaHead Side Project Saturday on (you guessed it) Saturday, and then a family kid’s birthday party on Sunday. Otherwise been slowly ordering moving boxes and doing some todos related to my upcoming apartment move. I won’t start packing for another few weeks, but getting everything organized and also having some friends stop by and take a few furniture pieces I won’t be taking with me.

My Elixir Exercism video series continues on a slow but steady pace. Feeling pretty good about that and even started to promote it in a few places.

Also starting to bang the drum on my consulting availability a little louder. I am even considering getting name badges with “Hire me” on them for ElixirConf.

Speaking of, ElixirConf is next week, and I’m looking forward to it. I fly out on Monday, do a training day, and then the official conference. I’ll share more later, but if you happen to read this and will be there, please do say hi.

That’s it for now—time for lunch and some office cleanup.

(1) This is a big inside joke for me. Whenever I’d be with my mother, and we’d observe or otherwise get frustrated with people driving recklessly or doing other shameful things out in public, I would start singing this song, expressing my innate default response to be a recluse.

Exercism Elixir Track: RPG Character Sheet (IO)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 12:40:46 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about IO while completing the RPG Character Sheet exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: German Sysadmin (Case and Charlist)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:54:16 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Case and Charlist while completing the German Sysadmin exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: City Office (Docs and Typespecs)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 14:38:17 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Docs and Typespecs while completing the City Office exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Bird Count (Recursion)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 10:54:32 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Recursion while completing the Bird Count exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: High Score (Maps and Module Attributes as Constants)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 11:30:56 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Maps and Module Attributes as Constants while completing the High Score exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: High School Sweetheart (Pipe Operator and Strings)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:24:27 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Pipe Operator and Strings while completing the High School Sweetheart exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Kitchen Calculator (Pattern Matching and Tuples)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 11:30:51 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Pattern Matching and Tuples while completing the Kitchen Calculator exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Guessing Game (Default Arguments, Guards, and Multiple Clause Functions)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 11:05:37 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Default Arguments, Guards, and Multiple Clause Functions while completing the Guessing Game exercise.

Journal -- August 12, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 18:57:30 -0400

Friday, August 12, 2022 – The past week started with some enjoyable and relaxing beach days down the shore.

My sister, who has been enjoying some extended time staying at her friend’s house, welcomed me down for a visit. I arrived Sunday morning and stayed through Wednesday afternoon. Most of our time was spent at the beach with a few food excursions, including some well-enjoyed breakfast outings.

My sister and her friend like to go to the beach later and stay late. We had some great weather, and they took some fantastic photos.

We had a very bright moon, and the colors that came out at the end of the day were notably pretty.

To be clear, this is the moon, not the sun. The day is over–we are headed home.

When I returned to the city Wednesday night, I caught up on random emails and hosted the Philly Elixir meetup.

Thursday saw me finish setting up my new laptop. I got Elixir and related tooling installed and configured. It took a little extra tweaking to account for M1-friendly BEAM versions, but nothing too crazy.

I was able to mostly recreate my VS Code setup via the text-based user settings, keybindings, and snippet files. I reinstalled my extensions one by one, but I suspect I could have done a better job at exporting the list.

By today, Friday, I got back into my Exercism Elixir track progress. I solved, recorded, and published the Log Level exercise. I also solved and recorded the Guessing Game exercise, which I’ll post tomorrow.

Exercism Elixir Track: Log Level (Atoms and Cond)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 15:05:52 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video, we learn about Atoms and Cond while completing the Log Level exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Language List (Lists)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 16:56:19 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video we learn about Lists while completing the Language List exercise.

Journal -- August 5, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 17:42:14 -0400

Friday, August 5, 2022 – Hello world, from my new laptop. I ordered this two months ago after an uncomfortable feeling that I was reliant on Mac hardware for my consulting income but the higher end model laptops of which I would want were becoming harder to order on short notice. Sure enough it took two months to get here but I am glad it has arrived.

I’m still getting it setup and might post some longer notes in the future. Early on I’m enjoying the hardware but rolling my eyes at the OS software. I was sticking to the older macOS 10.15 for a while since I did not have much interest in the UI changes of macOS 11 and then 12. I knew I’d have to update eventually but the new laptop kind of forces my hand.

The other big news of the week was my commitment to do the Elixir Exercism cohort. It technically starts on Monday, August 8th) but I’ve been busy working through some of the early exercises, recording myself on video as I go. My hope is that the routine spurs me to some more educational stuff in the future.

Otherwise it has been a quite week. Did some more work towards my apartment move, locking down my new place, notifying my current landlord, hiring movers, etc. Going to be moving first week of October. It is a big chore but I’m hoping the new place will be less stressful.

I had plans to go to the shore today (Friday) but my aunt whose house I would have been staying at got sick. Instead I’ll be going down on Sunday and staying a few days at the friend of my sister (whom is already down there). Should be fun, mostly just the beach time and book reading.

I took a step back from MLB: The Show this week after a few frustrating games where I just could not hit the ball. Took up Chrono Trigger on my DS as a substitue. I may take it down the shore with me.

Exercism Elixir Track: Freelancer Rates (Floating Point Numbers and Integers)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 13:14:55 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video we learn about Floating Point Numbers and Integers while completing the Freelancer Rates exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Pacman Rules (Booleans)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 11:16:06 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video we learn about Booleans while completing the Pacman Rules exercise.

Exercism Elixir Track: Secrets (Anonymous Functions and Bit Manipulation)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 11:50:51 -0400

In today’s Exercism Elixir Track video we learn about Anonymous Functions and Bit Manipulation while completing the Secrets exercise.

Exercism Elixir Cohort, New Video Series

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 19:39:16 -0400

Exercism, the popular platform that teaches programming via structured coding exercises, is going to be hosting a free August cohort for their Elixir track. They brand the endeavour an “Exhort”.

The Exhort is simple. We’ll give you and a bunch of other learners a space to learn together, add in some of our best mentors and Exercism experts, and support you as you work together through the Exercism Elixir syllabus over 30 days.

100% free

Starts August 8th. Lasts for 30 days.

Work through the track in your own time

Pair with each other or work as individuals

Commit to sharing your journey, and supporting others

I did a few lessons of the Elixir track last year when the new version of Exercism was launched and was impressed with how it all worked. The cohort sounds fun and a nice way for me to mingle with other looking to learn Elixir.

My plan is to record my work through the sessions and the first video / exercise is shared below.

For now I’m distributing these on my personal YouTube channel. The videos are pretty raw and longer than some historical educational content I’ve produced. I sharing my failures as well as my victories. It could be longer content than some might expect but I could see others enjoying seeing me work through the errors and typos too. We’ll see how it goes.

I also think the 30-day scope of the cohort helps me invest in the video series without worrying about a long-term content commitment to people. I’m still on the fence how I want to split my time in the coming months.

Journal -- July 30, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 11:26:37 -0400

Saturday, July 30, 2022 – It has been a calm week, and I am happy to have it.

On Wednesday met up with my Aunt for dinner at one of our local pub/pizza place. Then on Thursday my sister and I headed up to PARX Casino for a nicer dinner and a few quick sessions of misplaced hopes with the slot machines. I was particularly bummed I did not get one BIG spin on the Wheel of Fortune game. It is all I was looking for. At least the steak dinner was good, very good actually.

On Friday, I headed into town for a day at IndyHall. I have not been down as much during my vacation time, and it was good to catch up with some folks. While at the hall, I made some noteworthy progress on my blog project. Feeling pretty confident I’ll have something to demo at the next Philly Elixir meetup.

As much as I enjoy catching up with people at IndyHall, I can’t say I look forward to city visits much anymore. It feels sad to see the continued growth of homelessness and the continued neglect of the streets, with trash piled up all over. I don’t feel as safe as I used to. Even with my intentionally limited attention, I am well aware of gun violence in the city.

Plans for today and the rest of the weekend are light and include some more packing of mom’s things and other apartment cleanup efforts. I skipped my morning walk today due to some soreness in my feet but plan a longer walk and maybe some swim time tomorrow.

Journal -- July 26, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:38:46 -0400

Tuesday, July 26, 2022 – Attended the Phillies game last night. They came back to defeat the Braves with a 3-run home run by Bryson Stott in the bottom of the eighth inning! It was glorious.

Before the game, I started working on some notes for my fall consulting search. As a consultant, it is always a bit challenging as I need to demo my Elixir skills, but the client code is obviously not available to show. I think I have some good notes as well as some projects and blog posts from my ElixirFocus site.

I’m doing some coding work today, trying to finish my first pass at my Commanded CQRS/Event Source blog project. In short, it’s a basic first pass at commands, events, and other systems to help me figure out the patterns I want to use. Today I’m specifically trying to get my head around validation and how I want to do that, knowing I’ll want Ecto.Changeset structs available for the web layer.

Journal -- July 24, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 12:51:34 -0400

Sunday, July 24, 2022 – I’m back from my mid-week Baseball Hall of Fame trip. A recap with photos has been posted if you are curious how it went. Other updates below.

On Friday, I checked out another apartment that I think might work for me. It is a two-floor / two-bedroom rental in a townhome-style layout. I like how it is in a quiet area with a walking trail and park nearby. It is a 30-minute drive from my current place, the edge of the radius I am targeting, as I don’t want to be too far from my sister and other family. Need to talk with the leasing agent some more, but I have good hopes.

As for my current place, they continue to be no-show, no-work at removing the remaining moldy drywall and addressing other issues. It is embarrassing.

Yesterday, Saturday, I enjoyed a morning swim at the YMCA and then attended the Philly CocoaHeads Side Project Saturday. It was our first in-person meetup in two years. There were 5 of us, and we took over a little loft area at a bar in Jenkintown. Worked on that Cooperstown recap and enjoyed some friendly conversations.

Today, Sunday, I set my alarm for 6:30am and, after breakfast, was out the door for my morning walk by 7:15am. Another scorcher today, so I wanted to do my walk as early as possible. While I was walking, it was around 85°, but the high is predicted to hit 100° later today. I adjusted my walking path to take advantage of as much shade as possible. Might have to avoid the sun and stay indoors tomorrow. Perhaps another YMCA trip or do my VR workout.

No other notable plans for the day outside of some laundry. I have the Phillies on the radio and may work on the event-sourced blog project a bit. I also have some apartment-related paperwork to review.

One feeling that is gnawing at me as the new week approaches is that vacation time is over, and I need to be more work-productive with my time in the coming days. I’ve loosely started talking with people about possible Elixir projects but not sure what I want to do just yet. I need to get heads-down and do something to find the momentum.

Baseball Hall of Fame Trip Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 12:05:18 -0400

I just returned from my trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, and I thought I’d share some notes and photos.

I knew I would be off work in June and July, and while some shore trips are sprinkled across my summer calendar, I wanted to fill in the weeks with some trips and get out of the apartment. I’ve been saturating myself in baseball this summer, so Cooperstown seemed a good fit. From Philadelphia to Cooperstown by car is about five hours, give or take. The drive was uneventful and relaxed, with lots of pretty forest-filled mountain views. I also got lucky with some audiobooks that filled the air nicely.

While my sister offered to come with me, I took the trip by myself. I encouraged her to stay with her friends during her extended shore house vacation. She is not into baseball and while I think she enjoys the occasional in-person game with me, that drive to and back, plus the entire day in town, seemed like a bit much.

I drove up Tuesday afternoon and checked into my room at The Railroad Inn. Great little place. It was one of the more pricey options but very well done and a short walk into town and the hall of fame.

After unpacking, I put on my walking sneakers and explored the town. Saw Doubleday Field, the nearby lakefront, and lots of other nooks. It was a hot day but not overbearing. Benches under tree shade were very welcome when found for short breaks.

After my walk, I cleaned up and headed to Upstate Bar and Grill for dinner and to watch the All Star game. Had some good hot wings and french fries. The fries came with a sriracha aioli, which I would never have asked for but surprisingly enjoyed. Had a few extra Cooperstown Lagers and then headed home. I fell asleep watching the last innings of the All Star game from bed with plans to wake early for the hall of fame in the morning.

Woke up around 7am on Wednesday. Strolled into town around 8:15am and got a breakfast sandwich and coffee at the local Stagecoach Coffee. Was at the Hall of Fame by 9am and walked through the gates just as they opened. There were 20 other early birds like me.

The Hall of Fame is spread across three floors. You start with exhibits on the second floor, move up to more exhibits on the third, and then back down to the ground floor for the actual inductee placks. I started at 9am, watched the 15-minute “Generations” movie, and then took my time working through the exhibits.

I took a few photos, mostly of Phillies stuff that caught my eye or other players I am fond of. My goal with photos of museums like this is not high quality per se but to capture a few visuals to help me recall the trip and the feeling of the place. The goal here is NOT to fully document the place; how can one even try.

The Hall of Fame was very enjoyable. Visiting it alongside my rewatching of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary (which I’ve been working through over the past few weeks) put me in an excellent mindset to appreciate everything I was looking at. Lots of cool memorabilia and some great pull quotes/stories shared. I like those more than the raw statistics, still appreciating how numbers help one compare the play style and successes of one player vs. another.

After the hall, I got a late lunch at Mell’s at 22 and then took back to Main Street for some souvenir window shopping. There are lots of stores. They sell all kinds of baseball nicknacks and baseball cards. At the hall itself, I had already picked up a t-shirt gift for my sister, a new baseball book Remembering Harry Kalas, and a “who’s on first” baseball (which has special relevance for me as I love the movie Rain Man).

I wanted a little mini bat souvenir, and there are a few bat store options in town. Many offer full custom bats, but I wanted something a little smaller. I ended up with a mini bat half the size between my current little mini bat and a full-sized bat. For many of my peers who will see my toying with my current mini bat over Zoom, which I tell them is my thinking bat, I now consider this new bat a second thinking bat, for when the problem is just a little bigger.

See all the sides of the ball in this short movie.

Also, let us have some empathy for the poor souls running the Hall of Fame gift shop.

I ended the afternoon with a small scoop of peanut butter and chocolate ice cream and then headed back to the inn. There I relaxed a bit. I enjoyed some hard iced tea drinks and read a Phillies book I brought with me on the inn’s patio. Around dinner time, I walked over to a nearby pizza place. The pizza was “NY style” with a thinker crust. Not my preference, but it was pretty good. Back at the inn, I rested in my air-conditioned room. Was happy to discover Moneyball playing on TV and watched it.

The next day, Thursday, I got up around 8am and packed up. The inn provides a nice little kitchen of breakfast supplies. Before heading home, I enjoyed a coffee, english muffin, and strawberry granola bar. The home drive was, once again, pleasant and uneventful. I almost finished my one audiobook. I think there is an hour or so left of it, and I’m curious to hear how it ends. Will have to resume it during my next walk.

Overall a fun and successful trip. If you are a baseball fan, I think you’d enjoy it. Otherwise, it is a pretty small town, so not too much to see but a nice relaxing spot if you want to unwind.

Journal -- July 16, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 13:49:27 -0400

Saturday, July 16, 2022 – Yesterday I did some more apartment hunting and scheduled even more tours next week. Starting to get my head around what I want and what I will compromise on. Have high hopes for the scheduled tour next Friday as it is a more isolated place near a park and walking trail, which looks nice. We’ll see.

Today is a light day. Took a morning walk and then got some pretzels. Finished watching “Inning 7” of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary. I watched it in 2020 in lieu of the missing early baseball season that year and am enjoying it just as much the second time through.

Need to get some laundry done in prep for my mid-week trip to Cooperstown. Going to be a lot of fun. Also need to download some audiobooks to try out for the car ride.

Other fun news, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday, I finally got an invite to buy a PS5 from Amazon, and with a bit of help from some birthday gift cards, put the order in. Should be here tomorrow. Planning to play through the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and its DLC as well as update my copy of MLB: The Show (assuming my account / cards just transfer over). I had to get the bundle, so I’ll give Horizon a spin too. Honestly, the purchase is as much about upcoming games as those out right now.

Journal -- July 14, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:11:17 -0400

Thursday, July 14, 2022 – Birthday recap from Monday is pretty basic. Had an excellent breakfast at a local diner with my sister. Got pancakes which were great though I can never finish them all. Played some games and then took a nap before dinner with my aunts and uncles at my favorite brick oven pizza place. A fine relaxing day. Got lots of goodies and chocolate gifts. Michelle made the family chocolate cake which was delicious. I have a slice in the freezer for later.

On Tuesday, we worked through some of my mom’s old things, getting as much suitable stuff ready for donations. It’s still very hard packing up her things.

On Wednesday, I hoped to see the apartment repair man return, but no dice, no call, no nothing. Spent a few hours continuing my new apartment search. In the evening, I hosted a small social gathering for Philly Elixir. The outdoor beer garden was way more packed than we expected, but most of us (sorry Quinn) found each other and enjoyed each other’s company. I think we’ll do an online meeting next month and then maybe try another in-person social in September.

Today is going to be pretty quiet. Might run those donations to the drop-off but otherwise just catching up on email and little things. Tomorrow I have plans to tour an apartment and might drive by some others.

Journal -- July 10, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 13:27:22 -0400

Sunday, July 10, 2022 – A week of distractions, some pleasant and others not so much. Let’s catch up.

On Tuesday, my eye caught a curious stain next to the laundry washer and discovered a significant wall of mold upon moving it aside. In short order, I wrote a letter and went in person to the leasing office to request someone to come out.

Maintenance at my apartment has been extremely frustrating since moving in April 2021, with many tickets/issues left open and unresolved for months. I can’t let them slack on this. I will have to keep on them.

A repair man came by for a quick evaluation and attempted to fix some other open issues but not the mold. The next day after another letter and meeting, a second repair man came by and did some drywall removal. Best I can tell, he still needs to remove more drywall on the other side of the wall. He’ll also need to address the leaky faucet causing the issue. Unfortunately, he does not work here full time. I don’t think this will happen until next week. He’ll also need to reinstall the water heater as it was not installed properly (has an unsafe vent) in March by a since-fired maintenance repair man with whom I had many negative experiences.

I took the week’s events to reignite my plans to consider moving to a new place and spent a fair amount of time cataloging some options over the next few days. On Friday, I drove around to visit some apartments in person. While part of me is considering buying a house, I’m not sure if I am willing to commit to a specific location right now. Things feel fluid for me, so I’d be more comfortable thinking about this in terms of a 1-2 year apartment plan.

Otherwise, to all that, I did have a nice night at the Phillies game on Tuesday and a fun BBQ / pool day at a friend of my sister’s yesterday. My sister is over her COVID infection and testing negative again, which is fantastic.

Today was the weekly food order (done!), and I have plans for some apartment chores in the afternoon alongside having the Phillies game on in the background.

Tomorrow is my birthday! Planning breakfast with my sister in the morning and dinner with my aunts/uncles in the evening. Nothing too crazy, but I am a simple old man, and I’ll have it no other way.

Journal -- July 4, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 12:25:04 -0400

Monday, July 4, 2022 – Yesterday, after a morning walk and post-lunch nap, I took to the pool of my apartment complex. It was my first time there as it was closed last summer. It’s a much smaller pool than my previous apartment complex but was nice enough. At 4 pm, they cleared out the crowd for an hour-long lifeguard break and pool chemical check. I wish I could have stayed in place but ended up taking my beach chair and setting up shop in the shade of a tree by the river—a nice place to continue reading my book and enjoying the day. At 5 pm, I returned for one more swim before drying out in the sun.

In the evening, I made some fresh pasta and watched the Phillies on ESPN. The fresh pasta hit the spot, and while I had aspirations of leftovers for later in the week, I went back for seconds and exhausted the bowl I made.

Today I got fresh pretzels. Second time in three days but was in the mood. Rest of day is still undecided. Will likely read some books and do some laundry. I hear there will be some fireworks at night by the river. Might check that out if I am in the mood.

Tomorrow I got tickets for the Phillies game and am planning on heading down early to watch batting practice and make a fuller day of it all. With July here, I figured I should make the best of it and enjoy my summer break while it lasts.

Journal -- July 1, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 11:27:42 -0400

Friday, July 1, 2022 – Good news, I tested negative this morning and best I can tell have recovered from COVID. I’ll be on the look out for a rebound infection as it is a possibility with the antivirals I was taking but overall very happy and excited.

Bad news, my sister who I spent a ton of time with at the shore tested positive. Really bummed for her as she was looking forward to getting back to the shore. She was all packed ready to go before the test came back positive after almost a full week of negative results. I’ll do my best and make her comfortable with some food store trips and other errands. The isolation is much harder on her than me. She is an extrovert for sure. Whole thing sucks.

While I can’t point at much productivity this past week, yesterday I was a successful at cleaning up my room, desk and bathroom. I saw a small bug in the bathroom in the morning and was all like – NOPE! Finally some inspiration to get things cleaned up.

Otherwise been watching baseball and playing baseball on the PS4. New program came out last night so lots of new missions to do.

With July here I should probably put some more focused energy on programming/work. Vacation can’t last forever. We’ll see how that goes.

Journal -- June 27, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 17:56:04 -0400

Monday, June 27, 2022 – I had goals of waking up early and getting back to work today. Failed and ended up sleeping in most of the morning. After lunch was able to get some focus and be a little productive on the laptop from the recliner.

Got some bills and banking dome. Caught up archiving a week’s worth of email. Read through some unread Slack messages but aggressively marked whole groups as read without concern. Also watched some videos from a Domain Driven Design course, though sadly it did not gel with me as much as the author’s testing book did. I think I’ll give it some more time but am also eyeing up some book marked conference talks and a testing LiveView video course I bought a bit ago.

COVID recovery is coming along. Still coughing a tiny bit but at the point where I have stopped the mucinex pills. My anti-viral pills will go through tomorrow morning but I am anxious to finish up the prescription and get that metal taste out of my mouth. Planning on a walk tomorrow morning and see how it feels.

Journal -- June 26, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 10:36:03 -0400

Sunday, June 26, 2022 – Day 5 of COVID. Doing ok. Symptoms are mild and fluctuate throughout the day. Still taking my flu-type medications and the antivirals. Nowhere near 100% of my normal self but not bed ridden either. I’m up most of the day, usually playing PS4 or watching the Ken Burn’s Baseball documentary. Feel like I should try to do something more productive than laundry soon™ but we will see.

Been isolating as one would expect. My sister was nice enough to drop off some fresh pretzels and deli rolls yesterday which was much appreciated. She also got me some mints and gum to help with the metallic taste in my mouth I have from the antivirals.

Stopped in to the Side Project Saturday Zoom call for Philly CocoaHeads for a little socialization. Sounds like they might do an in person Saturday meetup next month in Jenkintown.

I was well asleep when the Phillies played the Padres last night but woke to hear Bryce broke his thumb during the game. A real shame, particularly considering the season he was having. Hope the other bats step up to fill the void.

In other related baseball news I was bummed to cancel my own planned trip to see a Phillies game next week. I’ll still be in a COVID window of sorts by then and would not want to risk it on others.

Journal -- June 24, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 10:27:24 -0400

June 24, 2022 – I’m back from vacation early after getting COVID. 😭

So on Sunday I headed to the shore with my sister. For a few days we enjoyed ourselves with typical shore actives like the beach and some favorite eats. By Wednesday afternoon however I started to get a bit of a sore throat. Tested negative but decided to stay in the hotel room and rest up. In the morning on Thursday I was feeling worse and tested positive. We packed up and headed home early.

My general symptoms includes, headache, light body aches, light sore throat and cough. No high temperature and blood oxygen is fine. No significant breathing issues or exhaustion.

Because of my diabetes my doctor put me on the antiviral medications. The most notable side effect is a metallic taste in my mouth but I’ll take that with the hope of a quicker recovery timeline.

So for now, I’m hunkered down in my apartment, resting and trying to sleep as much as I can. Props to my sister who continues to feel fine and test negative for getting me a food order and my supplies.

Journal -- June 17, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 16:15:46 -0400

June 17, 2022 – I have been slacking on my journal entries so let’s catch up.

On Wednesday I watched the afternoon baseball game and then went to play Quizzo with my cousin at the local pub. We lost; it was not close. A bunch of teachers fresh out on vacation schooled us. Overall a nice day.

On Thursday I had a down day. Just no energy or motivation. Maybe it was the morning rain breaking my spirits. Spend most of the day grinding my baseball video game and eating junky food. These kind of days aren’t the end of the world but I’d feel better getting something productive done.

Today, Friday, was better. Slept in a bit; my CPAP mask said 9.5 hours. After cleaning up and doing my morning chores I went outside to clean out my car. Got rid of some trash and cleaned out the glove box. Took the car to the local car wash and then when I was back home did a more proper interior cleaning and window wash. Also took the opportunity to install some new windshield wipers.

Looking ahead I suspect I’ll have to drive a bit at night over the next few weeks. Having lousy wipers really makes a night drive in the rain extremely troublesome for me so I’m hoping they (and the wash) help out.

Tonight, no big plans. Phillies have a double header today and I’m watching the end of game one as I type this. I’ll probably sneak a peak at game two along side some video gaming in the evening. Might start some shore packing but feel like that won’t happen until tomorrow.

Journal -- June 14, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 14:19:27 -0400

June 14, 2022 – Got a small coding session in yesterday though it ended early when some family errands came up. Got the basics of Commanded installed and some starter events made. Not a notable amount of work for a normal day but for a vacation day it will do.

This morning had to skip my usual first thing breakfast and sleep in a bit. Was required to fast for some blood work. I’ve been known to get light headed when giving blood and brought some juice and granola bars. Luckily they were not needed and it went on without any issue.

In the afternoon I wrote out my June tax estimate payments and dropped them off at the post office. Also took out some cash for the shore at the ATM. Will have to start packing my bags soon enough. Finally, posted some details about the planned Philly Elixir Social for July which we talked about at the end of last meeting.

With my laptop in hand and some Yo-Yo Ma on in the background I think I’ll get back to my coding project for a bit and then maybe some book reading.

Journal -- June 13, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 13:13:36 -0400

June 13, 2022 – Had a nice weekend. On Saturday ran some errands and got my usual weekend pretzels. In the afternoon I did some cleaning around the apartment, organizing the hallway linen closet and a mix of drawers. Around 4pm I watched the Phillies. Sunday saw the weekly food pickup. Made a point to get some snacks for my week at shore, which is coming up next week. I watched the early part of the Phillies game at 1pm but when the game got out of reach I took to my own distractions in some books and games.

This morning I was at the doctor for a previously scheduled checkup. We talked about a few things but the actionable item for me is to regain some lost ground in my weight lose targets. Need to double down on being active and cut some of the post-dinner cookies. I’ve stared tracking my food in a journal again and hope it will help me keep focus. I also have to get my blood work done at a lab. Normally they’d do it right there in their office but they are short staffed.

After the doctors, I took action and went for a long walk. Was a little hotter than my usual early morning walks but not too bad. No big plans for the afternoon. Michelle will stop by after work to look through some of these things I’m going to throw away from my weekend cleaning.

Standup for Saturday, June 11, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 11:50:01 -0400

Normally I wouldn’t journal over the weekend but since I missed yesterday.

❤️ Feeling: Continuing to enjoy the Phillies win streak. We are 8 in a row now. Had a bit of a shock at the scale after my shower this morning and need to curb my cookie intake.

✅ Accomplishments(Thursday+Friday): On Thursday I opted for some trip planning over side project work. Booked a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in July and my hotel for ElixirConf. Also ordered some baseball books I can read on the beach. On Friday got some errands done (car oil changes, fixed broken headlight) and then in the evening went to my aunt’s place for some pizza and to celebrate her birthday.

🥅 Goals: Bank errand with my sister and pretzel pickup in the morning (done!). There is a cool air today so I think I’ll open the windows and do some apartment cleanup this afternoon. Need to clean out my hallway linen closet. Phillies play at 4pm and I’ll watch that and maybe do some coding on my laptop.

Standup for Thursday, June 9, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:57:43 -0400

❤️ Feeling: The Phillies have won six in a row and I don’t know what planet I am on anymore.

✅ Accomplishments(Wednesday): Some afternoon errands and a light work day. Ran the Philly Elixir meetup, which was a light social affair. Lost two ranked MLB: The Show games, but the second one was at least close. Starting to doubt I’ll get enough total innings in this season for the Greg Maddux card, but at least its stub costs is coming down.

🥅 Goals: Do laundry. (How do I, as a single bachelor household generate so much dirty laundry?) Going to watch the Phillies afternoon game and hack on Franklin in the background. Would like to at least get commanded installed in my project and some basic events working. For MLB: The Show, starting to get my head around how to how to grind player XP points (which I need to do better at to finish up these missions).

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Standup for Wednesday, June 8, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 13:35:42 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Another low energy coding day day. Just not feeling it.

✅ Accomplishments(Tuesday): Bought my conference ticket and plane ticket for ElixirConf 2022. Going for the training day as well. Opted for the Instrumenting Elixir Applications class. Finished reading my testing book, it was really good. Also bookmarked the Domain-Driven Design in Practice course of the same author. Seems relevant to my interests. Watched the Phillies come back (again) in the ninth to win it. They are on fire.

🥅 Goals: Feeling kind of low energy so don’t have too much planned for the day. Need to go back out as I forgot to pickup my prescription refill while doing other morning errands. Will be hosting the Philly Elixir meetup later tonight which I expect to be a mostly social catchup with people. I have nothing formal to present. Maybe some book reading during the day but as I type this I expect to grind some video game baseball after publishing.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Standup for Tuesday, June 7, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:18:44 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Not very motivated to get deep into my coding side project and instead have been binging on video games and extra sleep. I guess that is what vacation is for though. 🤷‍♂️ Posting this as the day is almost over.

✅ Accomplishments(Monday): Enjoyed watching the WWDC keynote with my Philly CocoaHead friends. I did not win our bingo game. I had some extremely unlikely squares. Most of Apple’s announcements are not very relevant to me but I might try to catch up on the Passkey stuff and see what that is all about. Had a nice dinner with my sister.

🥅 Goals: Slept in after a staying up later that usual playing my baseball game. Got my walk in for the day, though did it later in the afternoon (~3pm) since my water was shut off in the morning for some kind of emergency maintenance. Some more book reading before dinner is planned, and then some code hacking with the Phillies on in the background.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Standup for Monday, June 6, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 11:35:49 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Feeling very lazy and unmotivated this morning but trying to get some things moving.

✅ Accomplishments(Friday+Weekend): Published my Side Project Idea Audit. Started a new repo for the blog project (called Franklin) though it is still very bare. Finished chapters 9 and 10 of my testing book. Attended Phillies game on Friday night and a family picnic on Saturday. Sunday was lazy around the apartment reading and watching Phillies. Played a little MLB: The Show and started grinding through the new prospect program.

🥅 Goals: Going to watch the WWDC keynote with my Philly CocoaHead friends. I’m not doing Apple platform development anymore but still fun to catch up with what they are up to. Hoping to hack on Franklin a little in the afternoon and then go to my sister’s place for dinner (fresh pasta!). At night will continue working through my mini season playoffs in MLB: The Show.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Side Project Idea Audit

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:44:00 -0400

During my time off this summer, I am looking for a project to sink my teeth into. Something to give me a bit of purpose and space to explore some technical tooling I am curious about.

In the future, I hope to find a project to help serve my financial needs, but this specific summer side project is more about personal exploration without any profitability interests.

I keep a running list of project ideas in my notebook, and here is the shortlist I considered for the summer.

Collaborative UI Breadboarding

UI Breadboarding is a concept I became familiar with via the Shape Up book. It is a practice where you work through user experience requirements in a whiteboard “text and arrows” environment without drawing specific UI. My app would enable a way to launch a breadboard session, invite others to it, and collaborate on a user experience. It would be a great demo of the real-time behaviors LiveView apps enable.

Collaborative UI Breadboarding is not my summer project because it is outside my typical job responsibilities. I’m not drafting new user interfaces in my consulting work day to day, and I want the outcome of this summer to be something I’ll personally use. I have considered a shift in my consulting to perhaps make this a more significant focus of my time, but I’m not there yet. So, while this would be a neat tool and an excellent demo of LiveView, I don’t think it is the right project for this summer.

Exercism but for Tailwind

I’m a big fan of Exercism. I have not gotten too deep into any specific tracks, but the platform concept and execution is very cool. One day I wondered aloud if there could be a place like Exercism but for learning Tailwind instead of a programming language. I envision something similar to Flexbox Froggy, an almost game-like environment where you learn CSS flexbox.

I’m not doing Exercism but for Tailwind for two reasons. One, I still consider myself a Tailwind novice. While building out education materials in the form of a game would surely improve my Tailwind skills, I feel like it would be a bit too large of a commitment than I’m comfortable making during this summer timebox. The second reason is that I’m not sure the meta frontend code editor / CSS rendering that I’d have to build would be transferable to future projects as other things on this list. While I am not going to be working on my profit-seeking project this summer, I am hoping there will be some skill overlap, and the time I spend in the summer will help with those projects in the fall.

Slack Plugins

From my observations, I feel like there is a lot of dysfunction in how many corporate teams use Slack and related tooling to communicate while designing and building products. Domain truth and discussions are spread out across a matrix of tools, including JIRA, Confluence, GitHub, Figma, Google Docs, Zoom, and the code itself. Slack acts as the central pipe of communication but is rarely managed well and can easily cause people to feel overwhelmed and distracted. It can also create a false sense of progress as you sit there, answering disjointed questions and resolving notification prompts. It feels like you are being productive, but the value can be pretty shallow when you add it all up at the end of the week.

I don’t even know what I’d build here, but one project idea was to interview people who also use Slack day-to-day for work and see if there are any opportunities to create plugins to help manage the chaos.

I’m not doing any Slack plugins because I hope to find or otherwise build myself a team environment where we rely less on Slack and more on other async writing to propose ideas and answer questions. I frown on using Slack as a meaningful store of knowledge. It is too chaotic and expensive (I’m talking about mental and distraction costs here). I think a chat space can be great for the social needs of a team but recommend other systems to manage product design/development discussions.

Notion Plugins

A few months ago, I increased my Notion use from a curious experiment to a preferred tool. I even dropped my use of OmniFocus and Bear in preference for Notion as my day-to-day notebook. Perhaps I’ll share more about that in the future. One side project idea was to build some plugins to sit on top of Notion. I’m not even sure what they would be, but it seemed like an exciting space.

I’m not doing Notion Plugins because I’m still learning how to use Notion and how I want to use Notion. I think there are some opportunities to build “blocks” to help host live data sections on Notion pages. I envision a product dashboard that combines outwardly owned data (like sales and analytics) and pairs those views alongside project plans or daily standups.

Personal Blog Rewrite

Spoilers: This is what I am doing.

The first commit to this repo / blog system was in December of 2018. The site as it lives today is a static site generated with Hugo and hosted on a simple Linode webserver. It works well enough, but my wants/needs are changing.

The first opportunity for improvement is to solve a bit of dysfunction in how I publish web content.

Most of my tweet-like content gets posted to Micro.blog and then cross-posted to Twitter and Mastodon. Sometimes I post directly to Twitter because I want to embed a video, and frankly, the cross-posting from Micro.blog does not match how I expect that to work.

For longer content, I’ll compose a post for this blog, which involves:

Using hugo new to create the file.
Editing the content (usually first in VS Code and then in Grammarly).
Committing the new files.
Pushing it to GitHub.
Waiting for it to publish (which is usually pretty fast).
Manually build a Micro.blog post to share the link (that will be cross-posted).

The whole process is cumbersome.

I want my website to become the true home to all my published content with this project. I am still interested in having content on social media, but I want my short-form content and long-form content to be intertwined into a single stream that is hosted on my domain. I want a single place on the web where I can compose a message, attach some media, and hit publish. Everything is on my site, but social media shares are generated automatically, in a format I find acceptable.

In many ways, this is the promise of Micro.blog, but I never really embraced it. I always had my website separate and used Micro.blog purely for tweet-like content. If this were just about the user experience, I might more strongly consider using Micro.blog, but as I said in the beginning, this is more about a technical exploration, so I’ll build it out myself.

Technical Plans

The core will use a CQRS / event-source style code architecture. Total overkill for the needs of a blog, but as this is a learning opportunity, I want to give it a try.
I’ll use Tailwind and a rich collection of Phoenix components to structure the UI. There won’t be much interactivity on the user side, but the admin area will have some places for me to play. I’m very interested in the developer tooling around component design and management, so I’m hoping something interesting will come out of my time here.
While the cross-posting will be an internal module at first, I think it is possible to share it more broadly if it is successful. To speak to specific behaviors, I thought the Micro.blog cross-posting feature lacked good observability into what is in progress and managing the format and exception handling (when the share content breaks the platform validation rules).

Challenges and Risks

Importing the old blog content will be a chore but something worth doing. Specifically, I’d like to have better accessibility constraints around media and will likely have to patch older posts with better captions and metadata.
Not using an out-of-the-box blog system will put notable stress on me to maintain the code and deployment. It will likely be more complex and costly than it was hosting a static website.

I’ll do my best to share as I go. If you have any questions, let me know.

Standup for Friday, June 3, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:27:44 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Good but a little guilty. I skipped my walk/workout this morning in favor of getting to my desk sooner. I have plans tonight so want to get some stuff done.

✅ Accomplishments(Thursday): Worked on some financial todos, sending out invoices, paying bills, depositing checks. Spent some time pontificating and evaluating my side project idea list. Feel like I’m close to locking down my choice. I even have a draft blog post sharing some of the ideas I passed on (at least for now) along with what I’m going to do any why. At night played some MLB: The Show and did eventually give up on that Jimmy Rollins event in favor of some more tunned CPU difficulty / rewards I am looking to capture. Bought the cards outright with my stash of stubs.

🥅 Goals: Finish and publish Side Project Idea Audit post. Kick off side project by writing up some overall goals and values. Make a repo, GitHub Project, etc and start drafting some tasks. Book reading after lunch. Around 2:30pm (eastern) there will be a content show for some new stuff in MLB: The Show I’d like to watch. This evening, attending the Phillies game with my sister.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Standup for Thursday, June 2, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:14:02 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Pretty good. I have to be careful not to over-medicate on the coffee with my extra reading time. I could have quickly gone over my three-cup limit yesterday. It is something I gravitate to while in my reading chair.

✅ Accomplishments(Wednesday): Did some more laundry and am caught up. Blogged a bit about my vacation plans. Read chapter 8 of Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns. Pulled the trigger on a new laptop purchase. Attended a Test Double internal hangout where someone presented their Elixir / Phoenix app that ran a Schulze method voting system. The presentation also included some hot takes on hosting on Fly.io, which is a hosting platform I am considering for future projects. At night played an event in MLB: The Show to earn a Jimmy Rollins card. It will take 15 wins to get, I played 9 3-inning games and only won 3 of them. Depending on how that goes next play session, I might just buy the card using the in-game currency as it is pretty cheap. We’ll see. Watched Phillies beat the Giants 6 to 5.

🥅 Goals: Morning VR workout (done!). Read chapter 9 in my Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns book. Do some project idea auditing to see if I can work out what I’d like to work on over the break.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Extended Vacation (Again)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:51:29 -0400

Repeating my choice from last year, I have decided to take an extended vacation from consulting this summer to catch up on some learning plans and otherwise invest in personal projects.

Funny enough, as I reread that post and those around it, it feels very similar. I’ll be “off work” for June and July. Basic plans include book reading, blog posting, and some technical experiments at a relaxed pace. I’ll be headed to the New Jersey shore for a week of beach time in late June. I am also considering a road trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame sometime in July.

I’ll start looking for contract work around the end of July, but I also hope to zero in on a personal product development path. One goal of the break is to define an audience I want to serve. I started down that road with [ElixirFocus], but I have notable reservations about building educational materials for that audience that can be financially sustainable. I still think I’ll write for that audience, but not with the end goal of notable profits – more as an enjoyable hobby.

ElixirFocus

For notable profits and a chance at lessening my need to do contracting, I’ll be on the lookout via research and interviews for new audiences and problems to solve. It will be challenging because, in many ways, I feel like the world needs less software more than ever. Who am I to put more digital distractions out into the world?! The key will be to find a way to add value by helping people reduce the technical weight on their shoulders. Find a way to solve problems and NOT give them one more button to press every day.

Standup for Wednesday, June 1, 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 11:53:49 -0400

❤️ Feeling: Feeling great. Excited to be on vacation again and have an opportunity to work on some personal projects.

✅ Accomplishments(Tuesday): Closed out some open pull requests with my client and otherwise wrapped up my contract. Did some laundry (towels). Won a 12-inning overtime game in MLB: The Show with my Diamond Dynasty team, the Philadelphia Frogs. After a night of piss poor batting and 22 strikeouts, with 2 out, 2 strikes, and a man on third, I ran a squeeze play where Rickey Henderson (99 speed) bunted in the winning run. It was glorious. Sadly this also aligned with a 5-hour overtime loss by the Phillies, which I had on in the background.

🥅 Goals: Sleep in (done!). Morning walk (done!). More laundry. Blog about my overall vacation plans. Read the next chapter in my Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns book, which I am really enjoying. Do some project idea auditing to see if I can work out what I’d like to work on over the break.

🆘 Help: I’ll be headed to the shore soon™ and welcome book recommendations, work or play.

Budget Revisit 2022

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 15:37:36 -0400

The last time I wrote about my budgeting habits was back in September 2018, and the last time I looked over my numbers was in 2020 when I had just lost my active contract due to the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Today as I look ahead to the summer and the future completion of my current contract gig, it was a good time to revisit my numbers.

Like last time I’ll share how I collect and organize my numbers, and hopefully, it will inspire you to revisit or improve your budgeting solution.

First, I collect a categorized list of expenses. I tend to use my credit cards, bank statements, and my recently completed taxes as a source of truth. Over time you can even use your historical budgets.

For my personal and business expenses, I create a list of monthly and yearly costs. Inside each of those, I break things down as hard costs and soft costs. Hard costs are those expenses that would be difficult or dangerous to change, such as apartment rent or health insurance. Soft costs are those expenses that I could sacrifice if needed, such as Netflix or charitable donations. I’ll share some examples of my categories at the bottom of the post.

To organize these, I use an app called Soulver. It is an impressively clean but powerful way to collect line items and generate totals without the heaviness of a spreadsheet. I also appreciate how I can use programming-like comments starting with // to document my thoughts.

My goal is to generate an overall monthly total for both hard and soft costs (averaging the yearly as a generic monthly cost). I can then use that against my expected monthly income and available savings to help generate burndown charts and scenarios like:

If I were to completely pause consulting and focus on a personal project how long could I last comfortably on my available savings.
If I wanted to work the absolute minimum number of hours to pay for my unadjusted monthly costs (remember to consider taxes and savings goals), what hour total would I need?
- What if I raised my hourly rate by X percent?.
- What if I was willing to remove some of those soft costs?
If I wanted to have X amount in cash available for a house or car down payment in X years, how much extra would I have to work?

Keep in mind that you won’t work full time every week/month. Make sure to account for expected vacation time off and some sick days.

Budgeting like this is a great way to get clarity on your spending and hopefully nudge you to cancel or otherwise lessen the spending on things that are not a fair exchange for the level of enjoyment you get or just plain forgot about. Furthermore, learning to build up that savings pot can be incredibly empowering, allowing you to be much more selective when deciding what’s next.

Sample Expenses and Categories

Personal Hard Costs Monthly

Rent
Renter’s Insurance
Electric Bill
Gas Bill
Car Payment
Car Insurance
Car Maintenance
Car Fuel
Health Insurance
Vision Insurance
Dental Insurance
Prescriptions & Copays
Life Insurance
Grocery Store Food
Haircut

Personal Hard Costs Yearly

Sleep Apnea Equipment
Bank and Credit Card Fee
Healthcare Lab Fees

Personal Soft Costs Monthly

Eat Out Food
Netflix
Hulu
YMCA/Gym
Video Games
Music Subscriptions
Charitable Donations

Personal Soft Costs Yearly

Vacation
Clothes
Shoes
Gifts (Christmas and Birthdays)

Zorn Labs LLC Hard Monthly

GitHub Membership
Linode Hosting
Google Apps
CircleCI
Backblaze
1Password
Bank Fees
Amazon Hosting
Verizon Phone
Verizon FIOS
Zoom
Dropbox
SBA Loan Payment

Zorn Labs LLC Hard Yearly

Tax Preparation
Hover / Web Domains
Network Security Software

Zorn Labs LLC Soft Monthly

Coworking Membership + Parking
Various Software
Various Podcast/Books/Education (This is one of my biggest categories!)

Zorn Labs LLC Soft Yearly

Various Software
Professional Memberships
Office Supplies
Professional Conference Budget
Content Licenses
New computer every other year: $4000 × 0.5
New iPad every other year: $1100 × 0.5
New iPhone every other year: $1000 × 0.5

I tend not to budget for new hardware purchases like computers or phones every year, but it is great to keep those purchases in mind.

Elixir Style: Prefer Unnested Aliases

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 12:31:06 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

In Elixir, alias is a keyword we often use to create shorthand references to long-form module names allowing us to refer to RetroTaxi.Boards.Board simply as Board.

You’ll often end up with a collection of alias declarations at the top of a module, and Elixir offers two ways to format these.

One way is simple list such as:

alias RetroTaxi.Boards.Board
alias RetroTaxi.Boards.Column
alias RetroTaxi.Boards.TopicCard

The other way is an optional nested list like:

alias RetroTaxi.Boards.{Board, Column, TopicCard}

Sometimes this nested list is broken across separate lines and presented like:

alias RetroTaxi.Boards.{
    Board,
    Column,
    TopicCard
}

Style Recommendation

I highly recommend avoiding this nested presentation. The primary reason is to help keep the codebase plain-text searchable. By avoiding the nesting, you can quickly find which modules are referencing any module simply by searching for its name string like RetroTaxi.Boards.Column. Finding nested aliases would require a more complex regular expression or language server tooling.

If you want to enforce this style with a credo, check out Credo.Check.Readability.MultiAlias which is usually disabled on a default credo install.

Quantum JIRA

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 20:00:41 -0500

Random crossover that occurred to me during a morning walk.

Theorizing that one could be productive within his own lifetime, Doctor Mike Zornek stepped into the Quantum JIRA accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in tech of the past, facing repos origins that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change commit history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an overworked product manager, who appears in the form of a Slack avatar only Mike can see and hear.

And so Doctor Zornek finds himself leaping from ticket to ticket, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next ticket… will be the ticket home.

Original Theme Narration

Mom's Passing

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 11:52:07 -0500

Over the last few months, I have had to increasingly step back from friends and work to help take care of my mother. She passed away on Friday, February 4th. Her obituary is shared below, and the memorial service will be this Saturday.

In lieu of flowers we ask for donations be made in her name, Maureen Carney, to Fox Chase Cancer Center who treated her and all of our family extremely well.

I look forward to connecting with everyone again after I take some time to get things settled.

Maureen L. Carney (nee Heffernan)

December 28, 1951 - February 4, 2022

Maureen L. Carney (nee Heffernan) passed away February 4, 2022. Devoted mother of Michelle Zornek and Michael Zornek. Loving sister of Joanne Moy (George), Mary Rose Brill (Jack), Betty Leonardo (Bryan). Dear aunt of many nieces, nephews, great nieces, and great nephews. Maureen will also be sadly missed by her loving friends.

Relatives and friends are invited to gather Saturday, February 12, 2022 9:00 AM to 10:45 AM, Burns Funeral Home, 9708 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia, followed by her Service 11:00 AM. In lieu of flowers, contributions to Fox Chase Cancer Center, 333 Cottman Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19111 in her memory would be appreciated. Due to COVID, a celebration of Maureen’s life will be held later in the spring.

Filters Shaping My Next Project Idea

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:00:00 -0500

This post was updated on April 22, 2025, as I am again considering new side projects.

Drawing inspiration from Derrick Reimer’s post Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea, I’ve been working through a collection of notes on my next project. Derrick quotes Jason Cohen as saying:

instead of trying to rank your ideas, run them through a set of filters to eliminate those that don’t fit.

I have a bunch of project filters to share but will open with some higher-level observations.

Why I Want To Do A Product (Again)

Outside of my initial post-college employment and a four-year window where I worked full-time at development agencies, I have been self-employed my entire career. Self-employment income has come through a mix of products and consulting. For some years, I’ve been able to make my entire living from my products; for others, I’ve had to lean more heavily on consulting. I’ve always viewed consulting as something to empower my product development and never the end goal itself.

I prefer products because:

I find satisfaction in working on a whole solution. I enjoy being involved with the design, the marketing, the customers, the support, and so on. I typically have a very limited scope of product influence in my consulting work.
I value passive income over time-based consulting income. Consulting income can be more lucrative in many ways, but I prefer the flexibility of passive income. In the past, I’ve been able to take time off or work on other projects while still getting paid, and it is incredibly addicting.
I enjoy having flexibility in my work hours and activities. My consulting life is already flexible hours-wise. Still, there is no getting around when I burn out on a particular activity, such as meetings or code review, it can be hard to avoid my billable commitments. When working on a product, there are many different activity types, and I could easily skip a few days of programming but still be productive toward the product by working on other things I enjoy, like UI design.

Recent Product Failures

Since returning to self-employment in 2017, attempts have failed to recreate my previous successful products. After spending six months of development, I failed with OwlDeck, eventually realizing that the tech stack I would need to master (CoreText) was over my head. I then had a significant change of heart towards Apple platform development, starting a multi-year period of self-discovery and eventually finding a new home with Elixir. Guildflow began in 2019, but ultimately, I decided it too would be shut down last month, November 2021.

With awareness of these recent failures, I am trying to be more mindful and intentional in picking a new project and planning my work.

My Project Filters

The market needs to exist already. I should be able to observe profitable competition who are not executing as well as I feel possible. I am not looking to break new ground but claim a space to offer a unique and valuable offering.

I need to feel comfortable interacting with the audience. For example, I’m not very excited about online advertising. I don’t think I would care much to drink coffee with a random ad salesperson, so that would be a poor audience for me to serve.

I need to be able to learn fast. I am not interested in going into the tank for 9-12 months before gauging if I am on to something. I need to find ways to validate my ideas and deliver value to paying customers in a short window, like 3-5 months. I don’t need to cross a specific success threshold at the end of that timeframe; I just need to observe the positive trajectory I need.

The business needs to remain small. I am not interested in traditional venture capital funding. I am not interested in building a huge team. The product needs to be successful but small at the same time.

I do not like managing people but would enjoy working in a ‘small band’. I think I would enjoy collaborating with people on this project, but I worry about finding the right match of talent who shares my vision and goals while also being a good counter for my own skillset.

The product needs to generate enough profit to provide a comfortable living for its creators. I don’t need this in the short term, but it is a significant part of that earlier learning goal and observing success over time.

The product needs to solve a pain worth paying for. With profitability and sustainability high on my value list, I need to connect with paying customers. It should be easy for them to justify and pay for the value.

The product needs to solve a pain worth solving. I don’t need to change the world, but I should feel like I am solving worthwhile problems and not adding to the virtual noise I eagerly try to silence in my personal life.

Making sales should not require more than a few decision-makers. Considering the solo nature (or small band) of development I have in mind, I can not afford complex sales cycles.

The project should not be mission-critical. I am not equipped to offer mission-critical uptime guarantees, so I should filter out products that require it.

The product should not be for any industry with heavy regulations. I am not equipped to manage that level of complexity, so I should filter out products that require it.

The product should not require mobile apps. I am not interested in building a business that requires deployment approval.

The product should provide value without asking for an outright replacement. Guildflow was a hard ask since not only did the group organizer have to buy in, but any transfer of a group from, say, Meetup.com to Guildflow would be a big ask of all the members too. I want to avoid this kind of big ask as much as possible.

The product does not need to be software. While I am a developer and empowered to deliver software-based solutions, I am not against building educational products or other assets/toolkits/solutions.

My Superpowers

In addition to considering the above product filters, it is also essential to identify one’s superpowers. We each have a unique background and collage of skills/experiences. Understanding how you can contribute to a given product idea is key to its choice.

Elixir is a notable superpower for me. I’m well over the hump as far as being competent and productive with it. The language and the BEAM empower me to build more concurrent and fault-tolerant systems than other startups of my size. I can solve some big-scale problems that a Rails or Node platform would have trouble with.

While I no longer do mobile development and have even filtered out any product ideas requiring a mobile app, I have roots in the community. I would not be against building solutions for that audience.

My attention to detail, particularly user experience, feels like a competitive edge. I do not consider myself a UI designer. Still, I could have a very collaborative and productive relationship with a UI designer, with the outcome being a well-executed app experience.

My next task will be to brainstorm possible audiences and go on safari for pains and discussion topics. Will do my best to blog some progress as I go. The journey continues.

Book Thoughts: Company of One

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 14:35:05 -0500

Company of One Book Cover

This weekend I finished Company of One by Paul Jarvis. The book pitches:

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that.

I bought the book on a whim after seeing a GoodReads friend recommend it. I thought it would be a timely book to fuel my introspection as I shut down one major project and consider what is next.

Overall I found the book to be enjoyable and engaging. I even picked up a new podcast subscription to hear the author talk more about the ideas described in the book.

I do think the book’s pitch feels a bit overreaching. Rereading it now, it feels downright misleading. There are some solid recommendations about going out on your own. However, the big idea that makes the book a recommendation for me is how it challenges us to rethink growth. Why do we want to grow sales, get more customers, hire more people? What are we doing, why, and is it sustainable? Are we hiring people so we can do less work or the company can do more work?

I align with the bootstrapper community over venture capital startups. VC’s addition to growth is a big part of that, but I think this book also brings home the idea for bootstrappers.

Even in a bootstrapped company, it would be easy to end up building a machine that you do not enjoy running. You may start the company because it gives you a stage to work with a specific technology and an audience you enjoy. Suddenly you grow too fast, without understanding WHY you want to grow, and all of sudden you are spending your days doing things that do not spark joy, like managing a large group of employees or drowning in customer support.

As I step back and consider what is next for me, I think it’ll be essential to brainstorm my ideal day, week, month, and year and build the company and products that can enable that life.

For style critique, I found the book to be a little heavy on the references of other writings and research. Specifically, it felt repetitive to have such works referenced and then very thin, terse insights made. I get that this builds a more persuasive picture over time, but it was a repetitious pattern that felt like padding.

It also did not help that some of the references felt a little dated. Knowing what we know now, maybe Basecamp isn’t a good reference for a model working environment. Bringing up Google’s 20% time for personal projects without talking about how it is no longer an active practice feels disingenuous.

For style appreciation, I like how the chapters end with introspecting questions under the headline “Begin to think about…”. Ultimately I find the most successful books help you dream up questions to ask way more than books that pretend to have all the answers.

I think this can be a helpful book for those like myself who are contemplating work opportunities, projects, or a new company. However, the valuable topics brought up are much more about growth than the title ‘Company of One’ really suggests.

Shutting Down my Side Project Guildflow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0400

With a heavy heart, I share my decision to shut down my side project Guildflow. In the spirit of the blog, I thought I would document some project history and how I got here.

Project Background

My history attending and organizing meetups in Philadelphia goes pretty deep. I found meetup groups to be a great way to meet like-minded developers who would become good friends and coworkers over time. Meetup groups were a huge positive impact on me.

In early 2019 I was looking to sink my teeth into a new side project. I was not very happy with Meetup.com, the website we used to run Philly CocoaHeads and Philly Elixir. The platform had become pretty stagnant and had a bunch of restrictions on data access for things like member email addresses. There was also this shady practice where if you stopped paying the group subscription fee, Meetup.com would sell ownership of your group to any member with a credit card. The parent company of Meetup.com was WeWork, which was known to me as a bad actor in the coworking world. WeWork had Meetup.com do questionable promotions of their spaces and experimented with an unwise scheme to charge users to attend events. In short, while I had an enormous passion for meetups themselves, I was concerned Meetup.com would be unusable in a few years.

The goals of my side project, in order of importance:

An opportunity to get deeper experience with Elixir and Phoenix (new tools I embraced after getting out of Apple development).
A drive to build software that I would use and crafted for an audience and purpose I could stand behind.
Create a modest stream of product revenue so that I could, over the long term, supplement and maybe replace my consulting income.

I decided to work on a tool for meetup groups.

Guildflow would be a calendar and group management tool for meetup organizers focused on privacy and data ownership. One might use Guildflow to help run their meetup group over other tools like Meetup.com or Facebook Groups.

Development History

The very first commit for Guildflow happened on April 10, 2019. Development was slow with inconsistent momentum. I was actively contracting, and most of my Guildflow time was random nights and weekends with a few scattered months of action if I was in-between paid work. As a learning project, I was also slow since I was still comfortable with Elixir and Phoenix. Considering the project’s goals, this was expected and fine, but it lengthened the whole project lifecycle.

I did reach out and run some customer interviews throughout the project, probably like eight or so. Half were people I knew casually, and the other half were strangers from random LinkedIn connections or other introductions. These interviews helped, but I fell victim to many of the bad questions and lies described in The Mom Test. In short, I was so excited to scratch my own itch and experiment with Elixir/Phoenix that I jumped into the tech way too fast.

My first public sharing of work came from a blog post in September 2019 alongside updates in October and November. By March 2020, I was ready to do a limited alpha launch. Remember what else happened in March 2020?

Launching meetup software during those initial US COVID lockdowns was, to put it bluntly, devastating. I can’t remember being personally productive at all during March/April 2020. It was scary and stressful. My paid work contract was cut short on April 1st, and new contracts were not to be found.

By June, I started to get back in the swing of things. I still did not have paying work but did launch a new Android Book Club, hosted on Guildflow. Over the rest of the summer, I would work on new marketing pages, videos, and features for Guildflow.

The meetup world was still in a state of shock during the summer of 2020. Some groups did find ways to do online meetings, but it came with new challenges. Many groups were falling apart. No new groups were forming. No one was interested in new meetup software offerings.

By the fall, I started to get some contracting interest once again and ended up landing a gig in October 2020. It was an Elixir contract, and having the Guildflow project as a reference, even doing a little code walk during the interview process, helped a ton. One downside of the new gig was that it was a full-time engagement. I traditionally avoid full-time contracts so that I can keep some momentum behind my personal projects. However, after being out of work all summer, I needed to take the work.

Through the fall, I did find some time to work on Guildflow, getting custom pages, editable navigation, and group messaging all working. I even pulled in my Philly Elixir group from Meetup.com to now be hosted on Guildflow.

After that feature push, in February 2021, I decided to put Guildflow on hold. COVID had just spiked during the winter in the US, and we did not (at the time) have an approved vaccine. It was hard to imagine a near-term future where I could observe active in-person meetups who would potentially use my software. To continue to develop in a vacuum seemed like a bad idea. I would take some time off, work on an upcoming apartment move and revisit Guildflow in the future.

Over time I have revisited Guildflow every three months or so, doing minor SSL security updates and other tiny bug fixes. We still used it for Philly Elixir, so I needed it to keep working. Today, however, I have decided to discontinue the project officially.

What Did I Learn?

Having saturated in the meetup headspace for the last two years, I’ve been trying to share my learnings and observations on the Guildflow blog. I’m hopeful I can transplant some of those valuable posts to my personal blog. I have a lot of opinions about meetups, and I could go on all day. To summarize as best as I can:

The most complex problems around running a meetup group have very little to do with the quality of the group management tools. The real challenges are finding an audience and generating rewarding, goal-oriented content that enables that audience to evolve into a true community.

While the Meetup.com tools are lackluster, they are good enough for most people. The real asset of Meetup.com is the user base. Using the Meetup.com platform, introduces your group to new people. Many group organizers do not have the time or passion for doing that kind of marketing outreach on their own, so they get tremendous value from the Meetup.com user base.

Group organizers will complain about the high Meetup.com monthly fee and complain about data access issues, but there is no observable trend of them actively looking for alternatives. I think there was a possible tipping point moment when the WeWork owners of Meetup.com (at the time) started experimenting with charging the end users for access, but they quickly backed away from that, and eventually, Meetup.com was sold to new investors.

Bigger Trends of Meetups

The other big takeaway is that the cultural concept of a traditional “meetup” is downward trending. This downward trend was historically observable, but COVID has exacerbated it tremendously.

I feel like many people traditionally consider a tech meetup to consist of “a monthly in-person event, in the board room of company X, where people interested in tech Y come by to see an educational presentation, talk shop, and eat pizza.”

As much as this format has been enjoyed by myself and others, I suspect this format is dying.

It is dying because of the internet. No one needs to wait for the monthly meetup (or conference, for that matter) to see a static, non-interactive demo of new tech Y or to talk shop with peers. There are SO MANY other outlets for this kind of exchange, including Twitter, blogs, YouTube, GitHub, Slack, Discord, email newsletters, and so on.

It is dying because remote work is here to stay. COVID is still here, and that means hesitance about in-person events, but it also means the conference room you used to meet at isn’t there anymore because the company went full remote or they can’t allow the random public inside. The people who would usually stop by your meetup after work no longer drive into town for a job; they work from home.

Traditional meetups might be dying, but communities will live on.

I think the meetup groups that survive will rethink their positioning and build thriving communities around goal-oriented events.

Why the Guildflow Shutdown?

While I continue to be supportive of the positive impact of local tech communities (or meetups if we still want to hang on to that term), my observation is that two types of people generally run these groups:

the passionate volunteer who loves the technology so much they just want to share it with like-minded people
the corporate evangelist who is running the group as part of their job to educate the public and get traction for their employer’s interests

One of the initial goals for Guildflow was: “Create a modest stream of product revenue so that I could, over the long term, supplement and later replace my consulting income.” The problem I have is:

The passionate volunteer has very little actual money to spend. Historically, they could not even get enough money to cover the pizza costs when passing around a donation jar. Their time is very limited for meta-group responsibilities like group marketing. They get tremendous value and exposure from the network effect of the current Meetup.com platform, which I am unlikely to compete with successfully.

The corporate evangelist has some money to spend, but they are also interested in harvesting the group membership data for aggressive and questionable recruiting or marketing purposes. I am not interested in participating in that kind of business.

I am shutting down Guildflow because after living in the meetup headspace for two years, I have a hard time seeing a pathway to some level of financial stability which could adequately compensate me for my time.

I could have tried to pivot my codebase to other group/calendaring needs. I might just do that. However, as I explore next project ideas, I don’t want historical assets or a sunk cost fallacy to prevent me from new audiences and concepts.

What’s Next?

First, I have some shutdown tasks for Guildflow, like moving Philly Elixir to a new home, migrating some blog posts, and archiving my stuff.

As for my next side project, I don’t know. I have a lot of soul searching going on right now. A few bullets of thought:

Do more customer interviews.
Build smaller MVPs and faster.
More open source.
More sharing of progress.

Be sure to follow me to hear more over the coming months.

Personal Phoenix 1.6 Upgrade Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

Over the past few days I’ve been upgrading my projects to Phoenix 1.6 and like any project that comes out of a template-based generator, migrating a Phoenix project to a new version can be a little scary and error prone, particularly for people new to Elixir and Phoenix. Today I’ll share some personal notes and tips to hopefully make the process a little smoother.

Step 0: Skip the Manual Upgrade (Maybe?)

Depending on the scale and circumstances of your project you might consider just re-generating a new project using mix phx.new and bringing over your old code into the fresh template. I wouldn’t recommend this for any project that had meaningful git history or other collaborators, but for smaller personal projects it might be the path of least resistance.

You’ll probably want the new project generator regardless and can install it with:

$ mix archive.install hex phx_new

Step 1: Familiarize Yourself with the New Version

Before blindly attempting the upgrade it would be best to read the official blog announcement, review the project changelog and preview Chris McCord’s personal upgrade notes. You might want to also bookmark documentation for specific new features, like heex templates.

Step 2: Get Your Project is a Stable State

Make sure your project is building clean, the tests are passing and the typespecs are um, type spec-ing. Push your changes to remote and start a new upgrade-phoenix branch. It would be best if you work through the upgrade in chunks and verify these things as you go.

Step 3: Update Elixir and Project Dependencies

If you can, now is a good time to explicitly require Elixir 1.12 as the minimum version of your project. This is not an absolute requirement, but as described in the heex docs, it will improve your error messages:

Note: HEEx requires Elixir >= 1.12.0 in order to provide accurate file:line:column information in error messages. Earlier Elixir versions will work but will show inaccurate error messages.

  # mix.exs
  def project do
    [
      # ...
      elixir: "~> 1.12",
    ]
  end

If you are using an asdf for version management you might also want to update your .tool-versions file as well.

Next run mix hex.outdated to see what dependency updates are available. You’ll see a bunch of stuff for the new Phoenix 1.6 release, which at the time of this post is up to 1.6.2. For one of our currently outdated projects I get the following:

$ mix hex.outdated
Dependency              Current  Latest   Status
credo                   1.5.6    1.5.6    Up-to-date
dialyxir                1.1.0    1.1.0    Up-to-date
ecto_sql                3.6.2    3.7.1    Update possible
floki                   0.29.0   0.31.0   Update not possible
gettext                 0.18.2   0.18.2   Up-to-date
jason                   1.2.2    1.2.2    Up-to-date
mix_test_watch          1.0.3    1.1.0    Update possible
phoenix                 1.5.9    1.6.2    Update not possible
phoenix_ecto            4.3.0    4.4.0    Update possible
phoenix_html            2.14.3   3.0.4    Update not possible
phoenix_live_dashboard  0.4.0    0.5.3    Update possible
phoenix_live_reload     1.3.3    1.3.3    Up-to-date
plug_cowboy             2.5.1    2.5.2    Update possible
postgrex                0.15.10  0.15.12  Update possible
telemetry_metrics       0.6.1    0.6.1    Up-to-date
telemetry_poller        0.5.1    1.0.0    Update not possible

Using the above collection of versions you can update your mix.exs deps list. To verify these work try running the following commands in series:

mix deps.clean --all
mix clean
mix deps.get
mix compile
mix test

Fix any issues that popup and then you can commit your progress and start to consider some of the optional parts of the 1.6 upgrade.

Step 4: Migrate to `heex` Templates (optional)

The new template system is called heex (pronounced heaks) and is more HTML-aware, helping report issues like missing div tags at compile time. The new heex templates will help resolve a notable collection of common LiveView and CSS bugs as well as provide nicer inline functions.

While heex templates are great they are optional for now. Previous eex and leex templates still work but are considered deprecated. If you want to start to migrate to heex I would check out the docs for a quick overview and then start renaming your file extensions like:

app.html.eex to app.html.heex
live.html.leex to app.html.heex

For inline templates you’ll use the new ~H sigil instead of ~L sigil.

As you make these changes the compiler will inform you what needs updating. For my own RetroTaxi project most heex updates involved migrating HTML attributes like:

- <div id="topic-card-<%= @topic_card.id %>">
+ <div id={"topic-card#{@topic_card.id}"}>

and

- <button phx-click="start_discussion_phase" phx-target="<%= @myself %>"
+ <button phx-click="start_discussion_phase" phx-target={@myself}

I also ended up using the new <.form> component, which honors the tag aware templates while also addressing a known technical limitation of live_components being wrapped in a block, which is a common pattern inside forms.

- <%= f = form_for @changeset, "#", phx_submit: "save", phx_target: @myself %>
- <!-- stuff -->
- </form>
+ <.form let={f} for={@changeset} phx_submit={"save"} phx_target={@myself}>
+ <!-- stuff -->
+ </.form>

Step 5: Migrate to esbuild (optional)

With Phoenix 1.6 all new project templates will default to esbuild over the historic webpack for asset bundling. This was a change made in an effort to improve long term stability, as npm and webpack have been a huge source of bugs and maintenance issues inside the Phoenix project. This is however an optional change when upgrading older Phoenix projects.

If you already have invested in any webpack customizations you might just want to keep using it.

If your needs are simple and you’d like to give esbuild a spin it can be swapped in without too much work. Chris McCord’s upgrade document has an in-depth set of edits you can follow. I did those steps myself with RetroTaxi and then once I got it all working, went back and re-added my Tailwind dependencies following Mike Clark’s blog post. I ended up with a very basic package.json file.

Aside: One notable question I still have regarding esbuild is the new command: mix assets.deploy. It seems curious to me that running this with the new .gitignore patterns results in a dirty git state. Is this wanted/expected behavior? If you have any thoughts let me know.

Step 6: The Little Things

There are lots of little things you can notice comparing your current Phoenix 1.5 project with a freshly generated 1.6 project. In fact I recommend using mix phx.new hello (substituting your own project name for hello to help with easier copy and paste) and then compare the new project files 1:1 against your current project. You’ll no doubt notice things like:

the move from use Mix.Config to import Config and other related config file changes.
the addition of Swoosh, an email composition and delivery tool, to your project dependency list.
how the path of assets in an esbuild setup will effect your .gitignore file and other template references.
the introduction of topbar as a static JS library replacing the previous NProgress dependency.
slight changes to the generated telemetry descriptions.
slight changes to how the Ecto sandbox is started during test mode.
new complier warning suppressions for LiveDashboard, which will intentionally not be available in production by default.

For RetroTaxi I tried to honor these changes as much as possible.

One helpful tool to do this kind of template comparison at a glace is PhoenixDiffs:

https://www.phoenixdiff.org/?source=1.5.12&target=1.6.0

My Final Upgrade PR and Next Steps

The final RetroTaxi Phoenix 1.6 upgrade PR is here if you want to take a peek:

https://github.com/elixirfocus/retro_taxi/pull/24/

One new feature I have my eye on but did not get around too (yet) is Phoenix.Component. I should be able to use this in favor of some historic stateless LiveComponent modules, which is no longer recommended, as seen in the docs quoted below:

Note: previous LiveView versions allowed the :id to be skipped on live_component but those are now discouraged since the addition of function components, outlined in Phoenix.Component.

Hopefully these notes provide some help and comfort as you upgrade your own Phoenix projects to 1.6. I’m curious how we can continue to improve this process in the future and even have my eye on some new Elixir 1.13 changes that could help by “supporting developers who wish to create tools that directly manipulate and custom format Elixir source code”.

Thanks again to the entire Phoenix team for an outstanding release!

Framework Laptop First Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 13:00:00 -0400

A few days ago I took delivery of a Framework laptop, a new product that prioritized repairability in support of the Right to Repair movement. I’m enjoying it a lot and wanted to share some early observations.

My notes below will be limited to hardware-related observations. As part of this laptop experiment, I’m also running an Ubuntu install and that has its own set of challenges from a long time MacOS user. Perhaps in the future I’ll share more about that.

DIY Edition

While you can purchase a prebuilt version with Windows installed, I elected to buy the DIY edition. This version comes with a selection of customized components like SSD, RAM and network card in the box but it is your job to install them. With DIY you also do not have to pay for a Windows license, which is great for me since I want to use Linux.

Installation of the components was fairly easy (even for someone with limited hardware experience) and Framework has a wonderful setup guide with lots of pictures if you need any help. The most notable issue for me was the wifi card. I had never had to install one before and the antenna wires can be a little delicate, particularly if you have larger hands like myself. While the laptop does come with a the one screwdriver size you need, I got some help via tweezers and a flat edge tool from a iFixit toolkit I already owned when it came to the wifi card installation.

There are a ton of little design choices that make this laptop feel special.

Not only do you get a screwdriver in the one size you’ll need (many other laptops require an armada of different screwdrivers to work on), it is even magnetized to hold the internal screws just a little better while working.
The screws on the base of the laptop are captive, meaning they won’t fall out and get lost when loosened.
If you were to loose an internal screw, there are extra screws inside the case.
The base and screen frame are held in with magnets, not glue, allowing for easy opening and alignment.
Instead of picking a fixed collection of ports, the Framework laptop has a simple expansion system which allows you to customize ports based on your needs. I am currently using a mix of USB-C, USB-A and HDMI components but they also have SD cards, extra storage and other options.
The machine comes with a 1080p camera and a pair of microphones connected to physical privacy switches that disconnect them when unwanted.
There is a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. This is the one hardware feature that does not work out of the box for the current Ubuntu release but there are known instructions shared by the supportive Linux users within the Framework community forum on how to get it to work. I plan to do this soon.
The screen resolution is 2256x1504, a taller 3:2 ratio than most other laptops, giving you a little extra workspace and enough pixels to run your OS in a high DPI mode for crisp text.

The overall build quality feels great. I saw Dave2D complain about some flex in the monitor but I’m not seeing an issue in my build. Keyboard feel and travel are nice although I still struggle with location of some keys due to historic time spent on my Mac.

Observed Issues

I prefer a larger laptop, like my 16-inch MacBook Pro. I like the larger screen and overall larger body on my lap, as I work sitting on a recliner. This laptop is 13.5 inches but feels a little small for my personal preference. I look forward to future Framework options that might be larger with dedicated graphics cards.

The trackpad is mechanical and not haptic which by itself is not an issue for me but still unfortunate. More importantly I have struggled with my out of the box Ubuntu trackpad experience.

First I was dealing with a frustration that a right-side tap was signaling right clicks, but this was solved with some quick tweak software. Ongoing is an issue with two finger scrolling speed being way too fast. I think this is a Gnome issue, and am hopeful a custom preference can be found to slow things down. I hear some people on a future version of Ubuntu are not having this problem so we’ll see. Finally there is my thumb placement at the bottom of the trackpad which can interrupts pointer movement with my index finger. These are technically software issues so I don’t want to ding Framework too much but want to share my notes as transparent as I can.

Alongside my MacBook Pro, I use an external display that supplies both power and the display connection over a single Thunderbolt 3 cable. Early attempts to replicate this using Framework have failed and I’m forced to use a second cable for power and the Thunderbolt cable for the display. I’ve been told there are some other improvements coming to the firmware for this, so maybe this will be resolved in time.

The speakers are good, though not as good as my MacBook Pro speakers. They are located under the front side edges which sadly makes the audio a little muffled against my legs when working with the computer on my lap while sitting on my recliner.

At 55Wh the battery capacity feels a little on the low side, but considering my typically use will not come into that play often.

Ideas

The expansion slots are a very unique aspect of the Framework laptop and sparks imagination for future possibilities. One possible idea, though size might be an issue, would be to package a little cellular connection module, allowing internet connectivity on the road.

I’d also love to see the DIY option get rid of the Windows logo for the SUPER key and instead use the Framework logo, but acknowledge for this first hardware version that is a nitpick ask.

And once again, for my personal preference, a larger 15 or 16-inch version with a dedicated graphics card would be awesome.

Conclusion

Buying a first edition laptop from a new company is no doubt a risky move. I bought a Framework laptop because their company values have alignment with Right to Repair which I am also very supportive of. Additional, the laptop comes at a time when I am actively trying to diversify my experiences outside of MacOS and it serves that purpose very well.

It has only been a week, but so far I am very positive about my Framework laptop purchase.

Elixir Terminology: Parameters vs Attributes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 10:00:00 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

I’ve written about being explicit and mindful about programming terminology before and today we’ll look at another specific Elixir terminology example: parameters vs attributes.

If you create a new Phoenix app and use the generators to stub out a simple CRUD experience you will no doubt observe web controller functions like:

defmodule HelloWeb.PostController do
  # ...
  def create(conn, %{"post" => post_params}) do
    case Blog.create_post(post_params) do
      # ...
    end  end
end

And internal schema module functions like:

defmodule Hello.Blog.Post do
  # ...
  def changeset(post, attrs) do
    post
    |> cast(attrs, [:body, :word_count])
    |> validate_required([:body, :word_count])
  end
end

Observing function argument names like post_params (short for parameters) and attr (short for attributes) how do we reconcile those naming choices?

Parameters

When we say “parameters” we are usually talking about data coming into the system from external actors, like a user POST-ing data from a web form or an API accepting a request. Parameters are generally considered unsafe. Since the contents are dynamic they will almost always be made from maps using string keys to avoid the known runtime capacity limitations of :atom keys.

Attributes

When we say “attributes” we are usually talking about internal Elixir structures. When a function accepts a simple map argument labeled attr, as seen in our example, I think we can lean on the definition for attribute which says, “a quality, character, or characteristic ascribed to someone or something”.

While attr is a community norm for incoming function arguments, there is an unfortunate overlap with some official Elixir terminology. A module attribute is how we describe those at sign (@) declarations like @email below.

defmodule ContactSupport do
  @email "mike@mikezornek.com"
end

Short post today, but hopefully some helpful context about some community naming norms.

Using Schemaless Changesets to Separate Concerns Between the Web Context and the Business Context

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

With schemaless changesets you have the power to hand craft validations for specific web form presentations and define firm boundaries of responsibilities between your web presentation layer and the business-specific contexts of your app.

It’s a story we can all relate with. A new app is born using mix phx.new hello.

Some mix phx.gen generators are used to begin to shape a solution, perhaps something like:

$ mix phx.gen.html Blog Post posts body:string word_count:integer

And then over time the Post schema grows. Different web forms are needed and so multiple changeset functions are added for the diverging user tasks. You might even start adding virtual fields to schemas just to handle web form needs.

It gets to a point where no one wants to edit or refactor the schema since it has grown too large and complex.

How do get we get out of this mess?

Part One: Break Things Down

When you find yourself with a large schema I would first look to how you can break down this BIG noun into other smaller nouns.

Perhaps you have a large User entity. Maybe you could isolate and extract some of its responsibilities. Maybe introduce a Credentials entity and a user has many of them. Maybe break out a Profile and a user has one of those.

Perhaps you have an Notification entity that is being mutated to track its progress through some kind of delivery process to a third party. Maybe instead of an ever mutating string value of status you introduce a new entity for DeliveryAttempt and then notifications can have many of those and derive a status. With less mutation you likely will need less changesets functions and the code will naturally be more focused.

Breaking down domain concepts into smaller structures can improve the expressiveness and clarity of a codebase. Now, while I hope this little reminder can help brainstorm ideas for your own project there is another sneaky issue at play in our story and that is the changeset dependency problem.

Part Two: Breaking Your Changeset Dependencies

As useful as Phoenix generators can be to stand up a basic app, or to get through a tutorial introducing you to concepts about the framework, there is a dark pattern you would be wise to acknowledge if accepting its compromise.

In an ideal scenario an Ecto.Changeset should NOT have a dependency through line from an app’s business context into the web controller and onto the web form of the page.

Letting a changeset that low in the stack influence the web forms is dangerous.

Lets explain.

First, having any chunk of code touch too many layers begins to handicap your ability to refactor. I tend to align with the thought that “Good Code Is Easy To Change Code”. If you are looking for a simple measurement when evaluating the quality of a codebase, changeability is as good as any principle to lean on.

A common but brittle approach that creates strong dependencies across all the layers.

Second, having low stack changesets dictate web form behavior creates a dysfunctional approach to user experience design where you force the user to represent their work as it will (eventually) be persisted in a database table row. In an ideal situation you’ll be crafting custom web forms to capture user intent and then transform the incoming data into the needed persistance format. Do not let the database dictate the user interface!

Using Schemaless Changesets

So with all of that said, how does one use a schemaless changesets?

Normally if you had a defined an Ecto schema like Registration you’d build a changeset with code like:

fields = [:first_name, :last_name, :email]

changeset =
  %Registration{}
  |> Ecto.Changeset.cast(params["sign_up"], fields)
  |> validate_required(...)
  |> validate_length(...)

Creating a schemaless version is super easy and very much the same. Instead of starting the pipe with a schema type you instead start it with a simple tuple containing the data and some metadata about the data’s types.

data = %{}
types = %{name: :string, email: :string}

# The data+types tuple is equivalent to %Registration{}
changeset =
  {data, types}
  |> Ecto.Changeset.cast(params["sign_up"], Map.keys(types))
  |> validate_required(...)
  |> validate_length(...)

The data in this case can be a simple Map or a more defined struct. For example, in the RetroTaxi project there is a web form presented on the home page and so I built a Struct to represent the request like:

defmodule RetroTaxi.BoardCreation.Request do
  defstruct [:board_name, :facilitator_name]

  @type t :: %__MODULE__{
          board_name: String.t() | nil,
          facilitator_name: String.t() | nil
        }
end

Later when creating a changeset we use this schemaless pattern:

def change_request(%Request{} = request, attrs \\ %{}) do
  types = %{
    board_name: :string,
    facilitator_name: :string
  }

  {request, types}
  |> Changeset.cast(attrs, Map.keys(types))
  |> Changeset.validate_required([:board_name, :facilitator_name])
  |> Changeset.validate_length(:board_name, min: 1, max: 255)
  |> Changeset.validate_length(:facilitator_name, min: 1, max: 255)
end

Other than this difference, you can use the changeset with the Phoenix form tool just like before.

I’ll also take a moment to give a nod to the embedded_schema Ecto type which can be used here in place of the arbitrary Struct or Map; see the documentation for a full sample. My gut tells me to isolate usage of things called “schemas” to entities or values that will end up in the database for a greenfield project, but it’s a small preference. I also like the idea that the concepts of “changeset” need not be limited to the Ecto library.

The Missing Error Gotcha

The one issue you may run into with this schemaless changeset approach is that as you test validations on your web forms you will not see any errors. The reason for this is that traditionally the changeset you render in a POST request will come out of a Repo.insert/2 or Repo.update/2 error tuple and that changeset will have its action attribute set to a non-nil :insert or :update value. The Phoenix web form tools use the presence of this value as a signal to render the errors. For us, this means we need to set action explicitly like the sample below.

  def process_request(request, user_id) do
    changeset = change_request(request, %{})

    case changeset.valid? do
      false ->
        # In the first published version of this post we edited the `action` directly but
        # it is probably safer to use the defined `apply_action` function, though the
        # result is pretty much the same.
        # {:error, %{changeset | action: :insert}}

        # We need to force an action value so the Phoenix forms will display the errors.
        # Code is more explicit here for demonstration purposes.
        {:error, changeset_with_action} = Ecto.Changeset.apply_action(changeset, :insert)
        {:error, changeset_with_action}

      true ->
        # Perform the actual request.
    end
  end

Conclusion

With schemaless changesets you have the power to hand craft validations for specific web form presentations and define firm boundaries of responsibilities between your web presentation layer and the business-specific contexts of your app. Lots of people will not invest in this separation of concerns, and depending on the life-cycle of the application and the needs of your users that might be fine. If however, you find yourself making multiple flavors of changeset or adding lots of virtual fields to a schema just to make the web forms fit in – it might be time to rethink your approach.

Learning Rust via Game Development: Starting Dungeon Crawler

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 09:45:54 -0400

A second update and demo of my work through Hands on Rust. This time we are building a graphic turn-based dungeon crawler game.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

Retro Taxi: September 2021 Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 09:00:41 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

A few months ago I kicked off the next sample project for this website, a team retrospective board built using Phoenix LiveView called RetroTaxi. More info about the project is available in the project kickoff and today I’ll share how it has been coming along.

From the scope of the original pitch document you’d like to think I would have gotten further along by now but a mix of client responsibilities and then a extended personal vacation kept me distracted. Over the past week however I have gotten back into the project and can show some basic things working.

First, a user can visit the home page and create a new board. This create board form also asks for their name, since they will be displayed as the meeting’s facilitator to future collaborators.

Create new board form.

With the board created you are redirected to the board page, which shows the custom title and displays the facilitator in the to-be-fleshed-out “who’s here” section.

Each board has four columns and each column has content cards. You can add cards to columns and you can edit cards. There is no active pub/sub between multiple people viewing the board and seeing the cards change (yet), that is still forthcoming.

Sample of current board with editable content cards.

The site is styled with Tailwind CSS through I wouldn’t say it represents a final visual language by any means. I hope to finish the project with a vanilla Phoenix LiveView setup and then move on to experiment with Surface for a fuller UI component experience.

Since I wrote the original cycle one pitch I feel like my understanding of what I want to build and how it will all work has been very fluid. I have pretty much dropped the concept of cycles and have just started tagging issues with a MVP1 label since this project’s progress has clearly not been constrained by time.

I’m going to try to be more deliberate with issues and pull requests moving forward so if you want a peek or contribute, check them out.

Hopefully I’ll also be able to start extracting some more code-specific blog posts from the project soon. If you have any specific questions, let me know mike@mikezornek.com.

September 2021 Elixir Consulting Availability

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:23:17 -0400

My summer vacation is coming to a close and I am once again looking for my next consulting project.

An ideal project would involve a healthy mix of:

Elixir/Phoenix programming
Product and user interface design
Technical documentation writing
Mentoring junior developers (or those new to Elixir)
Open source projects would be a plus
Quality assurance and testing could be a good fit too.

I am interested in both part time and full time engagement opportunities.

If you have a project or referral please shoot me an email or grab some time on my calendar.

Learning Rust via Game Development

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 11:59:26 -0400

A short show and tell for how I am learning Rust through game development.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

The Purpose of a Business is People

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 14:04:56 -0400

This blog post is part of an open exploration of my core values when it comes to work. Ideally reading through these posts will help you consider your own values. If you happen to be here researching my consulting services, my hope would be these notes help define possible alignment on your project.

First we must acknowledge, a business is a human construct that was built to accomplish a goal. In the United States, and other capitalist-countries, many times the primary goal of a business is to generate and quickly extract profits for the owners or stakeholders. I however have an appreciation and different perspective when it comes to the purpose of a business.

I like to think of a business as the balancing act amongst three primary forces.

First we have the customers, who are provided value through products and services. Without the customer we are lost and so we must prioritize our work and attention towards their needs and concerns at all times.

Second we have the workers. Many businesses view the workers as an unfortunate requirement to accomplish their business goal (profits). The business will determine the minimum amount of compensation that will keep the workers showing up which sadly creates a dysfunctional relationship. I like to think that the primary goal of the ideal business should be to provide a long-term, welcoming and supportive environment for its workers. Worker satisfaction comes from meaningful, rewarding and sustainable work. Prioritize the customer, but never at the sacrifice of the worker.

Finally we have the business (and its profits). In my ideal the business and profits are there to provide long-term stability between the customers and the workers. Each of those groups will need extra support at different phases of a business and a profitable business is better setup to handle those needs. I am not against a business owner or stakeholders taking some profits out of the system to reward an investment of time or money but it bothers me when that is the primary goal of the business. Another options to consider when trying to construct a fair and balanced approach to business is employee ownership of the business.

It can be challenging to reach these ideals inside systems you don’t fully control but none-the-less I find self-reflecting on your values and sharing your thoughts to be a rewarding process. With luck you can connect with people who share your values and have constructive conversations with those whose values differ.

Vacation is Good, I Recommend It

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 16:43:23 -0400

Figured I’d do a short check in with how my vacation is going.

Book reading is a primary activity. Check out my Goodreads profile for more info. I like reading with Bob Ross or Rick Steve’s Europe playing on the TV in the background. I like the background noise and something interesting to look at when I need to rest my eyes.

I’ve also caught up on some games and even finished 100% completion for Red Dead Redemption 2.

I’m doing a fair job keeping up with my morning walks but have not yet renewed my YMCA membership for swimming I was originally planning to do. Still want to do this but will likely wait until I get back from the shore.

Yes, on Sunday I head down to the New Jersey shore for a week at the beach. It’s going to be a little more limited since I plan to avoid the crowds and focus more time on the beach than the bars. Still, it will be good to get away from the apartment for the first time in a long time.

Coding has been intentionally limited. About 10 hours or so in July so far. I suspect I will start to code more in August, hopefully moving some ElixirFocus projects forward, but am enjoying the break while I have it.

I’ve been doing some reflecting on what I will be looking for in my next client project and also debating what I want to do with Guildflow. I paused development/marketing of Guildflow in January with the idea I needed to observe a return to in-person events before investing more time and effort. I can’t say we are there yet but there are other constraints that have me questioning what I want to do.

Anyways, vacation is going great. I highly recommend it.

Resources and Suggestions to Find Elixir-based Employment

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 16:12:03 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

The following is a collection of resources and suggestions for people looking to acquire full time or project specific employment writing Elixir. I personally lean more on consulting but the topic of Elixir employment comes up enough that I thought I’d share what I’m aware of.

Elixir Job Listings

First we have the aptly named elixirjobs.net, which provides an active catalog of known job listings.

I also highly recommend the #jobs, #jobs_chat, and #looking_for_contract rooms of the official Elixir Slack

Elixir Radar, which may be more well known for its weekly newsletter, also hosts a job board, which is usually promoted in said newsletter emails.

The Elixir Forum has a dedicated jobs tag that is less active then the above can still be a helpful link to track.

Don’t Let “Requirements” Scare You Away

One of my first web development jobs was with a company that at the time was looking for full time / experienced developer. I applied despite my limited experience and with only part time availability (I was still in college at the time). They hired me anyways, found a project that I could contribute to and ultimately provided a great environment to improve my skills.

The point being, many of these job descriptions do not fully convey the situation at these companies. If there is a company or opportunity that interests you, put yourself out there, introduce yourself and share what you are looking for. You never know how it might turn out.

Elixir Meetups / Personal Networking

While applying to a specific job listing can be the most direct approach to finding a new gig, there is something to be said for personal networking. Many Elixir meetups and communities are very approachable online right now. Get out there, introduce yourself (maybe even do a talk!) and be shamelessly direct, explaining that you are looking for work opportunities. Be like Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration.

Elixir Companies

If you observe a company sponsoring an Elixir conference or other kind of Elixir event, they are most likely looking to hire people. You don’t even need to limit your search to current events; if that company sponsored an Elixir event years ago they are still a good target to contact.

You can also look for companies that have been promoted for their Elixir usage or are otherwise known to be using Elixir. If you spot a company that might be a good fit, reach out to them – even if they don’t have a job listing.

Self Promotion

If you have even a mildly active personal website or social media account, consider adding a static header or profile link to a blog post explaining what kind of job you are looking for. Rename yourself on Twitter or Slack to “Billy Beta is looking for Elixir work” to make it clear, even in unrelated posts that you are available for hire.

If you need to be more stealthy, consider a few private emails to friends explaining your situation and that you are looking for something new. So much of my own works comes from friends of friends. It is very helpful to have wide social nets to allow for good things to happen.

Be Prepared

Finally, be prepared. Know what you want and don’t want in a new gig. Write it all down (paper is better) and prioritize your interview questions to align with those needs.

I personally am very behind the People-first Business movement, see also the People-first Job Board, and so I align my own questions around those values and concerns.

Your ability to land an Elixir gig has never been better. Get out there and find something that is a good fit for you. If I missed any resources, let me know.

Open Office Hours: Summer 2021

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 17:32:00 -0400

With some well earned extended summer downtime underway I once again have a more flexible schedule and want to promote my open office hours!

Open office hours is a great way for me to give back to the community and hopefully help people explore a problem. I love hearing what people are excited about and working on. Noting too formal, just coffee over a Zoom video chat.

Recommend discussion topics might include:

Code questions about Elixir, Phoenix or Ecto
Software testing strategies
Team communication challenges
Website structure and design
Product development
Customer research
Static website development with Hugo
Technical presentations and teaching

Slots are 1 hours in length to allow for breathing room but need not go the full time.

[Grab some time on the calendar!](ht

Consulting Retrospective and Summer Learning Plans

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 16:51:24 -0400

After dedicating a full time effort towards an Elixir/Phoenix consulting project since October, I’m taking some time off and looking forward to a nice mix of vacation and personal projects.

Consulting Retrospective

The project itself is under NDA, but I can say it was primarily Elixir and Phoenix coding as a subcontractor through Test Double. Test Double was great to work for, and very supportive. I had a lot of flexibility allowing me to shape my responsibilities, primarily landing on team support through code review, work shaping and mentoring. I did take ownership of some specific platform features but team support was the primary task.

This was easily the largest team project I ever worked on. We had over 100 code-level contributors to the repo and that does not even include a whole host of product managers, designers and customer support folks who were involved. The product we worked on is a high traffic, consumer-facing website. There were many concerns for technical scaling but I was actually more interested in the human scaling concerns, like how do you get a such a large technical team to align on a technical design decisions.

Day to day I expanded my Elixir skills a ton and enjoyed getting new or improved production experience with a bunch of tools:

Developer Tooling: asdf, CircleCI, Docker, VSCode
System Observability: DataDog, Splunk
Frontend: NodeJS, Jest, Phoenix LiveView
Elixir: bypass, credo, dialyzer, ex_doc, ex_machina, faker, floki, mix_test_watch, mox, oban

Summer Learning Plans

The basic plan is to take off all of July and August. I’ll be going down the shore for a week or so in July but the expectation is I’ll spend the rest of the time working on some personal projects and catching up on some learning paths. Some specific goals include:

Finish a deployable version my open source LiveView retrospective tool, RetroTaxi.
Continue to publish educational material under my ElixirFocus brand, formally Phoenix by Example. Ideally working towards some kind of small educational product.
Get more familiar with event source / CQRQ programming patterns Hoping to land an Elixir project in this style in the fall.
Read and work through a Rust/WebAssembly course/book; mostly for curiosity alongside my goal of learning a new programming language each year.

Having the time off, I’m also down for more coffee chats. If you want to grab some time, check out my calendar.

Improve the Clarity of Your Elixir Code Through Expressive and Consistent Language

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 12:00:00 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

One of our primary day-to-day responsibilities as programmers is to communicate. We need to express our ideas, explain our work and document our code. Having a strong vocabulary and explicit intentions behind the words you (and your team) choose can greatly help avoid confusion.

Take some time as a team to talk about how you name and describe things. Embrace productive confrontation when you identify inconsistencies and work towards creating (and documenting!) as much as a ubiquitous language as you can.

The following is a collection of terms I try to be mindful of in my own work. Hopefully this list helps inspire some of your own terminology choices.

Programming Terminology

Entity vs Value

An entity is a structure that has identity. An Account in my application has a unique identifier and is thus is considered an entity.

A value is a structure without identity. A Color in my application might be made up of three scalars like red, green and blue. Collectively they make up the Color value but there is no identity.

Some people might prefer the term record instead of entity in this context. I consider the terms fairly similar so would honor my team’s chosen preference.

Entity vs Row

Sometimes when we talk about entities we’ll get into the deeper discussions of how the entities are persisted, usually inside a database At that point I make a special case to change how I talk, being more explicit about the database row. Entity is how I refer to the in-memory representation of the structure, but if we are talking about database storage or SQL-specific things I want to use the term row to be more explicit.

Maps vs Structs vs (Ecto) Schemas

Maps, Structs and (Ecto) Schemas are all Elixir structure tools that we use to create entities and values. Each of these tools has their own purpose and constrains so I try to be explicit when talking about which tool we are using.

Create vs New vs Insert and Remove vs Delete

As you define the core domain nouns of your app you’ll inevitably start to build out a series of modules that help you manage these nouns. When designing the interfaces of these modules have an explicit pattern for how to name behaviors and try when possible to lean on community patterns. Ask yourself, “how does the Elixir language or popular frameworks use these terms?”

Delete and New as used inside of Elixir.

You can also take advantage of the various Phoenix/Ecto generates for a peek at some pattern recommendations from the framework authors. These are usually a great place to start, although I don’t consider the patterns to be gospel.

In addition to the working on the names of the modules functions themselves, you may also be involved in the user experience of an app and its own terminology. Ideally the nouns and terms from the interface down through the code will align but this is not always possible. Sometimes the needs of the user experience design require the terminologies to deviate. While not ideal, I’m fine with this – it just has to be done with intent and consistency. Write down the terms you have chosen and why.

Get vs Fetch

There are a few notable Elixir patterns to be mindful of with the terms get vs fetch.

First let’s check out Map.get/3 which will return a value for the given key or a default value if the key is not found.

iex> Map.get(%{}, :a)
nil
iex> Map.get(%{a: 1}, :a)
1
iex> Map.get(%{a: 1}, :b)
nil
iex> Map.get(%{a: 1}, :b, 3)
3

Next we have Map.fetch/2 which will return an :ok tuple or :error if the key is not found.

iex> Map.fetch(%{a: 1}, :a)
{:ok, 1}
iex> Map.fetch(%{a: 1}, :b)
:error

There is also a bang version of fetch, Map.fetch!/2 which will return the value or raise an exception if the key is not found.

iex> Map.fetch!(%{a: 1}, :a)
1

The takeaways from these language patterns I take note of are the following:

get_noun should return the value or a default if not found.
fetch_noun should return a :ok tuple or an :error tuple.
Any function with a bang (exclamation point) will throw an exception, and that exception should be documented inside the inline documentation.
In general I try to avoid creating bang style functions as I feel like Elixir exceptions should be exceptional. You may notice that the there are Phoenix code generators out there that will create a get! style functions in generated contexts. That is pattern I am aware of but question in newer code.

List vs Array

I do my best to be mindful of and embrace the terminology of the language I am working in, moment to moment. This means if we are dealing with a collection in Elixir I’ll say list and when we are dealing with a collection is JavaScript I’ll say array. In an Elixir context I’ll say map and in a JavaScript context I’ll say dictionary.

For a junior programmer this might seem like symantec nonsense but I think its an important distinction. Related, I honor the styles of the host language, for example using camel case for variables in JavaScript and underscores in Elixir. With luck a linter of some kind can help remind me if I loose my place.

Behavior vs Feature

When talking about what my code does I use the term behavior. I describe the behaviors I want to build and I document the behaviors I observe.

The term feature is more a product or marketing term, usually describing a collection of end user observable behaviors.

App and Business Domain Consistency

Document Your App’s Custom Terminology

While I have some personal preferences to share below, ultimately every app will have a custom vernacular for how they label things in the system. Spend some time getting team agreement on the meaning and intent behind these terms. Write them down. Review and evolve the glossary when needed. Having alignment on this language will be extremely helpful over time as you discuss what to code needs to do.

Authentication vs Authorization

Many people simply talk about “auth” systems without being explicit but it’s important to distinguish between authentication, figuring out who you are talking to, and authorization, figuring out if someone should be allowed to do something.

My own preference here is to use Sign in, Sign out and Sign up. I’m also ok with other variants like “Create Account” in the user experience as long as we are consistent.

I dislike log in since it is too easy to mix up the term “login” vs “log in”.

Account vs User and Settings vs Preferences

No strong personal preferences here, would have to consider the application context – but once again I am looking for consistency. If I were debating choices for a new app with my team I’d look at some industry competition to see what they do.

Language I Try to Avoid

Bad Code and Code Smell

I do my best to follow the retrospective prime directive which states:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Believing this, I try to avoid saying something is “bad code” or has a “code smell”. Those phrases package a lot of negative judgement which is not very constructive. Instead let’s look for opportunities to improve testability, or documentation or abstractions. No one wrote this “bad code” intentionally to sabotage the system. We are all members of an extremely immature and fast moving industry with diverse backgrounds and levels of experience. It is messy out there and everyone is learning as we go.

If you are doing a code review, instead of saying something has a “code smell”, kickstart a discussion around getting more context around the decisions and constrains that led to this code’s design. Ask if they considered an alternative or are aware of your concerns. These pull requests are opportunities for education and starting the process with judgement language is not going to result in many positive outcomes.

Understanding when to use String-based Maps vs Atom-based Maps

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:56:17 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

While browsing the ElixirForum the other day I spotted this question from Dominic which resonated deeply with my own experiences learning Elixir. Dominic asks:

I’m constantly being blocked by maps’ different construct %{:atom => "value"} vs. %{"string" => "value"} vs %{name: "value"}.

It does not appears to be consistent enough and in my case are often the cause of all “blockage” I have.

I understand them, I’m a long time Elm dev/fan and used to FP, but I don’t know why Elixir’s maps are so weird to me.

Later in the post Dominic notes he gets an error complaining about mixed keys: (Ecto.CastError) expected params to be a map with atoms or string keys.

So with all that said, why the lack of consistency? Why don’t people just use String-based Maps or just use Atom-based Maps? Why do all these Phoenix tutorials jump from one to the other?

The short answer is, if given the opportunity I think most Elixir developers would lean on Atom-based Maps at all times, but we need to work within the constrains of our deployments. As preferable as :atoms may be they are not garbage collected and if you are allowing dynamic content into the system (from say a web request) and converting that content to Atom-based Maps you leave yourself open to running out of memory from a bad actor or even just natural system behavior. It is for this reason the web request tooling within Phoenix will transform those payloads into String-based Maps.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s talk about Map syntax. While Dominic quotes three styles of map syntax there are really only two patterns to keep in your head:

%{"name" => value} which is a Map syntax using the arrow => token; and,
%{name: value} which is an arrow-less version of the Map syntax made exclusively for Atom-based Maps.

The third style Dominic shared, %{:atom => value} I would group into the arrow => camp. Maps can use Strings or Atoms as keys and so no real syntax sugar is present in this example.

I think one of the real jarring issues for people new to Elixir when it comes to the Atom-exclusive Map syntax is that it has the colon of the Atom key on the right-hand side. You’ll see this with Keyword lists as well. Having multiple ways to express a Map can be one level of confusion, but then to combine it with multiple ways to express an :atom feels like a compounding problem.

The good news, I can share as someone who has been doing Elixir for a few years now, is that this confusion is not something I’ve experienced elsewhere in the language. On the whole I’ve found Elixir syntax to be straightforward and approachable. Getting comfortable with the Atom syntax sugar of Maps and Keyword lists took a little time but eventually it stuck.

One of the deeper concepts that comes out of this discussion however is the need for String-based keys from content outside the system. I think it is very helpful to have that external boundary in mind when building your code. Let the web or API contexts handle validating or shaping those String-based Map values and then have a meaningful transformation into the Atom-based Maps that will accept values for your core layer. With that pattern in mind your tests can follow along, simulating String-based Map payloads for controllers and Atom-based Map values for core context testing, and thus avoiding the kind of Ecto error Dominic shared.

For more on boundaries check out the The Core and the Interface from the excellent Towards Maintainable Elixir series.

Hostname-based Privacy Tools Need to Evolve For Websocket Concerns

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 20 May 2021 20:30:00 -0400

I’m a privacy advocate. I use Firefox as my main browser. I install adblock browser extensions. I block ads from within my network router. Most of these privacy tools rely on the fact most ads and tracking happen through JavaScripts which are embedded alongside the websites we are visiting and send tracking data to a third party hostname. We know these hostnames are suspect and so we block the connections outright.

But what if the ads and tracking were to flow through the same hostname of the original website? What if the ads and tracking were woven though the same websocket connection that the main site ran through? How would we be able to block that?

Persistent websocket connections are the backbone for anything on the modern web that is collaborative or realtime. Phoenix LiveView is a library I personally enjoy using to build websocket-powered apps. A similar library called Turbo is also out there for Rails.

Having knowledge of how websockets work, how JavaScript tracking works and how privacy tools work – I have a growing concern that as we see more prevalent hostname-based privacy tools get traction amongst the casual web userbase the ads and tracking software is likely to evolve and may move into the websocket space. If it does I’m concerned it will be very difficult to separate the traffic of the main website one is trying to engage with and the ads and tracking bits that flow inside the same pipe to the same host.

I don’t have much to else to add. I have no answers, just concerns. Is anyone else working on this right now?

The Values That Define Us

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 17 May 2021 10:30:00 -0400

Over the last year I’ve gained a much higher appreciation for the proper documentation of a company’s values. When I was younger I was much more carefree about company values or even the company mission statement, but lately I find having well-thought-out and excessively reenforced values are an extremely helpful tool to help shape and align the inevitable hard discussions and decisions that need to be made within an organization.

In part I think this new perspective has been fueled through the company I subcontract through, Test Double, which does an excellent job of consistently referencing and referring to their own core values when discussing decisions, designing systems, hiring new employees or sharing praise.

The other big factor of course is the continued increase in social awareness around racism, injustice, and inequality. It feels great that there is some momentum being made here (noting the long road ahead of course). All this activity has many, including myself, taking stock in what they value and how our actions align with those values.

When the alignment is off you see volatile results like the recent Basecamp leadership failure or even the Apple’s lack of consistency with its quickly reversed hire.

Even when I disagree with a company’s chosen values (as I do while I read through Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon) I actually appreciate the documentation. It helps shape my understanding of the company and its decisions.

For values I do heavily align with, check out People-First Business from Wildbit. There are lots of great topics to read about on that site.

If you share my interest in continual iterative improvement to things like company culture or product development practices I think you’ll find documented company values can help focus many decisions. Personally, I think some value introspection will likely be part of a personal retreat I’d like to take soon™. More on that another time.

Philly ETE Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 07 May 2021 09:33:26 -0400

This week I attended the Emerging Technologies For The Enterprise 2021 conference online. Normally hosted in Old City Philadelphia, I’ve been a long time attendee of the show.

I find ETE to be a great place to hear about fresh tech things outside the echo chamber of my day to day work. This year’s event was no exception. One talk I really enjoyed was from Simon Wardley, “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones: Sensing A Business Environment Before Taking Action”.

During this talk we will examine the level of situational awareness within business, why it matters and whether we can anticipate and exploit change before it hits us.

Simon reviewed his Wardley Mapping technique and I was impressed with the way this visualization can give you a fresh perspective about your company and its work. I’ve bookmarked this link index to learn more over the next few months.

I also enjoyed “The Edges of Cutting-Edge Languages: Where does the language end and ‘user space’ begin?” by Richard Feldman. Richard is a great presenter and teacher. I’ve seen him teach Elm locally via some Philly meetups and have previous enjoyed his other conference talks, like: Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm?. I was pretty confident I’d enjoy whatever he was showing. His talk summery:

For decades, mainstream programming languages have drawn similar boundaries around what’s a first-class part of the language and what’s a third-party addition outside the scope of the language.

For example, the language ships with a compiler that reads text files and compiles programs. The package and editor plugin ecosystems are completely separate. Compiled programs have unrestricted access to operating system primitives, unless they’re running in a browser. The list goes on!

A number of modern languages are drawing these boundaries in different places than where they’ve been drawn historically. This talk compares some of these languages and their boundaries, and introduces a new programming language that’s being developed to draw these boundaries in different places from others have before.

Come see what programming can be like when we redraw the foundational boundaries of our languages!

It was a really cool talk and I was able to hear about a bunch of languages that were new to me, including one Richard is working on called Roc. Roc is still super early but that page does link to a few video demos of what is being worked on and the ideas behind it all.

Other big themes of the conference:

The continued escalation and evolution of DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated deployments, etc. I dipped my toe into these technologies last year. I’m not sure they are what I want to be doing day to day but having knowledge and appreciation for them is likely to be important.
Observability is another big topic. Feel like we continue to see new opportunities here to improve stability of systems. Elixir itself has gain a lot of tooling for this recently and it feels like I should spend some time digging in.
Never ending language evolution.

For myself, I hope all these patterns and tools help small teams do more while keeping the team small – BUT I do worry how it is hard to ask any one person to have experience in all these areas of study.

The conference sadly did not really experiment with much online socializing. We had an event-specific Slack but no real organization around getting people to mingle. I’ve seem this be hit or miss at other online conferences but one of the things I do miss from the in-person ETE is seeing many locally Philly tech friends in the hallways. Hopefully we can return to in-person next year.

I’m told conference goers will have exclusive access to the talk videos through July so I would keep my eye on the Chariot Solutions YouTube channel if you want to check these out in the future for free later.

Life Updates, Moving, Work, Side Projects and Learning Plans

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 10:00:39 -0400

It’s been a while since I posted here on the blog so figured I’d do a short life update.

COVID / Health Check

First, my immediate family and I are still healthy. We continue to stay quarantined and limit our interactions with people outside our bubble. My retired mother has gotten her two shots of vaccine per her age/health group and my sister was able to get vaccinated through her job, a public school teacher. I was able to get my first shot two weeks ago and scheduled for my second shot at the end of April.

I’ve definitely had moments of mental stress and very much am looking forward to a few things as hopefully people can start getting together again but willing to self regulate as needed to.

General health check is, good. I do need to continue to up my walking now that the cold weather excuse is gone. I’ve been doing some walking but my daily step average is still low from what I was doing last year. My sleep is awesome. The CPAP machine is working well for me a year in now. Allergies have been a slight issue the last month but overall my medications are holding. I did start a light blood pressure medication which is my real goal now – to continue the weight lose so I can hopefully stop taking that pill but this might be in vain since high blood pressure is a family thing too.

Moving

Me and my mother have were at the old apartment for many years but sadly over the course of the last few years a number of issues have popped up and caused notable stress for us. We didn’t really want to move but eventually had to make it happen. We now are at a new place and are just moved in a week now as I post this. It has been a lot of work packing (and throwing stuff out) but hopefully will result in a more relaxing location. So good so far. I’m not sure if this new place is for the long term but we’ll see.

Work

Work has been good. I’m still doing Elixir / Phoenix work for the same client I started with back in October. The latest extension goes up to June 1st but they will likely offer an extension, at least for a little bit of time as I know they would like our help through a big progressive release, that is starting end of April and should hit 100% around June 1st.

I did negotiate a 4-day work week with my client, which started in mid-March. This extra day lets me have some focus time for my side projects – at least that is the goal. I got to be honest that the apartment move has taken ownership of much of this free time recently but at least this prevents me from burnout and still have some downtime per-weekend. Hopefully once I am settled at the new place I’ll get better use of of this personal project time.

Side Projects

Guildflow has been put on the back burner since January. I made the decision that I can’t invest any more serious time into the project until I can observe in-person meetups happening again. I still use the platform to run Philly Elixir but Guildflow is mostly dormant as far as marketing / new code efforts go.

Phoenix by Example is my current main side project. It has seen some slowed momentum with my apartment move but on the whole has been a fun way to organize my Elixir education endeavors. The next big sample project, RetroTaxi is underway. I hope to finish that project with a big push in May and hopefully come up with a small educational product in June and July time frame.

Learning Plans

While I am over the hump in learning Elixir I still feel like there is lots of opportunity for continued experience gains. PragProg has been pumping out even more Elixir books and I’m enjoying consuming them alongside my Phoenix by Example projects and work code.

All that said, like last summer with my Kotlin / Android Book Club, I would like to do some alternative language learning over the summer. I suspect this will be Rust / WebAssembly. I might do another book club but not sure yet. If you are interested in let me know and we’ll see.

Let’s Do Coffee

One of the things I miss is the happenstance catchups with people at IndyHall. If you want to have a virtual coffee with me, please grab a slot on the calendar and let me know how things are going with you.

RetroTaxi Project Kickoff

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:55:21 -0400

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

Phoenix by Example is all about crafting educational content extracted from open source example projects. Today I am kicking off my latest example project, RetroTaxi!

From the pitch document:

A retrospective meeting is a regular practice of agile teams or any group of people who are looking for continued improvement to their team process, communication or habits. Successful retro meetings give the team an opportunity to reflect on what is working, what is not and what they want to do next.

Retrospective meetings can be executed in many different ways but with the advent of more people working remotely having an online collaborative tool to help execute the meeting and capture feedback is often advantageous. Some people will initially lean on collaborative tools like Google Docs to help execute a retro meeting and while it can work, it is not very elegant or structured. There are also dedicated retro tools but most are locked behind account registration, paywalls or try to do too many things.

This project aims to provide a simple, focused tool to help people run a retro meeting online. Our solution will value:

A registrations-free experience over formalized team management.

One-time use boards over detailed historic archives.

Conversations over analytical measurements or note taking.

A responsive web experience over platform-specific apps.

RetroTaxi will utilize Phoenix LiveView fairly heavily and should be a useful source of topics to discuss.

Project Goals

The first two projects of Phoenix by Example were fairly simplistic in nature and one of the first goals is of RetroTaxi is to do a more through exploration of a real world project process. As such you’ll see some early discovery time has been spent in preparing a pitch document, which is a slice of the larger Shape Up process.

Sample of some early discovery sketching and interface breadboarding.

Some mockups from the pitch document:

Board layout.

Card state.

The second project goal is to (hopefully) provide more useful and usable solutions to real world problems. When I built the GetShorty link shortener example there were no real aspirations that anyone would actually use the tool day-to-day, but moving forward I’d like to find small slices of opinionated, usefulness solutions to model the examples after. If you find this and have thoughts on retro meeting and the tools involved, please reach out. I’d love to hear your observations.

Next Steps

With the early discovery and my first pitch written I see the next steps as follows:

Sketch out the HTML/TailwindCSS needed to execute the design.
Build out the core contexts needed to model the behaviors of the board.
Create the LiveView to wire up the behaviors to the UI, breaking the interface into simple, testable components.
Refine the interactions and test non-happy path experiences (browser reload/rejoin).
Deploy and test the app to be used on the public internet.

The plan is to do this project in 6 weeks, with about 10 hours per week of dedicated time. I’ll be blogging my progress here so if you want to stay informed be sure to subscribe.

Securing Webhook Payload Delivery in Phoenix

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:00:00 -0500

This post was originally written for my old ElixirFocus blog, and transfer here after its closure.

Some of the most interesting and valuable behaviors we can build as web developers are through connecting different web applications together. Often times this comes in the form of webhooks, where one web app will POST events to your own web app. Keeping that communication secure is important and today we will take a peak into how you can secure webhook payloads in a Phoenix application.

Webhook Security 101

Webhook might sound like some scary, exotic term but at the end of the day webhooks are nothing more that a web server endpoint configured to receive HTTP POST requests in some agreed upon format. The concern however is, without any additional security, anyone could discover the endpoint and start sending their own malicious payloads to your web application.

To help secure a webhook, when you first set it up you’ll give the third party some generated secret. As an example, here is where you can store the secret while configuring a GitHub webhook:

When GitHub then sends the HTTP POST request they will include, in the headers of that request, a signature of the payload using the previously shared secret. As you process the HTTP POST request you can then generate your own signature, based on the incoming payload and the known secret, to verify the payload’s authenticity. If the secrets match then you have much more trust that the payload came from the correct third party.

Validating a Payload Signature in Phoenix

To get this to work in Phoenix we’ll need a few core behaviors.

First, we will want the ability to generate a signature based on a payload and a secret.

  def generate_payload_signature(_, nil) do
    {:error, :missing_app_secret}
  end

  def generate_payload_signature(payload, app_secret) do
    {:ok, :crypto.mac(:hmac, :sha256, app_secret, payload) |> Base.encode16(case: :lower)}
  end

Second we’ll need a way to pull out the signature from the connection’s request headers, if present:

  defp signature_from_req_headers(req_headers) do
    case List.keyfind(req_headers, "x-hub-signature", 0) do
      {"x-hub-signature", full_signature} ->
        "sha256=" <> signature = full_signature
        signature

      _ ->
        nil
    end
  end

Finally we’ll connect the dots creating a simple call site function where someone can pass in a Plug.Conn and a payload and ask if it is authentic.

  def is_authentic_payload?(%Conn{req_headers: req_headers}, payload) do
    case signature_from_req_headers(req_headers) do
      nil ->
        false

      signature ->
        is_payload_signature_valid?(signature, payload)
    end
  end

  defp is_payload_signature_valid?(payload_signature, payload) do
    case generate_payload_signature(payload, webhook_secret()) do
      {:ok, generated_payload_signature} ->
        Plug.Crypto.secure_compare(generated_payload_signature, payload_signature)

      _ ->
        false
    end
  end

  defp webhook_secret do
    Keyword.fetch!(Application.fetch_env!(:webhook_signature, :github), :webhook_secret)
  end

There are a few ways you could go about getting this check into your controller code. The most challenging part is that out of the box Phoenix does not make the raw body of an HTTP POST request available to you through the Plug.Conn struct. Instead a default Phoenix app uses parsers and converts such payloads into native Elixir value types.

One way to turn off this behavior is to edit your Phoenix app’s endpoint.ex file and remove the auto-parsing behavior for all routes of that endpoint. You can find some more info about doing this in the Plug docs in a section titled “Custom body reader”.

Since this parsing behavior is helpful for non-webhook requests in our example app, we will relocate the parsing configurations out of the endpoint.ex file and into the pipeline definition on the router.ex file. This way we can keep the parsing behavior working for the rest of the example app and do something custom for our webhook endpoint.

defmodule WebhookSignatureWeb.Endpoint do
  # CONDENSED FOR DEMONSTRATION

-  plug Plug.Parsers,
-    parsers: [:urlencoded, :multipart, :json],
-    pass: ["*/*"],
-    json_decoder: Phoenix.json_library()

end

defmodule WebhookSignatureWeb.Router do
  # CONDENSED FOR DEMONSTRATION

  pipeline :browser do
    plug :accepts, ["html"]
    plug :fetch_session
    plug :fetch_flash
    plug :protect_from_forgery
    plug :put_secure_browser_headers

+    plug Plug.Parsers,
+      parsers: [:urlencoded, :multipart, :json],
+      pass: ["*/*"],
+      json_decoder: Phoenix.json_library()
  end

end

Our next question is where do we this verification check? In our example app, we will keep the controller code focused on the behavior of processing the payload and put the behaviors for signature verification inside some plugs as part of the router’s pipeline for this specific endpoint.

The first plug will read the contents of the Plug.Conn body into a new assigns value :raw_body.

defmodule WebhookSignatureWeb.Plugs.RawBodyPassthrough do
  @moduledoc """
  This plug will read the body for `POST` and PUT` request and store it into a
  new assigns key `:raw_body`.

  This plug is used on certain routes in preference to the default Phoenix
  behaviors that would automatically decode the params and request body into
  native elixir values for a controller. It is a required choice since the body
  of a `Plug.Conn` can only be read from once.
  """

  import Plug.Conn
  alias Plug.Conn

  @spec init(Keyword.t()) :: Keyword.t()
  def init(options), do: options

  @spec call(Conn.t(), term()) :: Conn.t()
  def call(%Conn{method: method} = conn, opts) when method == "POST" or method == "PUT" do
    case Conn.read_body(conn, opts) do
      {:ok, body, _conn_details} ->
        Conn.assign(conn, :raw_body, body)

      {:more, _partial_body, _conn_details} ->
        conn
        |> send_resp(413, "PAYLOAD TOO LARGE")
        |> halt
    end
  end

  def call(conn, _opts), do: Conn.assign(conn, :cached_body, %{})
end

The second plug will pull out the signature from the HTTP request headers and then verify it matches our expectations.

defmodule WebhookSignatureWeb.Plugs.RequirePayloadSignatureMatch do
  @moduledoc """
  This plug will verify that the payload from a webhook request matches the
  accompanying header signature, based on a previously shared `webhook_secret`.

  When the payload is verified the connection continues as normal.

  When the payload is unverifiable the connection is halted with a 403 response.
  """

  import Plug.Conn
  alias Plug.Conn
  alias WebhookSignature.PayloadValidator

  @spec init(Keyword.t()) :: Keyword.t()
  def init(options), do: options

  @spec call(Conn.t(), term()) :: Conn.t()
  def call(%Conn{method: method} = conn, _opts) when method == "POST" or method == "PUT" do
    case PayloadValidator.is_authentic_payload?(conn, conn.assigns.raw_body) do
      true ->
        conn

      false ->
        conn
        |> put_resp_content_type("application/json")
        |> send_resp(403, "{\"error\":\"PAYLOAD SIGNATURE FAILED\"}")
        |> halt
    end
  end

  def call(conn, _opts), do: Conn.assign(conn, :cached_body, %{})
end

Finally we’ll bring it all together, defining an :api pipeline and using that pipeline for our GitHubWebhookController route.

defmodule WebhookSignatureWeb.Router do
  # CONDENSED FOR DEMONSTRATION

  pipeline :api do
    plug :accepts, ["json"]
    plug WebhookSignatureWeb.Plugs.RawBodyPassthrough, length: 4_000_000

    # It is important that this comes after
    # `WebhookSignatureWeb.Plugs.RawBodyPassthrough` as it relies
    # on the `:raw_body` being inside the `conn.assigns`.
    plug WebhookSignatureWeb.Plugs.RequirePayloadSignatureMatch
  end

  scope "/github", WebhookSignatureWeb do
    pipe_through :api

    post "/webhook", GitHubWebhookController, :webhook
  end
end

If the signature match is successful the controller will be allowed to do its processing of the payload values.

If the signature match is not successful we return a 403 response since “The server understood the request but refuses to authorize it.”

Show Me The Code

There is an example project with the behaviors expressed in this post on GitHub:

https://github.com/phoenix-by-example/webhook_signature

Prioritizing Customer Feedback

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 13:22:33 -0500

During a recent mastermind meeting a member asked the group, “how do you handle customer feedback?”

Like everything, it’s complex. I’m going to box my thoughts with the assumption we are talking about single-person bootstrapped businesses. If you are part of a larger team or working on a personal-education / open-source project, things will differ drastically.

During the early phases of a product development cycle customer feedback is usually the most valuable artifact of an alpha or beta release so, trying to take that feedback and transform it into actionable tasks to improve customer happiness is usually a good and high priority.

Eventually though, as your product matures and the next big goal of your business changes, you may find yourself getting lots of feedback or customer signals. At that point I think it’s important to be mindful of how you are spending your time. It can be very easy to fall into a cycle of reacting to things, feeling busy but not actually moving the needle of your business in the way you need to be. At this point instantly reacting to that customer feedback is not the most important, next thing for you do.

As for feedback tracking, I’m generally more of the mindset that important feedback will come in via repetition so there is little value documenting each and every item of customer feedback. Maybe a loose notebook of quick thoughts and screenshots, but nothing too formal. Customer feedback is not a “vote”. You determine the goals and vision of your software.

Understanding the Tradeoffs with Elixir Typespecs and Dialyzer

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 08:51:42 -0500

In today’s post I want to start a conversation around the tradeoffs of using Typespecs and Dialyzer use in your Elixir code.

Elixir is a dynamic, not a statically-typed language – and just to preemptively avoid the programming wars that might ensue, the given type system of a language is not a “good” or “bad” attribute by itself, but it will none-the-less influences the code we write.

For those who prefer or come to Elixir from a statically-typed language background you may be interested in learning more about Elixir Typespecs, described in the documentation as follows:

Elixir comes with a notation for declaring types and specifications. Elixir is a dynamically typed language, and as such, type specifications are never used by the compiler to optimize or modify code. Still, using type specifications is useful because:

they provide documentation (for example, tools such as ExDoc show type specifications in the documentation)

they’re used by tools such as Dialyzer , that can analyze code with typespec to find type inconsistencies and possible bugs

While I have done some limited work with typespecs in my side projects, in my current client project the decree has been made we will define typespecs for all functions, both public and private, and we have dialyzer checks built into the CI to report any reported issues.

On the face of this requirement I do not have a problem, it is very well meaning towards building a stable codebase. Who can disagree with such a goal? The realties however of seeing it through day-to-day are more complex. First, let’s talk about how dialyzer errors can sometimes be hard to debug.

One recent error I got back from dialyzer was something like this:

:0:unknown_type
Unknown type: Widget.t/0.

There was no function name, nor file name, nor line number to help me understand where this error was coming from. I was on my own. Luckily I knew the dialyzer check was clean before my I started my branch so I could at least look at my git diff for some ideas. This was not fun.

Another time I had a whole list of dialyzer errors reported back to me. Now if I was dealing with traditional complier errors I would work from the top of the list down, since sometimes when those first complier issues are resolved the later issues will disappear. Sadly when it comes to dialyzer errors that first error need not be what actually needs to get fixed. Many times you need to fix issues from the middle of the list first and knowing what to fix from that list is a learned art with its own dedicated learning curve.

Obtuse errors are bad enough but the second big issue for me is time. On a bigger project like ours it can sometime takes 10+ minutes to do a full dialyzer check the project. That long feedback loop can really slow down your day.

So where do we find the balance?

When it comes to Elixir code, my priorities of practices to enable a stable code base are as follows:

First, write tests. Validate your code behaviors and assumptions. Check the happy paths and check the sad paths. Do this for every project you ever write.
Second, use credo. Credo can analyze your project for Elixir style and consistency. Credo is extremely fast with helpful error messages that teach you not only how to fix something but why it should be fixed. Use this on any project that you work on for more than a few days.
Finally, use typespecs and dialyzer, but only for your public functions, and with a heavy leaning towards your own contexts and not the Phoenix-based modules that will be called based on dynamic behaviors like routes calling controllers. Use dialyzer for customer facing apps or anything open source.

Of course every project has unique needs and tradeoffs, but this is where I land in the general case.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on typespecs and dialyzer.

A Look Back: Week Ending December 27th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 17:41:34 -0500

Once again I missed my weekly updates so today notes include all items since the last check-in, December 13th. Additionally, I’ve been taking it easy during vacation so this list is lighter than usual.

Guildflow

Got some meaningful work done on group messaging, though still in-progress.
Spent a good while brainstorming goals for 2021. Will share when they are more concrete.

Phoenix by Example

Ran two weeks of daily videos / tweets before going on vacation. Really proud of this effort.
Planning to resume content on January 4th.
Made a new Twitter avatar/icon.

Work

Working with client on plans for 2021, their launch goals and my contract, which atm ends in late February.

Personal

Updated the server that runs this site and posted my Terraform on Linode Notes
Saw the first snow of the year in Philly.
Started a pretty normal playthrough of Pokemon Soulsilver. Got my first 7 gym badges over break.
Watched Fiddler on the Roof.

Terraform on Linode Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 05:54:53 -0500

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Over vacation I worked through a small project to use Terraform on Linode to provision a new webserver for my personal website. The following is a collection of notes and resources from the experience.

Project Goals / Areas of Improvement:

Since the addition of the guildflow.com static website, anyone who was attempting to load a HTTPS version of mikezornek.com would be met with a security warning as the browser was attempting to load the SSL cert for guildflow.com when serving up mikezornek.com.
The lack of SSL to mikezornek.com has historically been intentional.
The Linode serving my static sites uses Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is going to be EOL on April 30, 2021 and so it’d be good to get one a new LTS version.
This is a good excuse to experiment with Terraform, which is something I’ve been learning in support of some possible Guildflow infrastructure updates.

Quick Review of the MikeZornek.com Infrastructure and Deployment

MikeZornek is a static site. I like static sites as they are cheaper to serve and easier to keep secure. I have used WordPress in the distant pass but I was lazy at keeping it updated and eventually it was hacked.
Hugo is used to help build the static site.
The git repo is public and hosted on GitHub.
I’ve setup CircleCI to detect changes on the repo’s master branch and deploy any changes.
The deploy is pretty basic but there are a few HTML/link checks.
Once generated, the static files are copied to my Linode using rsync.
The historic Linode was hand crafted and used Apache as it’s web server.

Learning Terraform Resources

Linode-specific tutorials
Learn the Linode regions or instance types through it’s API.
The Terraform Book
Linode Terraform provider docs.
Linode Community Questions: how to debug stack scripts
Certbot for Ubuntu / ngnix prefers snap now.
Managing multiple SSH keys.

My Terraform Script

provider "linode" {
  # API Token
  token = "abc123"
}

resource "linode_sshkey" "mikezornek_linode_ssh_key" {
  label = "mikezornek_linode_ssh_key"
  ssh_key = chomp(file("~/.ssh/id_rsa_linode_mikezornek.pub"))
}

resource "linode_stackscript" "setup_mikezornek_prod" {
  label = "setup_mikezornek_prod"
  description = "setups nginx and certbot for mikezornek"
  script = file("files/setup.sh")
  images = ["linode/ubuntu20.04"]
  is_public = false
}

resource "linode_instance" "mikezornek_prod" {
  image = "linode/ubuntu20.04"
  label = "mikezornek_prod"
  group = "mikezornek"
  region = "us-east"
  type = "g6-nanode-1"
  authorized_keys = [linode_sshkey.mikezornek_linode_ssh_key.ssh_key]
  # Leave the root password unset if want to keep it random
  root_pass = "abc123"
  backups_enabled = true
  stackscript_id = linode_stackscript.setup_mikezornek_prod.id
}

output "server_ip" {
  value = linode_instance.mikezornek_prod.ip_address
}

The output is useful if you want to ssh into your new linode instance right away with:

$ ssh root@(terraform output server_ip)

My setup bash script

#!/bin/bash

# strict mode
set -xeo pipefail

exec > >(tee -i /var/log/stackscript.log)

FQDN=mikezornek.com

echo Setting hostname to ${FQDN}
hostnamectl set-hostname ${FQDN}

echo Running apt-get update and upgrade
apt update && apt upgrade -y

echo Installing nginx
apt install -y nginx

echo Prep snap
snap install core; snap refresh core

echo Install certbot
snap install --classic certbot

# echo Setup certbot for nginx for the domain ${FQDN}
# we will do this manually after setup since the
# domain should be pointing at this machine at the time of setup
# certbot --nginx --agree-tos -m zorn@zornlabs.com --verbose -d mikezornek.com

echo Starting nginx
sudo service nginx start

echo ALL DONE!

Observe the log file on your new server with:

$ tail -f /var/log/stackscript.log

A Look Back: Week Ending December 13th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 15:48:20 -0500

Once again I missed my weekly updates so today notes include all items since the last check-in, November 22nd.

Guildflow

Finished the marketing campaign on Ethical Ads: Privacy-focused advertising for developers and while I didn’t get the business results I was looking for I have nothing bad to say about the network. They were incredibly helpful. I may write up something more detailed soon™. Let me know if you have any specific questions.
Made some progress with my goal to better automate the deployment of Guildflow by getting more familiar with Terraform. Worked through a few tutorials and have started reading the The Terraform Book.

Phoenix by Example

Launched the second example project: GetShorty, an open source link shortener.
Got more serious about the Twitter account and even made a new YouTube channel.
Posted daily content Monday through Friday. When possible I embedded the videos right in Twitter but it was hard to keep them under two minutes so had to link to YouTube for the rest, which is the conical repository for now.
Hope to keep the momentum in the coming weeks.

Work

Lots of REDACTED client work in Elixir / Phoenix.
- Without getting too deep, we are currently drafting some larger work and refactoring plans. Feels good to be shaping work ahead of execution. It’s a very large system with a lot of business stakeholders and third party integrations; much more complex than the historic iOS projects I’ve worked on.
Finished reading of Real-Time Phoenix.
Continued reading Domain-Driven Design.
Finished reading Practical Pair Programming
- Related, did a lot of pairing at work which is something I find beneficial, though very exhausting. Like exercise I feel like I need to keep pushing to get better at so it’s not as draining.
Attended Philly Elixir.
Attended Philly CocoaHeads.
Attended BarCamp Philly.
Setup a mesh of two new Eero 6 Pro wireless routers to replace the previous Apple Airport in the apartment. May have to update my Comcast internet to 1000MB down as a way to avoid the upcoming data cap and this would help me get the most of said additional bandwidth. This mesh should also help with some wifi connection issues I’ve seen in my bedroom. Finally, I am also using the service trial to block ads at the router level; will see how it works out.

Personal

Watched The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. It was good, but not a must see recommendation.
Started playing Dragon Quest Builders 2.

A Look Back: Week Ending November 22nd

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 19:50:10 -0500

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

I missed last week’s update so consider this one a twofer.

Guildflow

Wrote up pitch to define Messaging behaviors and started coding out some things.
Met with mastermind group. Reviewed recent marketing efforts. Between client work and the US holidays Guildflow is going to be pretty quite through the end of the year.

Work

Lots of REDACTED client work in Elixir / Phoenix.
More reading of Real-Time Phoenix.
Started reading Domain-Driven Design. I started reading this one years ago, but never finished it. It’s come up again as we are trying to work out some code growth issues. This talk (Building beautiful systems with Phoenix contexts… by Andrew Hao) also came up and was interesting.
Attended the Philly CocoaHead Side Project Saturday meeting. Talked about lots of stuff.

Personal

Car inspection and oil change.
Added new Follow page to this website.
Did some looking for a new apartment.
Jumped by into my re-watch of Firefly.

A Look Back: Week Ending November 8th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:18:28 -0500

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Updated the site with new Add to Calendar feature.
Updated the SSL certs for the app and supporting website.
Met with mastermind group.

Work

Lots of REDACTED client work in Elixir / Phoenix.
More reading of Real-Time Phoenix.
Ran the last Android Book Club meeting of the year.
Got a new 16-inch MacBook Pro, as my old Late-2016 model was having battery concerns.
Experienced a Goat-to-Meeting.

Personal

Cleaned out my car and installed some new wiper blades.

A Look Back: Week Ending November 1st

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 18:17:25 -0500

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Launched multi-episode sponsorship of the Release Notes podcast.
Updated marketing site with gallery presentation of screenshots.
Did some development work towards group broadcast messaging.
Took a research meeting with a meetup organizer.
Did a demo for the Philly GDG (Google Developer Group).

Work

Lots of REDACTED client work in Elixir / Phoenix.
Finished reading Shape Up which is a project process from the folks at Basecamp.
Started reading Real-Time Phoenix.
For the Android Book Club I read chapter 29: Browsing the Web and WebView, 30: Custom Views and Touch Events, and 31: Property Animation – the last chapters.
Chatted with Kotaro about side project progress and goals.

Personal

The beaver races in Majora’s Mask 3DS broke me.
Got my ticket for BarCamp Philly 13!

A Look Back: Week Ending October 25th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 19:12:02 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Worked on some limited podcast marketing experiments.
Started work on website update that would offer the screenshots in a gallery UI.
Took a meeting with a community manager of a technology company and learned a ton about the needs of a person who helps lots of meetups promote that tech.
Finished reading Get Together.

Work

Started a new full time client project, where I get to help out with a large Elixir / Phoenix project.
During the onboarding for said client project, got to learn about asdf a tool to manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool. I have mixed feeling about it vs a Docker setup but trying to give it a fair shake.
For the Android Book Club I read chapter 27 WorkManager and chapter 28 Broadcast Intents.
Started reading Shape Up which is a project process from the folks at Basecamp.
Caught up with my two mastermind groups.
Promoted my first Phoenix by Example stuff on Twitter.

Personal

I voted!
More progress on my Majora’s Mask 3DS playthrough.

Introducing Phoenix by Example

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 18:23:47 -0400

Teaching has always been a big part of my self identity. Be it teaching at university, Big Nerd Ranch workshops or even my work with local tech meetups.

With my increasing enjoyment of Elixir and Phoenix I’ve been anxious to find a teaching outlet using these technologies. Additionally I want to find a unique spin on whatever I come up with, since there are already lots of great resources for learning Elixir and Phoenix and I don’t want steal anyone’s thunder.

My first result towards this effort is a “hello world” style example app and tutorial called greeter:

Greeter is a “hello world” example app to help introduce the core concepts of the Phoenix Framework written in Elixir.

This tutorial assumes no previous Elixir experience. In fact the first section will help you install and setup Elixir and Phoenix.

By the end of this example, you’ll have created a Phoenix app that can display a custom greeting message with a formatted name.

I’ve published the example repo under the Phoenix by Example organization name. I’ve also nabbed a web domain phoenixbyexample.com and a twitter account @PhoenixExamples.

I’m still not sure how this will work out over time but my plan is to record a few videos to accompany the example project. I would also like to work out some shorter tweet videos with some tips and tricks content.

The next project I’m thinking about would be a link shortener. I suspect I will not do a step-by-step tutorial for that one, but instead lean on code snippets pointing out the big ideas and then more videos.

The only really “bad news” is that I have a new Elixir Phoenix client project starting up so progress on these examples will be a little slower than I expected when I started pulling it together.

Feedback and project ideas very welcome. Let me know what you think.

A Look Back: Week Ending October 18th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 10:21:06 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Got my pull request that adds Postmark broadcast email support to the Elixir swoosh library was merged in! More info.
Worked on a per-event Add to Calendar feature that lets you download an .ics file or create a new event in Google Calendar via a customize link. This was a feature request of a beta user so happy to see user needs starting to dictate feature development!
Started my official campaign with EthicalAds, which is a privacy-focused advertising network for developers from the folks at Read the Docs. I ended up tweaking the ad copy to hopefully improve the click through rate. I’ll share result in a few weeks.
Did a demo of Guildflow for IndyHall Show and Tell.
Improved the loading time of the new home page by optimizing lots of images.

Work

For the Android Book Club I read chapters: 24 HTTP and Background Tasks, 25 Loopers, Handlers, and HandlerThread, and 26 SearchView and SharedPreferences. I normally code these in too but did not do it this week as I had some other higher priorities.
Met with Kotaro to review progress on his iPad drawing app and share my own progress with Guildflow.
Finalized details for a new client project. Will be helping a team using Elixir and Phoenix for a large website relaunch.
Finished up my hello world greeter example Phoenix project and tutorial. Need to promote it this week.
Did a Remote User Testing Session for a customer. They loved it.

Personal

Finished my play through of Final Fantasy 4j (rom hack version).
SOCKPOCOLYPSE
Started a playthrough of Majora’s Mask on 3DS. Was Majora’s Mask 3D a Bad Remake?

Finding Volunteers for Your Meetup Group

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 10:00:27 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

One of the biggest milestones of any meetup or community is when the group evolves beyond: “Mike’s group” to “our group”. (Substitute your own name for mine. 😀)

To achieve this, group responsibilities need to be spread out, and for that you need volunteers. Some organizers will experience friction getting people to volunteer their time for the group but in my own experience part of this friction is lack of specific details.

The easiest way to find volunteers for your meetup group is to ask for help. Be specific and define meaningful, approachable tasks that are easy for group regulars to take on. Find small tasks, with low commitment levels to help spur momentum.

Take for example, my own Philly Elixir group, which is a small local group. Recently, I found myself with a meeting agenda where I’d be doing the majority of the talks and demos. Not wanting to hear my own voice all night I tapped the shoulder of a meeting regular and asked if they could take on the industry news section of the agenda, highlighting some of the recent improvements to Elixir in version 1.11. It was a small task that helped take some of the pressure off my shoulders and ultimately strengthen the group health by having more people involved.

Beyond talks and event presentations there are lots of small tasks you can define and use to help draw out volunteerism within you group. Some examples:

Marketing outreach to other groups.
Social media posting.
Write post-meeting notes.
Picking up event food.
Help setup the room or AV needs.
Group photographer.
Website maintainer.

What are some other example of volunteerism can you think of? Let me know for a future post update.

Using Postmark's new Broadcast Email Stream via Elixir and Swoosh

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 13:51:26 -0400

In advance of adding some new broadcast email features to Guildflow I’ve built some additions to the Swoosh Elixir email library that allow one to use the new broadcast message stream feature of Postmark. Brief video tour and links below. Let me know if you have any questions.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

A Look Back: Week Ending October 11th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:53:50 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Launched the big marketing landing page update with lots of new screenshots to tempt people to join the beta and upgrade their own meetups.
Worked on a fork of swoosh (an Elixir email library). Specifically my fork updates the Postmark adaptor so I can batch and send broadcast email with a custom message stream. Hope to post an official pull request and demo video soon™. Eventually Guildflow will use this adaptor to help group admins send broadcast messages (with email notifications) to the memberships at large.
Started some experiments with EthicalAds, which is a privacy-focused advertising network for developers from the folks at Read the Docs. The admin team there is very helpful and I hope this works out.

Work

For the Android Book Club I read and coded chapters: 21 (Styles and Theme), 22 (XML Drawables), 23 (More About Intents and Tasks).
Met with Kotaro to review progress on his iPad drawing app and share my own progress with Guildflow.
Cleaned up a lot of loose end todos and digital trash.
Started work on some Elixir tutorials. Will share more when they are ready.
Took delivery of a new Intel NUC which for now is running Pop_os!.

Personal

Continued my play through of Final Fantasy 4j (rom hack version). Deep into the final dungeon. Probably only one more gaming session left.
Played a mix of Mario 64 Switch, Hades and Red Dead 2.
Hit a wall trying to get my AirPods fixed.

Airpods Pro Repair: How hard is it to ship an empty box?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 13:02:23 -0400

The Apple AirPods Pro earbuds I ordered in February are broken. The left pod has this really bad vibration that just never seems to never go away. It’s particularly noticeable during my walks. I had some connection issues before and re-pairing the device with the phone fixed it back then, but this new problem will not go away.

All I wanted to do was ask Apple to mail me a shipping box so I could drop them in, and have them fixed or replaced. What followed was an hour long customer support session that continues to erode my enjoyment of Apple products.

According to my support rep Apple requires a hold on the credit card to do the repair via shipping. The exact process is not 100% clear to me. It sounds like:

Apple puts on a hold on my credit card for $90.
Apple mails me a box (or provides a shipping label printout).
I mail the broken AirPod (left ear only).
Apple notices FedEx accepted my shipment and ships me a replacement left ear. (Mixed information.)
- Who knows what size ear plug they mail back?
Apple receives my shipment, inspects the hardware and releases the hold.

Frankly I find the process ridiculous. I don’t trust Apple or any shipping company enough to say that this will goes smoothly, and if does fail I don’t know who I would yell at or how to get my additional $90.

How can mailing a empty box be so hard? Why can’t they just wait until they get my broken unit to send back a replacement?

While the in-person Apple Store is an option, I’m very hesitant to drive and hour to and then an hour back to do this in person during COVID. Just does not seem worth the health risk for me or my family.

If anyone sees this and wants to add some sanity to the process, the case ID is: 101205809925.

PS: Other “fun” observations from the chat log below:

The “find serial” article is exclusively for iOS 14 (and I am still on iOS 13) so it was not very helpful.
Love that auto posting reminder that I have not typed for 30 seconds.
This session took more than an hour.

Casual Updates (Video 7m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 10:42:58 -0400

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

A short video where I catch you all up on my various project: Guildflow, Android Book Club, consulting work search, ideas in my head.

Providing New Member Onboarding for Online Meetups During COVID

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 11:41:34 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Even in the before times, being a new person at a meetup event was potentially an extremely overwhelming experience. Now that most group events and socializing are happening online it is even more important to make sure you as a group organizer have a plan for how to onboard new members and make them feel welcome.

Create and plan an onboarding experience for new members.

Each group will have its own unique needs but a common onboarding experience might include:

Schedule a one-on-one “virtual tour” by someone on the leadership team. While there are plenty of operational things to review during this meeting (how to join the chat rooms, rsvp for events, group expectations, culture and norms) I would encourage you to focus more on listening than talking during this meeting. Find out how the person learned about your group and what their short and long term goals are. Try to connect their goals to group activities. Be friendly, curious, and empathetic.

Connect the new member with a buddy or group sponsor. While this could be the same person who did the “virtual tour” it would be more optimal to connect the new member with a buddy or sponsor that best matches their goals. Maybe they are looking to get a new job, who among the current members can help them work on a resume or practice an interview? Maybe they want to get better at testing, who among the current members can help with that?

Schedule followup check-ins with the new member. Every so often, perhaps after the first 6 weeks and then maybe every 6 months, schedule a check-in and see how things are going. Have they attended any group events? How did these go? Are they socializing in the chat rooms? Try to find a way to get them involved. If they have not participated or stopped participating try to find out why. Make sure it’s clear you have their confidence, this is not a guilt trip and you are seeking honest feedback.

Make new members and guests feel welcome at events.

Walking into a video call as a new face, when the other members already know each other can be very intimidating. Here are a few things you can do as an event host to help make people feel more welcome.

Some people may feel more at ease observing events from a distance in the beginning, with their video and microphone off. If the event structure allows for this, then that behavior should acknowledged and accepted.

For those who do decide to be on video or microphone, make sure there is room in the agenda for personal introductions. Have a few ice breaker questions or ask people to share a recent win related to the topic of the event.

Create spaces for more happenstance connections.

Sometimes people benefit from a little nudge towards social interactions. When building out your group try to build spaces and opportunities for more chance encounters.

If you are on Slack, consider the donut meeting integration addon. “Donut introduces people who don’t know each other well on teams of all sizes via direct messages, and encourages them to meet in person or virtually for a variety of programs.”

Successful onboarding takes time but is worth the effort.

Your first step will be to draft an onboarding plan and share it with your group. Once everyone agrees, build out and automate your plan. Be sure to share these responsibilities with the other members and the leadership. The process will benefit greatly by being executed through a diverse collection of the membership.

If done well, proper onboarding will help new members feel connected faster and be more successful within your group.

If the onboarding fails, you’ll have an opportunity to learn how your group could improve to meet the needs of prospective members.

A Look Back: Week Ending September 27th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 19:32:06 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Finally finished the new page and editable navigation feature.
Deployed version 0.11, which includes the above features and some minor fixes.
Updated the Changelog on the marketing site.
Posted a pair of short feature demos. One on How to Create a New Group and the other How to Add Members via Membership Applications.
Posted a new blog post: Goal-oriented Side Event Ideas for Technical Meetups.
Started work on a bigger marketing site update. Not sure when it will launch, but I want to feature those feature demos above.

Work

For the Android Book Club I read chapter 18 (Accessibility). I have not yet coded this weeks chapters (16, 17 and 18) but hope to do so on Monday before the meeting.
I did however get deep into some Jetpack Compose tutorials and experiments.
Attended the Philly CocoaHeads Side Project Saturday event.
Did a two hour pairing session using Elixir for a prospective subcontractor role.
Did a pair of mastermind related meetings.
Met with Kotaro to review progress on his iPad drawing app and share my own progress with Guildflow.
Attended an IndyHall show and tell which included member onboarding improvements and voting info.
Hosted the rescheduled September meeting of Philly Elixir and talked a lot about LiveView use in Guildflow.

Personal

Continued my play through of Final Fantasy 4j (rom hack version). About to go to the moon for those who know that game.
Had to request a return of Mario 3D All Stars from Amazon (it never showed) and instead ordered a copy from Target.
Had a social coffee with a friend. Trying to set these up with people I’d normally run into downtown but have not seen in months due to lock down.

Goal-oriented Side Event Ideas for Technical Meetups

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 14:17:26 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

I’m a firm believer that going forward, successful technical meetup groups need to evolve past the once-a-month event style to more of an ongoing community presence, with smaller goal-oriented events happening more often. I believe it is through these events the social connections that ultimately lead to a successful community are solidified.

All of the following event ideas are built around:

Providing goal-based activities that will draw a crowd and encourage ad hoc socializing.
Offer more flexible or focused time commitments, with much of the event, when possible, happening async with high value face-to-face time limited for kickoffs and conclusion presentations.
Have low costs for organizing and hosting. No complicated software. No leaning on a single person to prepare a day long workshop.

Book Clubs

Book Clubs are great way to bring together goal minded people who want to become better at something. It’s a fairly well understood idea and so the big decisions are usually around what book to read and how to meet and discuss.

I recommend picking a few book options and letting a group vote. Generally speaking you’ll probably get more involvement with more introductory-level books.

You’ll want to meet once a week to keep that social pressure on people to do their readings and homework. Consider a first meeting for social introductions and then work out a regular meeting time from there. One hour is usually good enough.

When it comes to the meeting itself try to have different members volunteer to “drive” the meeting. My own book clubs tend to scan over the chapters from that week and kick off discussions/questions.

Code Jams

This is something I know of more formally from the Game Jam concept but it can just as easily apply to general programming.

Over the course of a single weekend or week you pick a theme and/or a specific SDK. People then work on a demo, game or hack with that theme and SDK in mind. At the end of the event people present their work, with awards being handed out – the more cheesy the trophies the more sought after they are within a community.

Some personal code jam style events I have fond memories of include MacHack, Iron Coder and Global Game Jam.

Architecture Craft Sessions

While Code Jams are more on the lighthearted side, these Architecture Craft Sessions are more about education through practice and peer review.

Pick a simple app idea (eg: tasks list, weather app, whatever). Everyone does a rough prototype or architecture outline for how they would build it out: the objects and types they would define, how they would interact, and why they are making these decisions. Something akin to an architecture decision record (ADR).

The event style would be advance notice of the app idea, then before the meeting each person would work on their prototype or outline in their own time. At the meeting they would come together to present what they’ve come up with. People can ask questions and offer feedback on the designs. It can take time to do a full code walk through so you might have to break up a larger group into smaller breakout groups to do this in a set amount of time.

The big idea is people get more experience with how to break down problems and design architectures that are SOLID and testable.

Pair Programming on Code Katas

I define the Architecture Craft Sessions above as more solo work and while some people prefer to build in isolation, there is also a lot to be said for pairing two people together. In particular pairing a junior person with someone more senior, even for an hour can lead to a ton of great observations for how people work.

To help define a path for this pairing we look to Code Katas.

A kata, or code kata, is defined as an exercise in programming which helps hone your skills through practice and repetition. Kata exercises vary from general to more complex algorithms and real life situations for you to try using your preferred programming language.

Remember that code katas are not quizzes or puzzles. You should not only try to ‘solve’ it, but find a very good solution, following best practices of the programming language you are using.

For more examples on Code Kata problems you can use check out:

https://github.com/gamontal/awesome-katas

Open Source Project Day

Rather than kick off a major new group open source project (which has a much larger time and energy commitment), pick a day and an existing open source project for your platform.

Kick off the day with an introduction to the open source project, it’s code and some good tasks for new contributors (simple bugs, documentations, more tests). Let people work async or in pairs, with shared group spaces for discussion or questions. At the end of the day people can demo the PRs they’ve built.

For people new to open source, match up mentors to teach how open source and pull requests work.

Any other ideas?

Those are few ideas from my own experiences. I’d love to hear if you have any more for a future update to this post.

Thanks, and best of luck with your technical meetup.

A Look Back: Week Ending September 20th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 11:36:54 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Posted a draft of the terms of service for feedback.
Made and shared progress on the editable navigation but ran into some UI / Framework issues that are going to cause me to rethink how I design the UI.
Posted a video story about why I built Guildflow.
Updated the website to use Fathom Analytics, which does not use cookies, and thus helps me avoid obnoxious cookie agreement banners.
Posted a 2 minute demo of how Group Export works.

Work

Did an adhoc unit testing Q&A with fellow CocoaHead Kenny. Probably going to do some more at the upcoming Side Project Saturday.
Did my main Android Book Club homework, chapters 14 and 15 coded, and through chapter 17 read.
Did some extra Android Book Club homework, learning about Kotlin Coroutines.
Watch the Apple Event. Not a watch user myself and not in the market for a new iPad, but some interesting things.
Did a first call with a client prospect.
Submitted a client proposal document that was mostly done last week.
Met with Kotaro and reviewed each other’s project progress.

Personal

Saw my doctor for my annual physical. Making good progress on my weight loss, still have a lot to go.
Continued my play through of Final Fantasy 4j (rom hack version). Discovered the developer’s room after 29 years!
My Mario 3D All Stars hasn’t shipped yet but hope to play it soon.
Got a new keyboard! Old one had a broken left arrow key.
Got some new sweatpants! My morning walks were getting very cold these past few weeks.

A Look Back: Week Ending September 13th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 16:20:17 -0400

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week.

Guildflow

Pushed out a new build (see the CHANGELOG). Mostly bug fixes and security updates. Also re-added the ability to grant the admin role to other members. One big feature was close but not ready. Maybe next week.
Made some good progress on a new feature allowing custom pages and an editable navigation. Didn’t make this week’s deployment but looking good locally.
Started documenting the new focus on technical meetups.

Work

Recorded a Remote User Testing Session for an iOS to Mac remote app. Client was very happy with how it turned out.
Took two meetings to discuss new work opportunities, one iOS and the other Elixir.
Worked on a project proposal for the iOS lead.
Attended two separate Mastermind meetings.
Had to postpone my Elixir meetup due to a family emergency. Have rescheduled it for 2 weeks later.
Attended Philly CocoaHeads social hour.
Got in a second writing session for the meetup book. Need to do better about making time for this.
Prepared September Tax Estimate payments. Will mail out tomorrow.
Attended weekly Android Book Club and reviewed ConstraintLayout and the Room database library.
Started a monthly donation to the Mozilla Foundation.

Personal

Helped a friend with some project research.
Ended up sadly canceling my YMCA membership since I could never get a lap swim reservation under the new rules. Hope to revisit this when it is too cold to walk in the morning.
Attended IndyHall Town Hall.
Attended IndyHall Show and Tell.

Consulting Availability: Elixir, iOS and User Experience

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:04:34 -0400

I would like to once again remind people I am looking for work. You can see more details about my freelance and consulting offerings on my For Hire page but to summarize, the following types of projects are usually a good match for me:

Elixir / Phoenix web development
Native iOS development
iOS code review / code auditing
iOS mentoring / teaching (individuals or teams)
Help setting up continuous integration / deployment systems
Static website development with Hugo

I do still prefer freelance contracts but am starting to soften on considerations of full time remote offers as well.

I appreciate you all keeping an eye out for me. Almost all the work I get is through referrals so your help means a lot.

Don't Waste My Time (Video 2m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 13:17:43 -0400

I love the enthusiasm and energy of this video.

A few thoughts on cutting to the chase in videos for an online audience.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

Google Ad Numbers Don't Add Up

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 10:46:27 -0400

I tried to run some Google Ads but can’t reconcile the numbers. I’ve been duped!

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Video Notes

I work as a consultant.
- I do a lot of iOS development, some Elixir, some teaching, etc.
Trying out a new productized service angle:
- Developer-focused User Reviews for $99
- Spent about a day working on a landing page and demo video.
Marketing so far: Release-day social post and the blog header.
Figured I’d try some Google Ads.
Initial take on the Google Ad UI: Much better for a person starting out.
Ran my ads for about a week.
The numbers don’t ad up in my eyes.
- I paid Google for 222 clicks but can only reconcile 77 of them.
- I asked for delivery to United States only and they did not seem to honor that.
Turned off the ad campaign for now.

A Screencast about Building Screencasts: How I Built the Guildflow 70-second Introduction Video

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 12:12:44 -0400

I’m a big fan of screencasts. I generalize the term screencast here as any video where you see primarily a computer or user interface, with a voice and optional video feed of a person doing some kind of demonstration.

You’ve seen lots of screencasts here on the blog and I’ve even done a few professionally as a consultant, using real voice-over performers.

In today’s video I’ll recount how I built the recent 70-second introduction video for Guildflow with specific demos and discussions of the tools I use including:

Bear to write a screenplay in Markdown.
Keynote to build a presentation of screenshots.
Screenflow to record my desktop and edit the capture.
QuickTime and Acorn to build thumbnails.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Thanks for watching!

Video: Using Fixtures and Test Assets in Swift Unit Tests (9m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 10:42:44 -0400

In today’s video I’ll demonstrate how you can use the concept of fixtures in your Swift unit tests to quickly build business objects and validate scenarios.

I’ll also show how you can add assets to a test target and then access them in code using Bundle(for: SomeTypeInTheTestBundle.self).

The code you see in the video is part of a demo project on GitHub:

https://github.com/zorn/VersionedFilesDemo

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Thanks for watching!

Migrating JSON File Schema Changes in Swift

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:26:25 -0400

As part of my side project bartering, I’ve build a simple open source Xcode project that demonstrate how you could save your Swift app’s storage as a simple JSON file and then migrate the file schema changes over time. This is particularly useful when you have users generating data and documents in beta builds while the app internals are changing a lot.

The code is in written in Swift and is utilizing a Xcode 12-specific SwiftUI project, though the core ideas are general purpose.

https://github.com/zorn/VersionedFilesDemo

Video walk through:

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Evolve or Die: It's Time to Rethink Meetup Groups

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 14:10:57 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Discussion topics from the video:

My ongoing research into meetup groups. Still looking for more people to interview too!
Technical meetups are on the decline. Why?
- Part of it is the avalanche of technical information online.
- Part of it is people being able to more easily find and connect with same minded people online.
- COVID has only expedited this decline.

If your meetup group is limited to meeting once a month, at a building, to eat pizza and talk about a technology, I fear your group may not be around in 5 more years.

There are still a ton of great benefits from a running a meetup community.
How should meetups evolve?
- More events, smaller events.
- Some in-person, some online.
- Not every member will attend every event.
- Social events: hack nights, side project saturday, show and tell.
- Goal-oriented events: book clubs, workshops, mentoring, masterminds, side project time bartering.
- Passive connections: Chatting and DM via Slack or Discord. Group Twitter account to promote member successes.
- Maybe do bigger events every 6-months? formal dinners, picnics, mixers?
- Need to spend more time onboarding new members when the group lives online.

The Google Trend chart for “meetup”.

Thanks for watching and best of luck with your group.

Video: Bartering With Other Developers on Side Projects (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:24:03 -0400

A short video talking about bartering your time with other developers to help add perspective to each other’s side projects.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Challenging My Assumptions Through User Interviews

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 09:34:11 -0400

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

A short talk about how recent user interviews have challenged some of my assumptions about how Guildflow accounts should work.

Android Book Club Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:22:55 -0400

A few updates on our Android Book Club. (Original announcement post.)

Things are going well.
Will be migrating from Programming Kotlin to Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition) in the coming weeks.
We have room for a few more people, if you want to join us!

Android Book Club Website / Membership Application:

link-removed

Apple's Gatekeeper Developer ID Program Needs a Transparency Report

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 09 Aug 2020 17:08:38 -0400

On Tuesday, August 4th, Apple published a global kill signal to the certificate system that allows Charlie Monroe’s applications to run on macOS. These apps are part of the Gatekeeper program that lets a registered Apple developer distribute their software outside the Mac App Store. Without a Gatekeeper signature, macOS makes it somewhat difficult for a user to launch a non-signed app and is not considered a sustainable way to distribute commercial software.

However, if the kill signal has been sent out by Apple, the signed apps can never be launched again. Instead users are presented with an alert like the following:

There is a good collection of reactions to this event on Michael Tsai’s Blog.

Apple did restore Charlie’s certificates. You can read more about it from his own blog: A Day Without Business

Catching up on the matter myself, I can’t help but think not only should Apple turn off its automated execution of such bans but they should also move to a more nuclear-launch type system where at least two people need to turn their key. This is an incredibly destructive event for the third-party vendor like Charlie. It’s unprofessional of Apple to have this connected to an automated system.

Additionally, if Gatekeeper is truly about protecting the users, I don’t see why we can’t have a transparency report listing the identifiers that have been disabled and why. A lot of people keep saying Apple does not abuse this power, but there is no proof to this; it is a closed system. We only know of Charlie’s situation because he posted it on Twitter. Considering it wasn’t too long ago when the App Store Guidelines down right threatened you about going public I don’t know if we can give Apple the benefit of the doubt here.

I know many look to Gatekeeper as a saving grace, a last ray of hope that the Mac will somehow remain the open computer platform they originally fell in love with. They hope Gatekeeper will help avoid an App Store-only future. I hope so too.

Adding a formal, descriptive transparency report would restore a lot of faith in the Gatekeeper system after this week’s events.

Actionable Ideas How Meetups Can Evolve When Forced Online Only

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 09:40:09 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Today I recorded some thoughts regarding the challenges meetups are facing as they’ve been forced online and ideas how those challenges can be met.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

A quick summery:

Challenge: Group participation is down.
- Idea: Embrace the smaller numbers; do things that you could not do with a larger crowd.
- Idea: Set expectations about required interactions; let people be passive when they want to.
- Idea: Do more, smaller, focused events instead of one big meeting a month.
- Idea: Create spaces for socializing outside events.
- Idea: Help connect people outside your group structure. Make it easy for members to discover each other on social or their personal website.
Challenge: Hard to attract and retain new members.
- Idea: Make sure events are structured to help new people get familiar with the community (introductions, one-on-one help, etc.).
- Idea: Create a chain of events structured around a goal, like a book club or group project.

In some ways, it’s a great time to start a meetup:

No more venue and food costs.
Can promote and bring in people from outside your city.
People are out of work and looking to improve themselves, give them a path to do so.

If you want to chat about your own group, I’d love to hear how things are going. See this post for more detail:

Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer

Thanks again, and good luck with your group!

Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:01:35 -0400

It’s an open secret that I’ve been working on some new software to help meetups, specifically with an early focus towards technical meetups.

While the foundation is coming together, there are still a ton of open questions and I’m trying to schedule some more customer research phone calls with other meetup organizers.

To be clear, I’m not selling anything, just asking a handful of questions helping me:

understand why they run their group
find out how it’s going historically and during COVID
learn what tools are working well and what tools are not

The call lasts about 30 minutes.

Schedule a 30 minute video chat!

If you are part of a technical meetup, please do me a favor and make an introduction to your group leadership. It would be extremely helpful to me. Here is a draft email you can start with:

Hi NAME.

I saw this blog post asking for help making introductions to
other technical meetup organizers. I follow the guy on
social media. He is doing research for some meetup related
software and I wanted to help him out with an introduction.
He assures me it's not a sales call, just a few questions
about our group. If you want to reach out or learn more info
check out:

http://mikezornek.com/posts/2020/8/introduction/

Schedule a video chat (30m):

https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat

Thanks.

Is WebKit Sabotaging the Future of the Open Web?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 17:10:19 -0400

This didn’t get much press at the time, but during WWDC the WebKit team listed a bunch of web technologies they will apparently not be implementing in the name of privacy.

Fingerprinting involves measuring the uniqueness of static device configuration (e.g. built-in hardware), dynamic device or browser configuration (e.g. user settings or installed peripherals), and user browsing data (e.g. checking which sites the user is logged in to, so-called login fingerprinting).

WebKit’s first line of defense against fingerprinting is to not implement web features which increase fingerprintability and offer no safe way to protect the user. Here are some examples of features we have decided to not implement in part due to fingerprinting concerns:

Web Bluetooth

Web MIDI API

Magnetometer API

Web NFC API

Device Memory API

Network Information API

Battery Status API

Ambient Light Sensor

HDCP Policy Check extension for EME

Proximity Sensor

WebHID

Serial API

Web USB

Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation)

User Idle Detection

Just to be clear, I am a privacy advocate. I use DuckDuckGo. I use Firefox. I block ads. I encrypt my DNS lookups. I’m building a privacy-focused tool for meetups. And with all that said, this worries me.

Right now, many mobile developers would argue that for a rich user experience you need to build a native app and I would agree, at least I would as of today.

But if I’m reading the tea leaves right, and history is a model to follow, what requires “native device” code today will be possible in the web browser of the future. WebAssembly shows great early promise in providing rich cross-platform code opportunities. If you are a 1Password user like me, you are probably already enjoying some WebAssembly today.

However, to build rich user experiences on a mobile device using WebAssembly or inside a normal web app requires access to the sensors and systems of that device. With this collective blocking of access (along with the lack of side loading options on iOS and the ban of non-WebKit rendering in App Store apps) Apple has positioned their own native and financial interests over the favor of an open web.

Why can’t the WebKit developer energy be spent on building these great new APIs and connect them with user empowering privacy tools. A great example of what I mean is website location tracking. If a website wants access you your location (for say driving directions) you can grant it access. I don’t understand why a similar approach could not be applied for things like Web Bluetooth access or Proximity sensor access.

I applaud many of the privacy decisions the WebKit team has made over the past couple of years, but this one feels wrong.

When I was learning to program in the late 90s we had another big platform vendor who sabotaged the web browser market for their own interests and I do not want a repeat.

Consulting Availability for iOS and Web Development

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 11:02:56 -0400

While I know many are struggling with productivity during lock down (and I’ve certain had some bad days) on the whole I have been able to use the time fairly well. I’ve been putting major hours into Guildflow (Elixir / Phoenix web development), catching up with WWDC things (SwiftUI mostly) as well as kicking off my own Android Book Club. And while these things are great, they are not how I make a living.

Native iOS development
iOS code review / code auditing
iOS mentoring / teaching (individuals or teams)
Elixir / Phoenix web development
Help setting up continuous integration / deployment systems
Static website development with Hugo

I do still prefer freelance contracts but am starting to soften on considerations of full time remote offers as well. I appreciate you all keeping an eye out for me. Almost all the work I get is through referrals so it means a lot.

Kotlin Tools for Android Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:32:28 -0400

A quick tour of some of the tools you’ll want to use to help learn Kotlin.

Links

Finding Speakers to Present at Your Event

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 09:00:00 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Helping to organize a meetup group can be extremely rewarding. I’ve been running various groups for over 10 years now and I only regret not getting starting sooner. Still, there is not much to love in the minutia of monthly tasks to keep everything going.

One of the most anxious tasks you’ll face is, how do you find speakers for the next event? This can be particularly stressful since it’s something that you can’t accomplish completely by yourself and getting commitment on something from another person is always a little bit harder. Here are a few ideas to help you keep your stress low and your speaker confirmations flowing.

Reach out to Group Regulars

The first source of speakers is usually the group itself. If you are keeping connected with your members as recommended in How to Brainstorm Presentation Topics for Your Events, you should be aware of what people are working on and if it would be a good match for a presentation. Do not wait for people to come to you, you need to reach out to them, and repetitively. Do it so much so as to be comical about it.

Explain the Benefits

Public speaking and selling one’s ideas is a priceless skill that comes into play for almost all careers. Speaking at a local group is great practice for people who are new to speaking or who want to try out a potential conference talk in front of real people.

Host Multiple Talks Formats

One idea that can help attract even the more shy potential speaker is to lower the barrier to entry. In addition to full 30-60 minute talks why not accept shorter 5-10 minute lightning talks or even more simple project show and tells. Having these smaller presentations can help ease the stress of presenting for someone new.

Offer to Help Them

I highly recommend speakers practice their talk before presenting to a group. It can really help to also record this practice. As they go back and watch the recording they’ll usually find lots things that can be improved. If the recording is made in advance enough you as the group organizer can also offer to watch it and provide feedback.

Recruit Speakers Who Have Presented at Recent Events or Conferences

If someone has done a presentation once, it’s usually much easier to present it a second time. Take advantage of this and browse other meetups or conferences in your area or even outside of your area (since many meetups are virtual these days) and ask recent presenters if they might be interested in doing a presentation for your group.

In addition to using social channels to help spread the word about the speaker openings it’s also a great subtext for reminding people of the group existence (so they may attend) as well as your efforts into helping to run the group.

Reach Out Months in Advance

It’s much easier to get someone to agree to do a talk in three months away than three weeks away. Once they are signed up, most people benefit from the friendly social guilt of doing the talk. We all need a little push sometimes.

When They Say Yes…

If someone shows interest in speaking, have them fill out a form to get the conversation started. I’ve included some recommended questions you might want to use as a starting point.

Sample Speaker Submission Form Questions

Full Name
Email
Phone (for emergencies)
Presentation Title
Presentation Summary
A Short Personal Bio
Expected Length
At what upcoming group event would you like to present?
Have you ever given this talk before?
Has this talk (or others) ever been published online? Please provide URLs.

Being the Backup, Doing a Talk Yourself

No doubt, particularly in the beginning of a groups existence, you might have to do a few talks yourself. You want to limit this and get others involved ASAP but I would much rather favor you doing a talk than to cancel a monthly event. Consistency is extremely important to the heartbeat of a group.

An Android Book Club for iOS Developers

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:03:23 -0400

I’m starting a new book club that will teach Android development using Kotlin for current iOS developers. Details below.

This is a book club dedicated to learning Kotlin and Android application development. Specifically, I am hoping to attract current iOS developers who are looking to expand their knowledge and use their current experiences with Swift and iOS to help shape the conversations at the weekly meetings. That said, previous Swift and iOS experience is not required, but just expect some comparisons to come up.

About the Host

My name is Mike Zornek and I am from from Philadelphia, PA. I am the developer behind the Guildflow website that hosts this book club and am selfishly using this book club in part to help test it out.

I am a long time Mac and iOS developer. I am interested in learning Kotlin and Android so I can help build a companion app for Guildflow. I am also interested in being more familiar with Kotlin and Android as I often work on consulting projects that develop both iOS and Android versions.

The Books

This book club will happen in two part. The first part will be about 6-8 weeks and focus on the Kotlin language itself and use the book Programming Kotlin by Venkat Subramaniam along with coding challenges from the Exercism Kotlin track. The second part of the book club will be closer to 12 weeks long and focus on Android application development and will use the book Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition). Note the 4th edition, as it was updated to use Kotlin.

Details

The meetings will happen every Monday at 8pm-9pm (Eastern Time) and happen through a video chat using Whereby.

We’ll also provide a Slack chat room for in-between meeting discussions to be shared later.

To join the group use the Membership Application:

link-removed

Once you are accepted into the group you can RSVP for events as well as view the membership list and other members-only details.

Questions / Feedback?

Send email to: mike@mikezornek.com.

Book Club Website: link-removed

How to Brainstorm Presentation Topics for Your Events

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

In my experience running meetup groups for over a decade, the social aspect or hallway conversations can sometimes be the most beneficial aspects of an event yet to hold an event without a speaker or topic can usually lead to an empty RSVP list.

Keeping on top of what your members are interested in hearing more about is an important group organizer task and in this post I’ll share some ways in which you can stay informed.

Keep Connected With Your Group Regulars

Every month send out a few personal emails to a few of your group regulars. Ask them how things are going, if they are enjoying the group, what they have worked on recently and what they are interested in learning. Record their comments in an ongoing notes file or spreadsheet.

Aside: While I recommend keeping a monthly checklist of things to do (including things like the above) I would also advise against automating these emails. Make each one personal and you’re far more likely to get a conversation going.

You can also send our a web survey every 6-9 months. This is a little more impersonal but can still generate some helpful information.

Don’t Be Afraid to Mix In Beginner Topics

Many of the technical groups I’ve run in the past are almost 50% hobbyists or people just starting out. Don’t be afraid to revisit the basics from time to time to help these beginners out. I would also argue many of the experienced people can usually learn something new from these beginner presentations and discussions.

Run a Group Roundtable Discussion

Every industry has their regular issues, from pricing to customer support. Consider hosting a roundtable discussion about a specific topic. Be ready to seed the conversation with open questions. You could also show a recent industry conference video to perk people’s curiosity.

Spy on Other Groups

Spy is a little sharp of a term, but you get the idea. Stay in touch with your fellow organizers in other cities. Ask them what kind of presentations they’ve recently run and how they were received. If they are not too far you might even be able to woo a prospective speaker to visit your own town.

Share your notes publicly with your group using a collaborative tool like Trello or even a simple Google Sheets. Letting them see what’s planned and what’s open can help spur involvement.

On the Topic of Mac OS X Sheets (Video 4m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 21:12:24 -0400

A short little WWDC reaction video that talks about Mac OS X and sheets.

☠️ RIP Aqua

Clubhouse is Now Guildflow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 11:38:06 -0400

Just a quick note, that I have a new name for my meetup project. Say hello to Guildflow!

If you’ve been following this project you may have seen some previous names like Campfire and Clubhouse and while I still like those names to run a modern software project requires a lot of unique name checkboxes, registrations and trademarks and those names did not work.

Why Guildflow? Guild is a nod to the group and community focus of the product and flow is a reference to the zen like toolkit for meetup organizers I envision will continue to materialize as the feature set matures.

The official blog post has links to the various new social account. Give them a follow if you can.

Apple's EU Antitrust Investigation is Long Overdue

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:58:01 -0400

European Commission:

The European Commission has opened formal antitrust investigations to assess whether Apple’s rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store violate EU competition rules. The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.

The investigations concern the application of these rules to all apps, which compete with Apple’s own apps and services in the European Economic Area (EEA). The investigations follow-up on separate complaints by Spotify and by an e-book/audiobook distributor on the impact of the App Store rules on competition in music streaming and e-books/audiobooks.

Apple’s response:

It’s disappointing the European Commission is advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don’t want to play by the same rules as everyone else… We don’t think that’s right — we want to maintain a level playing field where anyone with determination and a great idea can succeed.

I agree with Manton Reece’s assessment that this might be the most insulting statement from Apple I’ve ever seen.

More interesting links can be found at Michael Tsai’s Blog.

As if to make an example of someone, like a gangster asking for ‘protection money’, Apple today also rejected an update to the new HEY email app and have threatened to kick it out of the store entirely if it doesn’t start uses the Apple/iOS payment system.

HEY is doing exactly what Basecamp is doing, is doing exactly what Netflix is doing. Offering a subscription service that must be purchased on the web, then a client in the App Store to access that.

We don’t use the App Store for our Mac app for this reason. But we have no choice but to use the App Store for iOS. It’s the monopoly store in apple mobile town.

For the few who closely follow my own career, it has been clear my love of Apple and Mac OS X has long been on the decline. However, like a marriage with kids, it’s hard to just pick up and leave. It’s best to make some plans and plot your escape.

Today’s events only strengthen my resolve to escape.

Book Notes: Dreaming in Code

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:41:17 -0400

Dreaming in Code is a book by Scott Rosenberg. On the book website he write:

Why is software so hard?

Hard to make well. Hard to deliver on time. Hard to use.

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project – Mitch Kapor’s Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling.

I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories.

I finished the book last night and found it very enjoyable. Its not a must read by any means but for those programmers who like to learn about process and project management, from a storyteller perspective you might enjoy. The best chapters I think are those dedicated to the general history and art of programming.

Towards the end of the book I started using the Kindle highligher (which is a first for me). Here are some excerpts:

“When you learn about computer science,” Lanier said in a 2003 interview, “you learn about the file as if it were an element of nature, like a photon. That’s a dangerous mentality. Even if you really can’t do anything about it, and you really can’t practically write software without files right now, it’s still important not to let your brain be bamboozled. You have to remember what’s a human invention and what isn’t.”

~

He discovered that we ask more work of students who want to become writers and poets than of those who aim to become software developers: They must study with mentors, they must present their work for regular criticism by peers in workshops, and they’re expected to labor over multiple revisions of the same work. “I think we need to be ashamed of this,” Gabriel says. “What we put forward as computer education is a farce.”

~

“Designers should all take some time and learn programming,” John Anderson declared one day over lunch. “Then they won’t keep proposing such really difficult things.” “But then they wouldn’t come up with great ideas,” Lisa Dusseault replied.

Video: How I Use OmniFocus to Track Tasks (12m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 09:59:22 -0400

OmniFocus is a task manager that was built around the concepts of Getting Things Done, a popular action management system by David Allen.

I’ve been a fan of Getting Things Done and a casual user of OmniFocus for years, mostly focusing on long term projects. For weekly stuff I used to do a manual list in Bear but a few weeks ago I took the time to see if I could make OmniFocus work for my weekly list, and so far it’s working out great. This video is a review of what’s changed.

PS: One things I forgot to mention in the video is that for my side project I use Pivotal Tracker for actionable technical tasks and keep the marketing and general business tasks in OmniFocus. I am also experimenting with a public project roadmap but that is more experimental.

How Much Does It Cost to Build an iOS App?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 17 May 2020 16:26:38 -0400

As I take prospective client calls, particularly for those clients looking to build a new iOS app from scratch, the big question ultimately is raised:

How much does it cost to build an iOS app?

I think Ken Yarmosh’s summary hits the nail on the head:

… most quality apps cost between $100,000 to $1,000,000. Some apps will be less and some more. If you’re looking for an app built with great design, superior development, and clever marketing though, it will be somewhere in that range.

I highly encourage you to read that article to learn more. You should also check out The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries which is a great, short and visual book on the topic (not specifically of costs, but of quality project development practices).

Video: Accountability via Masterminds (4m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:56:51 -0400

It can be hard to keep the momentum with a long term side project. I’ve found accountability help recently through a mastermind group.

MastermindJam | https://mastermindjam.com/

Clubhouse Roadmap Tour

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 May 2020 10:02:11 -0400

I’m using a public Trello board to keep track of my Clubhouse project’s roadmap. Check it out. Feedback on the roadmap style and content itself very welcome.

Buffer | https://open.buffer.com
Trello | https://trello.com
Amy Hoy - Just Fucking Ship | https://stackingthebricks.com/just-fucking-ship/

Personal Lockdown Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 09:57:51 -0400

Thought it was time for another personal update. The last one was about a month ago.

First, me and my family are safe, healthy and relatively sane.

My client project did end on April 1st and I am officially looking for new projects.

I try to be grateful for what I do have and acknowledge there are many people who have it much rougher than I do right now. I can comfortably live off my savings for a little while while many others were paycheck to paycheck and are now scrambling for basic supplies.

It was as good as time as any to revisit my budget. I’ve blogged about this before but the basic idea is to break down personal and business expenses by monthly and yearly costs. Also started categorizing things into hard costs (rent, health insurance) which are difficult to cut and soft cost (Hulu, Netflix) which can be cut. Then I created a burn down chart based on savings, expected invoice payments, and (hopefully) some expected government assistance.

Normally as a gig worker I can not collect unemployment compensation but as part of the CARES act, these benefits have been expanded. The benefit is through the states, which for me is Pennsylvania, and the program is called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. This program is not being ran through the normal state unemployment system and instead PA decided to stand up a new website. The website opened around April 17th (I believe?). Looking at my records I was able to file on April 19th and I recall there being massive technical issues on day one.

In fact there are technical issues as recently as yesterday. Every time I log in, I have to pick a new password. The password rules are bogus by the way, no more that 18 characters and very specific about what is and is not a special character.

Worse though is the process. You need to fill out a ton of forms and upload a lot of tax and financial documents to verify your income so they can calculate your benefit, but there seems to be no trust. Best I can tell someone is going to have to manually go through these applications and check all the PDFs uploaded.

In short, no money has been distributed. It’s been 10 days since I filed and I have not heard anything. The online “certification” form that we are are suppose to fill out weekly is not there; it shows an alert prompt saying it will “be ready to accept claims in a few weeks.” They may say benefits are retroactive but I know states have finite monies and with tax income going to shit and state expenses going through the roof, something is going to break down.

Again, I’m thankful for my privilege. I have savings to live off for a while. But let’s not forget, there are people out there starving and this program right now is bringing no relief.

In related money things, I was once told by a TD Bank associate that I should consider their business loan to help with breaks in consulting income. Well when the wind was turning I applied (March 23rd). To be clear, this would be a commercial, high interest loan, not a PPP loan (this was before PPP was even announced). I’d want to avoid dipping into this loan, but I figured it would be a helpful safety net to have. A few days later I got a phone call saying I would be approved for a $20,000 business loan and to expect a call from a local rep in the future. The second call never came but am email did (April 15th). It was a broadcast email seemingly sent to anyone asking for a recent loan.

Thank you for applying to TD Bank, N.A … Given this challenging environment, are you able to represent that your business is currently open and operating? If you respond “No” to this Question, then your loan will not be scheduled for closing at this time.

Well fuck.

Speaking of PPP loans, my take is that they are not a good fit for me. If I were to take a PPP loan through my business and pay myself, I would not be considered unemployed. Technically the law says they are forgiven if used for payroll, but I have no trust that forgiveness will be honored. I feel much easier looking towards the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (even with its shit implementation) since those monies are never considered a business loan. I know some say “apply for everything and give the money back if you don’t need it” but I had to make a decision weeks ago about how I wanted to handle this and at the time, everything I saw said PPP was only if you were paying yourself through a payroll system. Maybe that’s false or the restrictions have been relaxed but thats what I understood from reading the reports out there.

Other personal notes: I was sad to have missed MicroConf this month. It would have been my first time in attendance. I did appreciate the ticket refund they provided; legally they did not have to do that.

I’m also trying to make the most of things and enjoy some regular video chats with IndyHall and Philly CocoaHead folks. I was even able to hold our monthly Elixir meeting online a few weeks back. It was not the same, but it was good to see the regulars.

Day to day, I try to take walks with my sister to get some fresh air and exercise. I’m still doing well with my diet overall, though there have been a few more cheat days than I’d like.

For work, I’ve been putting productive time into Clubhouse while also helping host a few office hours to help others.

At night, I’m playing through Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Animal Crossing and MLB: The Show.

That’s it for now. Stay safe and do good works. 👋

Video Book Review: Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:58:03 -0400

https://www.ruinedby.design

My Favorite TextExpander Shortcut Snippets

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 14:52:36 -0400

I’ve been a long time TextExpander user. You don’t know of TextExpander? Shame!

TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation.

My common shortcut snippets include:

Email: z@zl into zorn@zornlabs.com and m@m.com for mike@mikezornek.com.
Date: ddate
Time: ttime – very handy while testing UI as a piece of dynamic content, yet descriptive and ordered.
Common Google Terms: -ep into Elixir Phoenix.
Phone Numbers: cphone and hphone into the real phone numbers.
Support Email Replies – when I did a lot of that thing.
URL to my meeting calendar: -meeting into https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat
Common Xcode Comments: -mark into:

// MARK: - Outlets
// MARK: - Properties
// MARK: - Life Cycle
// MARK: - Methods
// MARK: - Private

SwiftLint Disables:

// swiftlint:disable rule_name
[CLIPBOARD]
// swiftlint:enable rule_name

I added a new one today, for the common need to convert a title-like string into a filename-friendly one.

"%pasteboard".toLowerCase().replace(/ /g, "-");

Thus expanding -urlp into “Nurturing Your Community During Lock Down” (the clipboard) into nurturing-your-community-during-lock-down.

I’m on the hunt for more too. Let me know if you have any recommendations!

Video: Nurturing Your Community During Lock Down (7m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 14:50:16 -0400

My Project: Club House Hosting

Video: How I Decided to Build Clubhouse (6m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 11:32:08 -0400

Links:

My Project: Club House Hosting

Video: Quick Thoughts on User Testing (5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:50:17 -0400

Clubhouse Public Alpha

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:50:28 -0400

Today, after more than a year of side project progress, I finally am starting to share some of my progress regarding Clubhouse Hosting through the release of the first Public Alpha.

My first commit (over a year ago):

In my full time consulting work I push for “release small and fast” but personal responsibilities, this project’s scale, and the new technologies I’ve had to learn through the process have slowed me down tremendously. I still have a ton of spit and polish to do, and even bigger ideas once the basics are in place but I’m excited to hit this milestone, even if it is only a Public Alpha.

The platform is still in-development but available now as a Public Alpha. This means many features are incomplete and probably broken. Users should expect things to change, sometimes in breaking ways, and know the site still lacks production-acceptable backup and export systems.

The real focus of this release is getting feedback. I’m asking friends, peers and anyone interested in the goals of the project to lend me their time for some online user testing. If you would like to donate your time, please consider scheduling some time on my office hours calendar.

From this point on I plan to do regular updates. You can follow along via the Clubhouse Hosting Micro.Blog or twitter accounts as well as consider signing up to the mailing list from the front page.

Thanks for your support!

Baseball

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 14:32:59 -0400

It is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds, prison yards, in back alleys and farmers’ fields; by small boys and old men, raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed; the only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years; while they conquered a continent, warred with each other and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and with the meaning of freedom.

At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating, and has excluded as many as it has included. A profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American Odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers, and it reflects a host of age-old American tensions; between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.

It is a haunted game in which every player is measured with the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.

With the season on hold I’ve been getting by watching the documentary, Baseball by Ken Burns and enjoying it a ton. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime but available elsewhere if you are interested.

April Book Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:54:46 -0400

I don’t do many book updates on this blog. In fact I don’t read nearly as much as I would like. I’m a slow reader and in general am more visual, watching videos, movies and games.

I do maintain a reading list profile on Goodreads and welcome friend invites there.

Anyways, I recently finished and started some books that have really impressed me so I wanted to share.

First, I finally finished Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden. It was really good. I related a lot to Ed’s younger experiences with computers and learned a ton about his, um, event. The problems with mass surveillance and the desecration of personal privacy are as important today than ever and this book has fortified me for the fights ahead.

Next I read / browsed through iOS Unit Testing by Example by Jon Reid. I’m a fairly experienced tester so the introduction side of this book was skimmed over pretty quickly but I still picked up a ton of ideas and tricks to keep in mind for future projects. I’m thrilled a resource like this exists. Well technically the book is still in beta, but there is lots there to check out even today.

I’m currently reading three books.

To help me automate and containerize my Elixir project deployments I’m reading Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches by Elton Stoneman. This too is still in beta but all the chapters are currently available. I’m about half way through and have started to apply what I’m learning. I appreciate how the author tries not to assume too much about the reader’s background. DevOps is a deep field and I personal benefit from having, even the basics, explained to me.

Next up is Swift for Good: Volume One by Paul Hudson (and others). I bought this pretty much blind a few months back, mostly to support the cause, but now that I’m reading it I consider it a must read for all iOS developers. I’m about half way through but am picking up MAJOR ideas and am excited to try them out. It reminds me of the The Best Software Writing book published in 2005, which was a repackaging of some of the best blog authors / software developers of the day. If you haven’t checked out Swift for Good yet and are currently doing iOS development, make it a priority.

The third and final book that I just started but have connected with instantly is Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro. I’ve seen Mike speak many times and once again he does not disappoint. I’m a firm believer in coders being responsible for what they build. It all starts with ethics and this book hopefully is helping many search their souls for how they can do good in this world.

If you use Goodreads, consider making a new friend request or posting your own book update. I love discovering what people books are enjoying, even if it takes me a while to finally read them.

Video: An Introduction to Elixir

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 08:46:05 -0400

This talk was originally presented at the Philly Elixir Group April meeting.

Covers the basics of the language, what it can be used for and why it’s particularly helpful for certain situations. A great talk for people new to or curious about Elixir.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Slides PDF / SpeakerDeck

Links:

Putting Zoom in Quarantine

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 16:03:22 -0400

I’ve already blogged about my interest in finding a Zoom alternative for my own groups and meetings but sadly it’s not a platform I can completely shun since I have personal connections that still use it heavily.

First a small update on my alternatives…

I had high hopes for Jitsi. Being open source was a huge plus for me, but sadly when we tried it out at my Elixir meeting, we ran into multiple technical problems.

At said meeting we eventually jumped to Whereby. Whereby feels like it’s more suited for small groups, and our group is small so we were able to use it without issue.

In addition to the technical success, the user experience of Whereby was also enjoyed by the attendees. It was fully featured and worked well in our personal web browser of choice. Today while doing some more research I was also happy to see Whereby’s privacy statement was written in plain English and seemed reasonable.

Moving forward, I think I’ll be leaning on Whereby when I have control.

For my Zoom-choosing communities, I first tried just using the browser version with my copy of Firefox, but that did not go over well. Zoom web wants Chrome and once again, I would prefer not to install Chrome for privacy reasons.

I then tried a Docker containerized version of Zoom but quickly discovered it expects a Linux host and does not work with Mac OS.

In lieu of Chrome I finally installed Iridium Browser, which is a open source project that takes the open source base of Chrome, Chromium, and removes all of the Google phone home and related features. Today I was able to use Iridium to participate in a Zoom call with moderate success. I still had to sign in to a Zoom account which is not very comforting, and the Zoom web UI is not a 1:1 match to its desktop cousin (one feature it lacks is gallery mode, which I like to use) – but it did work.

Despite some improvements, Zoom security issues continue to come out on regular basis. I hope in time I can drop it entirely, but for now I feel like limiting my interactions with a mostly isolated Iridium Browser will do.

If you are in control of a Zoom meeting, please consider researching you own replacement. Hopefully this info will help towards that end.

Swift UInt vs Int

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 15:23:36 -0400

I’m giving major consideration to utilizing Swift’s UInt type for function returns and calculated properties in the future.

Yes this does burden the user of my code or SDK to do the occasional type conversion, which is the only reason I’ve ever heard why the community uses Int even for variables that should not be negative, but I think the expressiveness outweighs the negative of more code.

I generally like to fall in line with the community when it comes to coding standards to help my code “fit in” but this issue has bothered me since day one of learning Swift. Would love to hear some feedback on this from experienced Swift developers.

Open Office Hours

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 10:25:12 -0400

Yesterday was my last day on contract and once again I have Consulting Availability and am available for hire.

With some time to kill I’m looking forward to catching up on some personal projects but today I wanted to share my Open Office Hours.

If you’d like a free, casual consultation about your project or code issues please schedule an online meeting. Slots are 1 hour in length and recommend topics would include:

iOS / Swift Questions
Phoenix / Ecto / Elixir Questions
Testing Help
Continuous Integration Setup
HTML / CSS
Static website development with Hugo
Public Speaking / Technical Presentations / Teaching

Make your appointment today!

Meetup Finds New Owners and I Welcome the Competition

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:11:15 -0400

For a long time I’ve felt Meetup’s service offerings were pretty mediocre and stale. In 2017 they were purchased by WeWork and things only got worse.

I’ve been a long time group organizer and feel very connected to the needs of the community, so much so that I’ve started working on a Meetup competitor called Club House Hosting.

Club House Hosting enables you to create a group website with modern event and membership tools for your social or peer group. Honoring the ethos of the IndieWeb, Club House Hosting lets you use your own domain, own your data and control your privacy.

Meetup, as of today, still does really share these goals but there is some positive news:

Today we’re announcing that Meetup has fully divested from WeWork and has been acquired by an investment group formed for the express purpose of acquiring Meetup. Our new partners believe in our mission, in our organizers, in the power of real human connections (in-person and online when necessary), and they’re investing in Meetup’s future success.

Even though I consider us competitors I’m thrilled Meetup is out of the shadow of WeWork. I hope the change infuses them with some productive energy.

As for Club House Hosting, things have been slow so far in 2020 but with more time available on the horizon I hope to launch a public alpha so people can start kicking tires soon™. Stay tuned.

Zoom / Google Hangout Alternatives

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:02:41 -0400

With the need to do more video conferences and meetings many are turning to Zoom and Google Hangouts. Technically I’ve always thought Google Hangouts was pretty mediocre and Zoom, while a better user experience has shown time and time again not to be trustworthy software.

One item of homework for myself is to investigate alternatives for my own meetup and other projects that better respect the privacy of users. So far some recommendations I’ve gotten from friends:

Jitsi - Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure videoconferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.
Whereby - Whereby is a flexible tool providing you with video meetings in the browser – no downloads & no logins for guests
Nextcloud Talk - Screensharing, online meetings & web conferencing without data leaks.

If you have anymore recommendations please let me know. I’ll share my notes when I’m done but wanted to get this out now so others can tests the waters as well.

Things Change Fast

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 10:54:14 -0400

It was only March 1st when I last did a rather normal personal update and man did things change fast for us all.

I think it would be bizarre to look back at my blog and not find any writings about the Coronavirus, so here we go. My recollection of personal events so far.

Shortly after my March 1st post I saw the news and was taking the threat more seriously. I canceled my trip to MicroConf (originally planned for April) and helped convince some family to cancel their own trips during St. Patrick’s weekend.

By March 8th I decided I was not going to work on site anymore with my consulting client. This had only been a one day a week thing but still it was not an easy decision since I was building iOS software to interface with Bluetooth devices and I didn’t have all the devices at my home so this put some strain on my teammates as they had to do more testing on my behalf. The client did not complain and in fact a week later they issued a work from home edict to their own staff.

I also made the call on March 8th to cancel the in-person Elixir Group monthly event. Since we are not a large group this was a bit easier but also kind of sad. I said this then, and will follow through with some kind of online option should the need be there in April (and it looks like it will).

From this point on I pretty much stayed at home outside of a few appointments to take my Mom to the doctor, pick up a new sleep apnea mask and get a prescription refilled. I canceled my strength training class and did not visit the gym. I did not attend a family birthday party (which they frustratingly did not cancel themselves).

Still shut-in, my family did try to make the best of St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th, which my Mom calls the “High Holy Day”. The three of us, Me and my Mom, who live together, and my Sister, who lives a few apartments away, did enjoy a few drinks and FaceTime’d a some other family members. We’ve continued to do some similar FaceTimes and a few movie nights (comedies only) to help keep us positive.

To be clear the three of us are a closed circle, we are not interacting with others. I’m more of an introvert and so the “social distancing” doesn’t bother me as much but I do feel for people like my Sister who are extroverts and need that group connection to feel at ease.

By this point many other business were closing down and it was clear things were going to get rough. I also got the word around this time that my client would not be extending my contract. I think they wanted to originally but were now, like many others, constrained by cash flow and expected loss in sales. This is unfortunate, but not really unexpected. I have posted my Consulting Availability but I suspect I’ll be out of work for a while again, living out of my savings.

One small positive I’ve enjoyed while being shut-in is a new TV. Since February I had been considering a new TV for gaming and once I played the FF7 Remake demo I pulled the trigger. I got a 55" LG OLED, C9 on March 4th, right before the lockdown. It’s really nice. I’ve been playing a few new games on the PS4 Pro: Red Dead Redemption 2, MLB The Show and Ni no Kuni, as well as a some Luigi’s Mansion 3 and now Animal Crossing on the Switch.

I’m not playing games all day or anything. I still am working for my client (at least until April 1st when my contract ends), but it’s a nice distraction at night after dinner.

I am keeping up with my diet and doing some walking. I go out about 4-5 times a week so far. It too is a good distraction and helps me get some fresh air.

I’d be lying if I didn’t share that I do have moments of depression and dread like I think we all do. I try to find a balance between watching the news and staying informed while not watching too much and feeling depressed.

If the statistics are anything to follow, if feels like the real event is about to happen, so to all who read this, stay safe and be careful. I will continue to post technical and geeky blog updates that could be considered non-relevant to the issues of the day. I do it for some semblance of normalcy in otherwise chaotic times and to keep my own self distracted. Please respect the seriousness of this situation and do your part. We are all in this together. ❤️

Consulting Availability

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 11:39:29 -0400

Just a quick post today to share that my current client project will end April 1st and I’ll have consulting availability opening up.

For more info you can check out my For Hire page but to summarize, the following types of projects are usually a good match for me:

Native iOS development
iOS code review / code auditing
iOS mentoring / teaching (individuals or teams)
Elixir / Phoenix development
Help setting up continuous integration / deployment systems
Static website development with Hugo

Thanks for keeping your ears to the ground and sharing my info when you think it might be a good match.

Video: Working With Time Zones in an Elixir Phoenix App

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:14:21 -0400

This talk was originally presented at the Philly Elixir Group February meeting.

“Today we are going to talk about time zones, specifically what they are, how Elixir handles them and then talk about some strategies you can apply when working with time zones in the context of an Elixir Phoenix app backed by an Ecto database.”

Download MP4.

Slides PDF / SpeakerDeck

Here are some of the reference links mentioned:

Renaissance Man

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 15:39:04 -0400

👨‍💻 Right now I’m on a client project that has me working on an iOS SDK codebase but still touching GoLang, C and Kotlin/Android as well. I’m doing the best I can but it is challenging jumping around, particularly into languages I don’t have a rich history with.

This experience does however back up my opinion that good programers are better off being proficient in many languages.

If you do find yourself with some extra time indoors over the next few weeks, consider giving yourself a distraction and try to learn something new. I recommend Exercism as a great starting point for many different languages. They even have mentors to help. I also like PragProg’s “Seven (Things) in Seven Weeks” series.

Good luck out there. Stay safe, stay sane. Make today count!

Spinning Plates

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 22:06:55 -0500

I don’t do a ton of writing here but I do like to post updates at least once a month. Sadly I missed February. 😢 Truth be told, things are just really busy right now.

First, I did land a new contracting gig which has me busy for many hours a week (hoping to fit in even more billable hours in the coming weeks). It’s iOS work, and specifically for an SDK. Part of my job is to evaluate architecture things and where I can I’ll try to carry over some wisdom to some future blog posts (like I did with my Networking talk).

Second, per my goals for year I did find a new general practitioner doctor, had a checkup with blood work and have done some of my related followups, including a sleep study. Turns out my sleep apnea was even worse than I feared. The good news is, I’ve been using my new APAP machine for a few days and it seems to help a lot, though I’m still getting used to the mask while I sleep. As for the blood work, suffice to say, I have room for improvement. I did rejoin my local YMCA and have been pretty good going twice a week so far. I’ve been mixing up swimming, basketball and cardio. I even started a strength training class. It’s a large new time commitment, but it has to be a priority.

As for general things, I was able to finish my taxes this past week and it feels good to be ahead of that deadline. I made out better with my estimated taxes than I had planned so I took the extra money and paid off my car, which feels great.

I’m also doing my well with my ‘Attend more social events outside the tech zone’ goal by hosting a bi-weekly poker game at IndyHall. It’s a low stakes cash game ($20 buy-in) but a fun distraction.

The big thing that has fallen through the cracks is Club House Hosting. I’ve only been able to dedicate limit hours to it, though did a have a nice coding session this past Saturday. I need to find time to get this project over the hump. It’s not far from a beta launch and I really want to get it there.

So those are my updates. Thanks for sticking around. Hope to have something more technical / helpful in the next few posts.

2019 Accomplishments and 2020 Goals

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:22:38 -0500

A friend recently went off on how he hates these kinds of blog posts but I can’t help myself from sharing. Yes it’s very egotistical, but you could say that about the majority of a personal blog. I also like posting since my blog posts have a way of lasting a lot longer than some random document on my computer and it is fun to read these things years after the fact. (eg: my 2018 post, my 2017 post)

With all that said, a look back and a look ahead…

2019 Recap

My previous goals:

Diversify and increase my income.
- Add more clients so less dependent on single large client.
- Add passive income through a new product/service.
- Shoot for a 10% income increase.

I did pretty well here. I expanded my client roster and made income from four unique clients and was even able to bill for Elixir work. I made a slight amount more than 2018 but this also included a month of no client work in December. If that month had some billable work I might have made my 10% goal. I did not add any passive income via new projects but I have been working hard on Club House Hosting and hope it will start paying clients in the Spring (beta clients even sooner).

Be better at shipping/executing.
- 2017 & 2018 was a lot of learning new tech, demo projects.
- 2019 needs to be about shipping real value.

Did not ship as much as I wanted to. Still keeping up with a pile of new tech to learn. 2020 should see a lot of open threads start to close and showcase via shipping projects.

Do a better job of tracking my time.
- 20-30 client hours/week
- 20-30 project hours/week
- 50 total “work” hours/week

I did a good job tracking, up till December. December is a wash according to my time records. There was no active client work and I did not track my personal projects (though meaning time was spent).

More so, the goal is less about tracking and more about making my hours more productive. Having tasks to fill those 20-40 minute blocks where I can’t start deep work but I should still find something to do.

Better code documentation.

I am very happy with my work on this. I was much better about both inline code documentation as well as for descriptive guides and such.

Utilize work byproducts as education / blog opportunities.

This is a big fat F. I think about it a lot but don’t have much to show for it.

Other 2019 Things of Note

I rebooted the Elixir Meetup Group in May and we’ve been having monthly meetings ever since. We have a small but active group chatting with each other on Slack and some even keeping up with a weekly book club. Really proud of group and hope to expand it in 2020.

I lost a long time (2+ year) client. The project I had been hired for was closing and the budget forced on them just didn’t have allocations for me. I was lucky enough to balance this with some new contract work with a new client but none-the-less, it hurts to loose that stable income.

With a lack of client work at the end of year I was able to rebuild this site. I like the way it’s come out and hopefully the more detailed For Hire and Projects sections will help me land some new projects.

It’s only a baby step but I’m doing much better with my soda intake. I used to drink soda constantly while working on the computer and now I no longer drink any at home. I will get a soda at a restaurant or on occasion when I’m out but more than not I’m drinking water instead.

2020 Goals

Take better care of myself
- New general practitioner doctor.
- More checkups.
- More exercise.
Launch Club House Hosting
- Setup some sample groups during an open beta.
- Do formal public release in Spring before MicroConf in April.
- Keep motivated and accountable via Mastermind groups.
Work on keeping consultancy work healthy
- More marketing of my skills to potentials clients.
- More industry writing.
- Start automated deposits into retirement accounts.
Attend more social events outside the tech zone
- Already started this by rebooting the IndyHall poker game.
- Want to find opportunities outside the bar scene.

Regardless if you post or share, it’s very much worth it to take stock and write down your goals. Good luck with them in the new year!

iOS and Web Consulting Availability

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 10:53:23 -0500

Happy New Year everyone. Hope you enjoyed your break.

Just a quick post today to share that I do have consulting availability and would love to start work on a new client project.

I recently updated my For Hire page but to summarize, the following types of projects are usually a good match for me:

Native iOS development
iOS code review / code auditing
iOS mentoring / teaching (individuals or teams)
Elixir / Phoenix development
Help setting up continuous integration / deployment systems
Static website development with Hugo

Thanks for keeping your ears to the ground and sharing my info when you think it might be a good match.

Gaming Update, December 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 16:44:31 -0500

With the holiday break going strong and my time for gaming increased, I figured I’d share what I’ve been playing lately.

World of Warcraft Classic

I’ve been playing regularly since its release and enjoying the retro feel for a few months now. I have a Level 55 Gnome Mage on Deviate Delight, an RP-PvP server. I also have a small collection of alts, all around the 16-18 level range. I’m taking things slow and enjoying the journey. I doubt I’ll join any scheduled raiding guilds but instead will focus on casual things.

Link’s Awaking

I got the remake alongside a Switch Lite. I am very fond of the original GameBoy version and this remake has been a fun experience. It’s a pit pricy for a Switch game, so unless you are hungry for the nostalgia, I’d recommend buying it used in a few months. The Switch Lite has lots of pros and cons. I’m going to keep mine BUT it’s not something I’d recommend for others. Can share more if people are interested in a future post.

Pokemon Sword

With hesitation and frustration I bought the new release and sadly it has not hooked me in. It just feels dull, very repetitive and stale. Game Freak’s laziness and greed bleed through the experience. I really hope this is a wake up call for them and the series. I’ll continue to give it some of my time but I would not be surprised if it end up in the archive before finishing it like Ultra Sun/Moon and Let’s Go before it.

Final Fantasy 1

There is an event called Final Fantasy Fiesta going on over on Twitch where two streamers are playing all the mainline Final Fantasy games back-to-back in a race of sorts. It has me nostalgic so I went to play the first game a few days ago. I first looked through my closet for options (found the GBA version and NES Classic version) but ended up using OpenEmu and a spare PS4 controller on my MacBook Pro to play the original NES release. I’m a few hours in and enjoying the grind, sometime re-watching Sherlock via Netflix on the side.

That’s pretty much it for now. I didn’t ask for any new games for Christmas as I already have a high backlog stack so I suspect this will be my focus through January.

Enjoy the holiday break and play some games!

Website Revamp

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 14:01:51 -0500

At the end of November I took a few days and revamped this site. Let me know if you spot any issues or typos. Thanks!

What’s New

I rebuilt, from scratch, the Hugo theme code the site uses, wanting to own the site in both design as well as content.

I added a small bit of color and branding to the main header navigation. I’m still big on simple page designs but also feel like returning to a blog post after being here before should have some sense of branding / nostalgia.

New section, For Hire. To date I’ve hosted a simple company site at zornlabs.com. It was never much but when considering the idea of building out a project portfolio there it just felt like I was spreading myself too thin across multiple sites. I think for now it’s just easier and more productive to focus on a single site to sell me and my services better.

New section, Projects. Wanting to sell my consulting services, it’s important to have a portfolio of some kind and the new Project section serves to do that. For now each project has a short description and accompany video file. I hope to expand it more in the future with some open source efforts.

Events section renamed Talks. Still not sure if this is the best name but it does describe the goal of the section, to help document and list the various event and conference talks I’ve done. The fact it additionally list conferences I’m attending is a little verbose, but does help color what I’m interested in and excited about.

The site is now open source, available on GitHub for all to check out.

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 2: A Tour of UI Sketches

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 13:42:04 -0500

The Project: Club House Hosting

Show off some of the early UI sketches and then talk a little about plans for the week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Khn0nas24

Available for Consulting: Web and Mobile, Elixir and iOS

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 13:16:52 -0400

A few planned consulting projects have been postponed and I now have some consulting availability headed into November/December. If you could use some help with an Elixir or iOS project, let’s chat.

I am very comfortable working remotely with on-site travel for big project milestones.

I am also up for some teaching / mentoring work for any junior developers out there. I love helping solo projects and teams improve process, introduce automation and other good practices.

Most of the work I get is from word of mouth so please consider sharing in your own social circles. Thanks!!

Full Time Spaceship Employees Only

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:22:29 -0400

Recent episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast have brought up Apple’s lack of quality developer documentation. The most recent discussion spawning after the release of a new website, No Overview Available, which serves as “a survey of Apple developer documentation.”

During the multiple discussions it has been suggested that this documentation issue is an easier problem for Apple fix than others since documentation can be produced in parallel, money can buy more writers and Apple has plenty of money.

This is mostly true, but a major factor that is not brought up is Apple’s reluctance to hire remote documentation writers.

I myself was approached for a documentation team job a few years back and the fact I did not want to move out to Cupertino was an immediate strike. It was a shame too since I was probably a prime candidate having both real world development experience as well as teaching experience about the platform.

No matter how well designed the new campus is, I feel like Apple’s reluctance to embrace some kind of remote work culture will be a thread of its inevitable decline. There is a fixed, limited pool of candidates who live or is willing to relocate to the Cupertino area. It gets even more difficult when you consider a technical writer will probably make less (Glassdoor listing) than a developer and yet the cost of living out there is crazy for both professions.

PS: Yes, I know of a few special cases that are allowed to work remotely but they are just that, very special cases.

Club House Hosting Dev Diary 1: Some Introductions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:08:21 -0400

The Project: Club House Hosting

Some basic introductions about me, about the project and about the timeline. See you next week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgi00EWZc0o

My New Project: Club House Hosting

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 11:30:26 -0400

Over the past few months I’ve been tinkering on a new project and it’s time to start to talking about it publicly.

From the Development Journal:

Club House Hosting is a new platform that will help group organizers launch dynamic websites for their group using their own domain. These sites will feature traditional publishing tools as well as tools dedicated to the unique needs of running a group, from things like event calendars with RSVP systems to member directories.

I’ve decided to keep most of this discussion on a separate blog since a big part of that content that will be posted is non-technical advice for group organizers and I don’t feel like that audience overlaps too well with my personal dissertations on the latest video games.

Aside: Can’t wait to play Link’s Awakening this weekend!

If you are a group organizer or know of one, please consider passing along the website, it’s RSS feed, it’s Twitter account, and so on.

I’d really love to hear from people who are running groups and what they would like to see from their tools.

Thanks for sharing.

If Flying, Print Out MacBook Battery Status

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 21:43:50 -0400

In recent weeks the FAA has put a flight ban on the MacBook Pro laptops with recalled batteries. NPR writes:

The Federal Aviation Administration has banned certain MacBook Pro laptops on flights following an announcement by Apple Inc. that some use batteries that pose a fire or safety risk.

The laptops were sold between September 2015 and February 2017 and can be identified by their product serial number, according to the company’s notice.

The Apple support site is here.

Since the model range is so wide and the laptops all look the same I don’t know what this going to mean for people flying with their laptop.

I recommend printing out the support page with your serial number coming up as clean in case you are red flagged going through security.

Happy flying.

First ElixirConf, and Then Azeroth

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:20:41 -0400

Happy Friday everyone. Hope you all had a good and productive week. I myself am feeling pretty good.

Went heads down this week and made some project progress for both clients and personal endeavors. Today, Friday, I’m working from home. First cleaning up a bit and then probably some more client work. Would like to close a few threads before attending ElixirConf next week.

I’m going for four days. First two days are workshops and then two days of conference talks. My workshops will be:

Build Performant, Real-Time UIs with Phoenix LiveView - LiveView is something I have experimented with but have yet to get going in my projects. I am excited to get past the simple demos into more complex use cases.
Build a Smart Camera with Nerves, Phoenix, and Absinthe - I have almost no hardware experience and this is more of an experimental thing for me. Lots to learn!

It’s going to be a fun week. Over the last year I’ve really started to get over the beginner hump of Elixir and am ready to sink my teeth into some of the deeper aspects (or aspects like Nerves and embedded software I’ve never touched).

Sadly while I’m away at ElixirConf I’m also going to miss the opening of WoW Classic. I’m really excited to see how Classic works out as I’m not a fan of current retail WoW but still enjoy the lore and atmosphere of Azeroth. It sounds like the early days are going to result in a fair amount of login queues so maybe my Elixir distractions will be for the best.

Pretty sure I’m going to level a Gnome Mage as my main. Server is Herod (PvP).

Regardless to all this, I am also looking forward to September and a no more trips for a little while. As much as I like to get out I also love being home and enjoying my routines. I also need to start getting more time into my side project and start it’s marketing / validation path to see if it’s a real product or not. More to come on that.

Enjoy the weekend and have some fun.

On Conferences

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:23:59 -0400

I wish I had time to help run a conference (again). I have a lot of opinions.

I’d love to run a small conference where the rule was, everyone had to present in some form (30m presentations or shorter show and tell style talks). This would obviously cap the event at a small number of attendees but I think it would level the field in an interesting way.

For a slightly larger conference, I’d institute a no laptops / no phones policy in the conference hall. If you want to go back to your hotel room and take a call that’s fine, just don’t bring it to the hall. The hall is for socializing with the other speakers and guests. I know this might annoy people who like to take notes on a laptop/iPad but pencil and paper should suffice this time.

It’s summer conference season and I’m getting a little burnt out of the standard full time STAGE –> AUDIENCE format. We are in an age of YouTube, blogs, Twitter, newsletters, FaceTime, iMessage – and we don’t need to wait for the yearly conference to express our fresh ideas, we are doing it all the time.

In my opinion, a conference’s main goal is about using presentations to spark the fire of discussion amongst the attendees. Sadly many of the conferences I find myself at don’t do this and instead the attendees spend 90% of there time sitting silently in a dark room, everyone looking forward, no communication, no talking.

Some basic tips for conference organizers:

Make sure to plan lots of socializing time in-between talks, like for every 1 hour of talks and then there should be 1 hour of socializing.
Consider limiting individual talks to 30 minutes and have a section for shorter lightning talks. The goal is to get as many ideas out there as possible. Different ideas will stick with different people. The more the better.
Use circular tables. Yes this requires more floor space but it keeps people facing each other during breaks and naturally let’s other people break in to a conversation.
Make people change their seat every so often. A forced lottery seems harsh but you could also use topical tables, like one table is a “spaces” table and another is a “tabs”.

Notable conference behaviors I’ve seen and enjoyed.

Release Notes Conference breaks people into teams for dinners around town at different style restaurants.
CocoaLove conference embraced its hosting city with morning walking tours and site seeing.
I like the concept of pre-conference workshops. I think it allows those who are new to a platform to get a lot of hands on time before experiencing talks that usually don’t cater to them.
I loved the feel of old school MacHack. It was a 24-hour, 3-day conference where the opening keynote was at midnight. We took over the hotel lobby and worked on our hacks for the contest / presentation at the end. In between coding, in side rooms, people gave talks of all shapes and sizes. There was a movie night where we bought out a full theater and watched as a group. It was a real community building event.

I’d love to hear others stories/thoughts. Email me: mike@mikezornek.com or post a blog post on your own site.

A Month with the 2019 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K Display

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 20:00:00 -0400

Previously on, The Great Monitor Search Continues. After identifying a need to get a new external display for my MacBook Pro, I first paused to see what WWDC might bring. After Apple released a monitor that I could not afford I instead went with the LG 49-inch UltraWide monitor which, while productive and cool in many ways, did not jive with Mac OS X day-to-day. It was returned. Now having my second choice monitor, the 2019 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K Display, how is it going?

Jumping from a 49-inch ultra wide to a 23.7-inch monitor at first felt like many steps backwards. Once again I’m forced to perch my MacBook Pro on a stand to be my secondary monitor. While there are many new advances and benefits of the 23.7-inch monitor, it’s hard to ignore that it doesn’t fill the void the previous 2011 27-inch iMac (ran in display mode only) was filling even before I tested out the ultra wide.

That aside, so far the monitor is working out well.

The color and resolution are amazing. With my bedroom lighting the glossy screen avoids the typical reflection issues and so I benefit with richer colors without too much of a compromise. The 500 nits of brightness are amazing and even puts my MacBook Pro display to shame. I like running the monitor at a true retina 2x 1080p of resolution for general tasks but have nudged the monitor to a scaled 1440 while doing some longer programming sessions. With the more detailed resolution and sharper text I’ve even been able to lower my coding font to grab up some extra space.

The real benefit of this monitor however comes from its nearly seamless integration with Mac OS X. All of the expected brightness and volume controls work from the keyboard. There is no power button on the display and once you connect the Thunderbolt cord to the MacBook Pro the monitor wakes up and also starts charging the laptop. Even wake from sleep is fairly reliable. (I think twice I had to do a unplug/replug for the monitor to be found but this could have also been from the fact that the cord needs to be firmly connected and the design of USB-C can leave connections to come out a little too easy sometimes.

For downsides I’ll mention the internal speakers. I like the fact they are included but the quality is pretty bad. I’m not an audiophile so it’s hard for me to describe but in my own day-to-day I’m using the MacBook Pro laptop speakers instead (for now) as I feel like they have more range. (Aside: The old iMac had good, usable speakers, I wish the LG had them.)

I think it’s a shame the monitor only has USB-C connections on the back. I would have appreciated a few USB-A type ports so I can plug my keyboard and mouse in directly without the need for yet another $39 adaptor. I also have a slight concern that this monitor won’t be usable by any of my current or future Windows computers since they prefer Display Port or even HDMI as a backup. I dunno. I have done no testing and in general am living with the fact that this is probably going to be an Apple-only monitor for me.

I would have also appreciated a basic camera for conference calls. I have an external USB camera I can setup (with ANOTHER adaptor) but not having a camera/microphone for this common need seems like an oversight for such a high end monitor.

My final complaint, and this isn’t for the monitor directly, is that using it makes my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016) run hot. Check out this graph, the early days are when I was working from home with the monitor attached and then the later days are me on the road at a conference with no monitor. Connecting the monitor seems to double the temperature, just to push the pixels let alone when I’m really pushing the CPU with code compliers or video exports.

I worry about running a laptop with high thermals like this regularly day-to-day. What really stings is that under a better scenario I would be connected to a modern and affordable Mac Pro tower that would have more cooling capacity – but I digress.

In short, I’m generally pretty positive about the monitor. I think it does have a bit high of a price tag and notable compromises but the improved Mac OS X integration makes up for it for me. I wish we had more options on the market. I also wish Apple would just make a monitor for the rest of us.

PS: A few days ago LG refreshed the 5K version of this monitor sold through Apple Stores. The previous 5K was discontinued when I had to make my choice which is a shame since I think the 27-inch might have been a better match for my needs. I think I’ll sit on my hands for a while and watch for the new reviews. Perhaps in time I’ll sell my 23.7-inch 4K and upgrade or maybe I’ll just buy a second 23.7-inch 4K. That is one other benefit of the 2019 refresh is that the 23.7-inch has better support for monitor chaining. But then again, if I’m getting too much heat with one monitor I wonder how hard two would push my laptop.

The Great Monitor Search Continues (again)…

A Smorgasbord of Updates, July 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 15:12:22 -0400

That feeling when you realize you have not posted and the month is almost over. 😳

Overall July has been pretty lax and it was kind of planned that way.

The last week of June I was on a shore vacation with the family and when I got back to work many of my coworkers were off on a July 4th break so things were quiet as I killed some bugs and built some more Admin UI in Phoenix.

July 11th was my 40th birthday and so I took a little time off around it. Nothing too big (I did not want a party) but instead had a nice quiet dinner with my Mom and Sister.

Over the next two weeks was normal work, nothing too crazy.

On July 23rd we kick-started our new Book Club for the Philly Elixir group. We’ll be reading Elixir in Action (2nd edition) which seems to be a quick review of the language basics then a deep dive into the OTP concurrency features that utilize the Erlang VM. Should be a fun read and I am anxious to share it with my local Elixir friends.

For the last week of July, I’m attending An Event Apart DC.

An Event Apart DC is a three-day conference with 17 sessions and an intense focus on digital design, UX, content, code, and more, giving you deep insights into where we are now and where things are going next.

On the hustle front, I’ve been making small steps with my side project (not very public yet). Most of the time has been spent on learning infrastructure things rather than actual features but that’s ok since a big goal of the side project is learning new things.

July Gaming Update

While we are here, let’s talk about games too!

In the spring I binged hard on MLB: The Show. I played a lot of games as the Phillies in mock postseasons and even enjoyed some online play (during a free Playstation Plus trial).

I also recently played a bit of Final Fantasy 14. I like many parts of the game but I’ll admit to getting overwhelmed with the Main Story Quest grind. I wish their was more voice acting in these quests and I also wish there was less tedious travel (so many quests would send you our to have a quick conversations with someone and then back super quick with no real game play outside travel). I don’t mind some of this, as it can help with world emersion but I found it to happen a bit too much. I’ve since paused my subscription but will probably be back in time.

In recent weeks my focus has been Pokemon, specifically Pokemon Red via the Virtual Console on my 3DS. There is community outrage that the new games in the series will lack the National Dex and I couldn’t help but get inspired to fill out the original dex, in Pokemon Red. I’ll post more once I finish but you can peek at my Micro.Blog for a few action photos.

Up next? I did pick up Dragon Quest Builders 2. I really enjoyed the first one, though did not finish it. September will also bring us The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and WoW Classic. Lots to play.

The Great Monitor Search Continues

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 19:30:40 -0400

TLDR: The LG 49 inch UltraWide monitor is pretty cool, but not very Mac compatible (specifics defects below). Next up for me is the Apple Store approved, 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K Display, which will trade screen real estate for retina, better color and native controls.

Backstory

I’ve been anxious to buy a new monitor for my MacBook Pro for a few months. I decided to hold off until Apple announced their Mac Pro + Display plans as I generally like all the conveniences that come from using an Apple monitor with Apple hardware and would love to buy one.

I still use a 27-inch Thunderbolt 1 Apple monitor at my work office – this new monitor would be for home use (for now).

So WWDC has come and gone and while amazing, that new Apple monitor is not for me. Instead I bought what I had been eyeing for a while, the LG 49WL95C-W 49 inch 32:9 UltraWide.

YouTube Reviews: Linus Tech Tips, The Tech Chap, MacRumors

Defects

I got to use the LG 49 inch UltraWide monitor for about two weeks and while I enjoyed the extreme screen real estate, I just ran into too many hardware issues and so it’s getting returned.

First, was random screen blackouts. I actually was prepared for this from reading reviews before purchase, but I also read that recent firmware updates fixed it. In my own experience I had some early blackouts on day one, used the (very non-Mac like) LG software to update the monitor firmware and didn’t see anymore … until today, where I had a few pop up while watching YouTube. (Maybe the monitor has figured out it’s getting returned and it is out to get me?).

The bigger issue however is screen resolution and refresh rate. If you wake up a connected MacBook Pro via a keyboard connected to the monitor you have about a 30% chance it will get the resolution right. When it goes wrong you’ll either end up with an extremely distorted view (as in the OS doesn’t know what monitor is connected and everything is stretched out) or you’ll get the native resolution but the refresh rate will only be 30 Hz. That refresh rate is really iffy too, sometime I see a pull down in System Preferences that lets me switch to 60 Hz, other times I get no pull down and my only recourse is to power down the monitor and attempt a reconnect or a system reboot. It’s pretty annoying and a deal breaker for such a high end piece of equipment.

There are other problems too, like not being able to edit the speaker volume or brightness using the native Mac system controls but since I’ve started my monitor search months ago I sadly came to accept some tradeoffs. Frankly it’s really hard to find a good monitor to pair up a Mac with.

I’ve begun the refund process with Amazon and it seems like I should get a full refund since it’s under 30 days. We’ll see.

Round Two

For my second contender I’ve chosen the more Apple approved, 23.7-inch LG UltraFine 4K Display. While it does not have anywhere near the size or screen real estate of the previous 49-inch monitor it will be a retina display, that comes with better color and more integrated controls.

YouTube Reviews: MacRumors, 9to5Mac

My general thinking is that maybe in the long run I’ll get two of these (it has some nice thunderbolt chaining possibilities) to get back my extra room, but will test drive just one for now.

While I’m sure I will enjoy the Mac integration, there is part of me that also worries that this might not play nice with Windows should I ever need to use the monitor with that OS. Again, lots of compromises to be made when shopping for monitors right now so sadly I’ll deal.

MacPro Reactions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 19:41:48 -0400

This year’s WWDC as expected is overflowing with things to talk about. For now, let’s scope this to just the MacPro (and its monitor).

From a purely technical perspective, there isn’t much missing. We got:

Expandable RAM (12 physical DIMM slots)
Expandable SSDs (2 slots; I hear the T2 encryption will work with this even if it’s non-Apple supplied.)
Expandable IO via 8 PCI express slot
A neat modular system that seemingly can also fall back to more generic cards.
The CPU even seems socket-able.

I’m not sure I love the aesthetics but I do enjoy how they use both sides of the motherboard and the whole shell slides up to reveal the internals.

I’m am a little concerned that there is no direct fan on the CPU or video card, though I am relieved that if they need to add fans in future revisions, at least there is plenty of room.

The pricing for the base SKU is $6000. Before WWDC I thought it would be $5000 so $6000 by itself isn’t crazy however it does start to sting when you realize the base model only comes with 256 GB SSD and a pretty old video card. That is plain cheap and greedy on Apple. The base CPU does have a rough street value of $1300 but I’m left wondering where the rest of this money is going? Apple’s margins I assume.

The monitor is technical perfection.

I’ve been shopping for a new monitor and Apple was right that there are about 8 modern features one looks for in a monitor and no one today checks off all boxes. Lots of monitors focus on price or gaming. Some offer retina but then shoddy Thunderbolt 3 support. This new Apple monitor looks amazing, but oh man that price.

$5000 for the monitor, or $6000 if you want the matte option – and then the stand, an extra $1000.

This is what broke me. This is the point in which I question why Apple is showing me this?

I truly believe they should have revealed this MacPro and monitor at a proper video / media conference. Revealing it in front of developers who can’t afford it nor whom the product is marketed at just feel very out of context. We were begging them to built us a tower and display, but they built them for someone else, and it’s kind of depressing.

What I wanted:

I wanted a $5000 tower where I could update the graphics cards a few years in. I don’t need 8 PCI slots, maybe 4 or 2 would work. I wanted to have easy access to RAM to add more in the future (I don’t need 12 slots I’m sure 4-6 would be fine). I want multiple SSD slots on the board (2 is fine). I want to be able to open it up and clean out the dust every few months (this is why an iMac will never work for me).

I wanted a $1000 self-contained version of the 5K iMac display. Maybe an ultrawide version? I like Apple monitors historically. They work great out of the box and have great color. Surely there is room in the market for a sub-$6000 Apple monitor for the “rest of us”?

What’s Next?

Well with this new knowledge I finally pulled the trigger on my new monitor. It’s not an Apple monitor. I’ll go more into that one next time.

As for the MacPro itself – time will tell. I for sure am not buying one day one. I want to see people review this. I want to see iFixIt rip it apart. We need time to see how this thing fairs in the real world. The recent laptops have turned me off to buying untested Mac hardware.

I will also continue to update and prune my dream hackintosh part list (which right now hovers around $2000) as I think that might be a more viable option.

Thoughts on Mac Pros at WWDC

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 May 2019 15:48:04 -0400

Today I reread the transcript of that closed door Mac roundtable event of 2017 where we were promised new Mac Pros.

As I read it one of the things that frustrated me most is how Apple acknowledged and was almost proud of how “pros” have moved on to the portable line and even the iMacs without once considering that this purchasing behavior might be influenced by their own neglect of the Mac Pro line.

Craig Federighi: That is a pretty incredible evolution that we’ve seen over the last decade. The original iMac, you never would’ve thought as remotely touching pro uses. And now you look at today’s 5k iMac, top configs, it’s incredibly powerful, and a huge fraction of what would’ve traditionally required the Mac Pros of old and are being well addressed by iMac.

Later…

Phil Schiller: As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.

That quote was in 2017 and oh how I remember us in the community jumping to conclusions that he must mean we’ll see new Mac Pros in 2018 – but alas they never materialized.

For a meeting who’s goal was to clear things up, they sure did leave us speculating.

Anyways, that event was over two years ago now. It’s time for Apple to show its cards. I’m not saying we need an order form or even a ship date but come June 3rd at WWDC, we need to see what Apple’s plan is. Its time.

Oh, and if the rumors are true, and we end up with some 40-50% margin’d proprietary stack of Mac minis, consider my faith in the Mac Pro completely lost.

If WWDC comes and goes without any news, I’ll live with my assumptions and make my own hardware plans.

Oh and this is funny…

Phil Schiller: Obviously, as you know, we just did a very major update to the MacBook Pro line. That’s going very well. Customers absolutely love it, we’ve had a lot of customers buying them.

Oh, poor 2017 Phil – he doesn’t know yet. In time this line of products, specifically its keyboards will become known as the worst products in Apple history, by even its most devote fans.

Philly Elixir Meetup is Rebooting

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0500

After too long of a hiatus, the Philly Elixir Meetup group is rebooting!

https://www.meetup.com/PhillyElixir

Elixir is a functional programming language that is popular for building web apps and services using a library called Phoenix as well as GraphQL APIs using Absinthe.

Our first meeting back will be:

Monday, May 6, 2019
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

PromptWorks
1211 Chestnut Street #400

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/PhillyElixir

Even if you can’t make this first meeting, please join the group as we’ll have many more to come. If you have questions, shoot me an email. Thanks!

Video: Blog Update, April 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 09:00:00 -0500

No big announcements, just a quick update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF_lymjYzUI

Book: The Common Good

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0500

I’ve been a long time fan of Robert Reich and particularly enjoyed his documentary Inequality for All from 2013. This year he has a new book, The Common Good – and I liked it a lot.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership.

I like this book because it goes above the here and now issues to ask the bigger question of how our society broke down and then offers some thoughts as to what it will take to fix it.

The book ends with a discussion guide which doubles as a fair outline of what’s in the book. Check it out, and if you want to know more – get the book.

A Discussion Guide for The Common Good

PART I: What Is the Common Good?

How do you define the “common good” in America? What do Americans have in common other than national symbols like the flag and the national anthem? What do these symbols mean to you?
Do Americans have obligations to the nation in addition to paying taxes, serving on juries, and voting? If so, what are they?
Some say Americans are selfish and self-centered. Others point to acts of kindness and courage—first responders to emergencies, everyday acts of altruism. How would you describe our national character?
Has America’s character changed over time—since your parents were children, for example? If so, how and why?
Do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time? Do you believe in our system of government—the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federalism, and the rule of law?
What’s the difference between a concern for the common good and nationalism?
What role does a president play in setting the moral tone of the nation?

PART II: What Happened to the Common Good?

Why has the public’s trust in all major American institutions—especially government, big businesses, banks, and the media—plunged over the past forty years? What events or trends have been most responsible for the decline?
Americans appear to have become far more partisan than we were forty years ago—liberals have moved to the “left” and conservatives to the “right,” Republicans and Democrats are less willing to compromise, and everyone seems to be angrier. Why has this happened?
Have widening inequalities of income and wealth played a part?
Has the flood of big money into our political system played a part?
Are the two related?
Why before the 1980s did big corporations have responsibilities toward their communities and their workers, in addition to their shareholders? Why after the 1980s did big corporations focus solely on maximizing profits and shareholder returns? Should corporations go back to their former ways?
A major theme in the 2016 presidential election, coming from both major parties, was that the economic system is “rigged” for the benefit of those at the top. Why did this theme appear so prominently in 2016 and not before? Do you agree with it?

PART III: Can the Common Good Be Restored?

What are the attributes of good leadership? Do leaders of business, government, and the media have responsibilities to restore trust in their institutions? If so, how should they go about it?
What roles do honor and shame play in contemporary American society? Ideally, who should be honored and for what, and who should be shamed and for what? How should such honoring and shaming occur?
Who do you trust to inform you about public issues such as climate change, the economy, or dangers posed by foreign governments? What are the qualities or characteristics you look for in deciding whom to trust in conveying the truth?
Does a democracy depend on a shared reality, or can a democracy function with people believing fundamentally different facts?
Are Americans adequately educated about how government and the economy are supposed to work, as well as how they actually work? If not, what should that education consist of, and when should it begin?
Do Americans have sufficient understanding of the obligations of citizenship? If not, who should be responsible for providing this understanding? Parents? Teachers? Public officials?
Do we have an obligation to break out of our self-made “bubbles” of friends, neighbors, and Internet algorithms that confirm everything we believe? If so, how can we do it? If not, can we still be effective participants in our democracy?
How do you think the common good can best be restored?

New Project: Group Leadership Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 21:19:13 -0500

Today I’d like to share a new project I’ve been working on called Group Leadership Club, Helping People Build Successful Technical Meetups.

This site is dedicated to group leaders. Our goal is to help them start, run and sustain their own meetup groups. Through articles and a community forum we work to answer questions and provide guidance.

I’m a huge believer in the power of meetup groups. I’ve participated in many groups over the years and have myself helped run a very successful group in Philly CocoaHeads. Through CocoaHeads I’ve met dozens of people I now consider close friends and peers not to mention the education opportunities.

Over the past few years I’ve tried to give back to the community, specifically to other leaders, from causal conversations and advice to a formal talk I did at 360iDev. This new site is an extension of those recommendations with a modern discussion forum to help address specific questions as they pop up.

If you think the content is relative, please sign up to the forum or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you know someone who might like such a site, please do share a link. Thanks for your help.

Code Documentation

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:00:00 -0500

This article is part of a series, Professional iOS Projects.

Professional iOS projects have good code documentation.

What is code documentation?

When I talk of code documentation I generally mean two things. First is inline code documentation, those triple slashed comments in a Swift file you use to describe types, properties and methods. Second, I mean guides, which are articles that describe aspects of the code from a higher perspective, usually explaining expected interactions as well as the thinking behind the design.

Documentation is great. It helps people who are new or returning to a code base learn how things work and like unit tests can help lead to better designs as documenting a poor design usually will help expose potential issues and misunderstandings.

Why should I write documentation?

All that sounds great but how come no one writes any code documentation?

Sadly it’s a victim of our current industry norms.

You won’t find many “how to write great code documentation” classes in a computer science curriculum. Most “learning to program” books will overlook the topic entirely or limit coverage to a passing mention of the document syntax format for the given language.

Even at work, when was the last time a pull request of yours was rejected for missing documentation? When was the last time your manager brought up code documentation during a sprint plan? Maybe you are getting pushed around for a quick delivery. Was documentation a requirement in the client contract? Has anyone suggested that if it’s not in the contract it’s not part of the deliverable?

This is where we separate the coders from the professional programmers.

Some, many in fact, work in this industry just to make a buck. Others like to consider themselves craftsman or professionals. These people constantly look for ways to improve themselves and the community around them. It is in these people I put my faith that over time, code documentation norms will get better, like other behaviors before it.

When I first started programming very few people used version control day to day, leaving it for only the most complex of projects. A daily ZIP file of the source and passing around .patch files worked just fine for many.

Testing has also followed a similar path where back in the day only a few would consider testing helpful and tools were hard to find and integrate, but now test targets are part of the built-in project templates.

Progress is being made.

Aside: While I general feel the community norms around code documentation need to improve I did want to point out that open source is one ecosystem which is shown to highly value code documentation the tooling around it.

If you are looking for good code documentation examples, try to find an active open source project to reference. You’ll usually find some helpful patterns to follow.

How do I write documentation?

Swift inline documentation is easy enough to get started with.

Example 1:

/// Describes a person whom we have met in real life.
class Contact {

    /// The name of the person.
    let name: String

    /// Initialize new `Contact` instance.
    ///
    /// - Parameter name: The name of the contact we met.
    init(name: String) {
        self.name = name
    }
}

To add documentation use three slashes /// to start a line of documentation. You’ll want to document the type, the properties and then methods. Also, notice for methods that take parameters there is a format to document them as well.

In Xcode you can also use Option+Command+/ to bulk paste a documentation line template. This template is particularly useful when documenting a method with lots of parameters and other parts.

Swift documentation supports Markdown and if you backtick mentions of a type it often will generate a link to that type when the documentation is rendered in Xcode.

Example 2:

/// A data store to hold `Contact`s of the user.
class ContactStore {

    //MARK: - Properties

    /// The currently managed `Contact`s of the store.
    private (set) var contacts: [Contact] = []

    //MARK: - Methods

    /// Accepts a contact and adds it to the store.
    /// If the given contact was already a member of the
    /// store, the `contacts` collection is not changed.
    ///
    /// - Parameter contact: a contact to be added to the store
    func addContact(_ contact: Contact) {
        guard contains(contact) == false else {
            return
        }
        contacts.append(contact)
    }

    //MARK: - Private

    /// Will search the store for the given contact.
    ///
    /// - Parameter contact: the contact to look for
    /// - Returns: a bool value indicating if the contact
    ///   was found in the store
    private func contains(_ contact: Contact) -> Bool {
        // FIXME: To be implemented
        return false
    }
}

In this second example we use MARK: - SectionName. This helps split up our source file. In particular since we don’t have headers anymore I like how I can segregate private methods to the bottom.

Another example here includes the use of //FIXME. FIXME is not triple slashed so it’s not technically documentation but it will be showcased inside of Xcode’s editor.

The main way you’ll encounter this documentation is through Xcode’s Quick Help. Option click a method and you’ll see:

Sadly there is no official support for HTML generation but there are third party tools like Jazzy that can help.

Writing Guides

In addition to inline documentation you’ll want to write up some more high level guides. These can cover many things from code tutorials to design retrospectives to agreed upon code patterns and terminology.

A great example of this can be found in the open source code base for NetNewsWire. Brent has written lots of helpful documents including Coding Guidelines and a Roadmap.

Resources

Counterarguments

Documentation is one of those things some developers get extremist about. One popular quote:

Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, “How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?” Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

Steve McConnell

There is nothing inherently wrong with this statement. I too avoid documenting very simple statements. The bigger problem is that the code we are writing today isn’t very good. It’s usually pretty lousy. It’s a version one for some half written client specification.

If you aren’t finding possible improvements in the code you wrote last year you have a problem. The phase “good code” is very suspect.

There are extremes with anything. Use your judgement. Most people don’t get yelled at for writing too much documentation though.

How to Get Started?

Document something, document anything.

You need not take two weeks off to go back and document everything. Stick to documenting new types or types that are being refactored or take a shot at listing the most complex aspects of your current system and then work down the list.

Give code documentation some time to become a habit. Documentation’s value usually doesn’t popup until a few months after writing it.

Gaming Update, February 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0500

First and foremost I’ve been playing Civilization VI, and getting better too. Civilization VI is by far one of the most complex games I’ve ever played (this is my first game in the series) but its been fun learning the game mechanics. I’ve been nudging up the AI difficulty as I go and it’s starting to get rather challenging, though like many I do wish the AI was smarter rather than just more rewarded in order to draw its advantages.

This week we will see a new expansion for Civilization VI, Gathering Storm, which will add lots more environmental issues (global warming, volcanos, river floods) amongst other additions and changes. Related to the release, there is a Steam sale for the core game plus all previous DLC for 70% off, $40 total. If you’ve been on the fence about trying Civilization VI now is a great time to check it out. I do recommend trying the base game before getting the new DLC to make sure you like the game format first. If you do jump in, let me know and we can play online together.

In Civilization VI downtime I’m on a bit of a Final Fantasy kick. I’m playing the Final Fantasy X HD remake for PS4 and Final Fantasy XIV (MMO) for PC. I’ve had the HD remake sitting around since when I bought the PS4 and playing it is part of my general goal to explore more of my backlog before buying new games.

As for FF XIV, well I need my MMO fix since I’ve turned off WoW. I’m not putting in crazy hours or anything. I’m taking things slow and steady, exploring the game and its many, many job choices. I really like the crafting system so far. It is so much deeper than WoW’s crafting and I like how I can level all the jobs on one character.

That’s it for now. Keep on gaming!

Code Consistency with SwiftLint

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0500

This article is part of a series, Professional iOS Projects.

Have you ever opened a source file and knew instantly it was written by a specific member of the team because of all the curious syntax choices they made? Perhaps they are green and don’t know the community standards or perhaps they spend most of their days in another language which has its own preferred style. What do you do?

Many programmers would agree at a certain level of maturity we look for code consistency in our own work and in our group projects. However manually enforcing a style guide is extremely tedious, error prone and can get personal real quick. The solution is to find tools that automate a community standard and let them enforce if not generate the code patterns for us.

In this post we’ll introduce and demonstrate one such tool for Swift iOS developers called SwiftLint. Its a great first step into a world of consistent code and easy to get integrated into your Xcode project.

What is SwiftLint?

Wikipedia describes a linter as:

Lint, or a linter, is a tool that analyze source code to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and suspicious constructs. The term originates from a Unix utility that examined C language source code.

SwiftLint is a tool that can scan your Swift code files and generate a list of warnings and errors based on a community provided collection of rules. It has great Xcode integration and online documentation.

Installation

There are a few different ways to install SwiftLint. I’ll review the Homebrew method as it is the one I prefer. Assuming you have Homebrew already installed, run:

brew install swiftlint

This will install a command line tool called swiftlint and while you can use it from the command line most will want to integrate it with their Xcode project. To do so, you’ll want to add a new Build Phase for your main app target, specifically a Run Script Phase at the end, and insert the following code:

if which swiftlint >/dev/null; then
  swiftlint
else
  echo "warning: SwiftLint not installed, download from https://github.com/realm/SwiftLint"
fi

Xcode Build Phase Editor

This script will look for the swiftlint command line tool. If found, it will run it on your project’s source files. If not found, it will still allow the build to finish but will post a short message to the console.

SwiftLint In Action

With swiftlint installed and your Xcode project setup, you now will experience new inline warnings and errors, helping to identify code that might lean away from community standards. Sometimes the warnings or errors will even offer automated fix options too.

Warnings and Errors in Xcode Editor

Customizing the Rules

Out of the box swiftlint will enforce a small subset of the 166 (and growing) rule collection. You can however customize the rules you want to enforce on your project by adding a .swiftlint.yml configuration file to the root of your project. Here you can explicitly opt in or disable rules. You can also configure file paths to exclude from rule matching (like Pods or Carthage). You can even configure some rules, defining the thresholds you want to be held accountable to (think file line size or method line size). More details on this configuration is in the SwiftLint README. A full list of Rules is also well documented.

If you want to turn a rule off for individual occurrences, check out the inline disable and enable options:

// swiftlint:disable colon
let noWarning :String = "" // No warning about colons immediately after variable names!
// swiftlint:enable colon
let hasWarning :String = "" // Warning generated about colons immediately after variable names

Personally I recommend turning on all the rules to get started. If you have a previous code base this will probably result in hundreds of warnings and errors but you can easily filter these errors in Xcode to see them, one by one.

When I first started using SwiftLint in a larger project, I did this rule by rule, either fixing the code issues and committing the changes or adding the rule to the disabled list. It took a few hours but was a great way to learn what people considered good standards.

SwiftLint has been my personal go-to tool of choice but if you want to compare some related projects checkout:

Conclusion

SwiftLint is a easy to install and configure tool that helps you add some code consistency to your Swift Xcode projects. It helps you avoid manual style checks during code reviews leaving more time to focus on actual code quality.

Registered for Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 12:35:09 -0500

Just took advantage of the early bird pricing for Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2019 and got registered.

Entering its 12th year, the Emerging Technologies Conference has brought the leaders of the open source community to Philadelphia to teach about their projects, their work and how these technologies are changing software development. During this time, ETE has become one of the largest gatherings of developers in the mid-Atlantic.

I’ve been to ETE in the past and particularly like how it lets me sample lots of topics I don’t see in my traditional iOS circles. Lots of local tech friends usually show up so it’s a great way to say hi and meet people too.

Events page updated.

A Pivotal Year for the Mac Platform

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 18:55:05 -0500

This is going to be a pivotal year for the Mac platform and my relationship to it.

First up is the Mac Pro.

While I’ve owned Apple laptops since I switched to Mac OS X full time, I almost always had a tower computer as my main hub. I love towers. I love loading them up with hard drives and upgrading the RAM and graphics card after a few years of use. Even after I would have upgraded to a new tower I’d usually make use of the old tower as a backup or media server of some kind.

Things changed in 2011 when I was ready to buy a new tower but Apple hadn’t updated the current lineup in any significant way. At the time I decided to go with a loaded 27-inch iMac instead. In general it was a nice machine but did have some faults, heat and dust buildup being the most problematic. I had AppleCare so Apple replaced the overheated graphics card, twice, for no extra charge and I’m sure they would de-dust during the install as well. When AppleCare was up, so were my yearly cleanings and in time the iMac would start to run hot again. Seeing as how Apple has added no dust cleaning features to the current iMac design, not even a simple filter on the air vents, I don’t think I can buy an iMac or an iMac Pro again.

My desktop dreams lay with the new Mac Pro design we’ve been told will come this year. 🤞

Next, is Marzipan.

So, Swift is a curious language. My biggest complaint can be summarized to say Swift is schizophrenic. It wants to be everyone’s best friend. It can do object oriented programming, it can do functional programming, it can do “protocol oriented programming”. It lacks strong opinions.

In day-to-day work, using Swift, a strongly typed, functional leaning, complier driven language, to execute UIKit which is built in Objective-C, a dynamic, object oriented language which loves runtime changes feels clunky at best and flat out bizarre if you came into the ecosystem without appreciating the strange tale of how we got here.

My hope has and continues to be that Apple is working on a replacement for UIKit (and AppKit?). A new UI framework that has functional design patterns and is learning from what we see out in the web world right now. When I saw the Marzipan announcement, my hopes started to sink. If the longterm goal is a new framework, why the hell are we adding desktop metaphors to UIKit?!? It just seems like more duck tape and not the clean solution I want and we deserve. I’ll hold off on hard criticism until we see a proper developer preview, most likely coming this summer. Regardless, I really hope the Mac OS starts to see some love. I feel like its been stagnating for many, many years now.

Finally, we have the AX processor, and potential Intel to ARM switch.

Apple’s decision to design its own mobile processors for the iPhone and iPad product lines has turned out to be an extreme success. As has been widely reported, the recent processors we see in the new iPad Pro product line rival desktop class Intel chip performance and rumors of a potential desktop architecture change are very strong.

This has very wide implications, many upsides but some downsides too. I have developer concerns. I have consumer questions. I have industry curiosities. Not to mention, what does this mean for my Mac Pro?

Lots of questions. I look forward to the answers.

Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack, Video and Slides

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 15:00:00 -0500

UPDATE 1.16: Fixed some slide typos (didn’t bother to edit video). If you spot anymore, let me know. Thanks!

I had a great time doing this networking design talk for the local Philly CocoaHeads. If you watch the video and have feedback, I’d love to hear it as I may revamp this talk for a 2.0 version in the future.

Video on Vimeo 44 minutes
Slides PDF / SpeakerDeck

Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack

When an app is young and has simple networking needs it’s not uncommon to use URLSession tasks directly inside of a view controller. However as the app needs grow to include things like authenticated requests, token renewal, testing, cancellation, caching and more – you’ll want to have a more defined networking stack to lean on. On a client project over the summer, the iOS team and I started to document a networking wish list and over the past few months we’ve started to execute it, first on some smaller features and a demos app. Now we are preparing for a new greenfield iOS app where we should be able to hit the ground running with our new ideas.

In this talk I’ll review the network design we’ve come up with. I’ll demo what we have working and talk about how we want to extend it in the future. Attendee should walk away with new ideas that they can integrate into their own networking stacks.

Philly CocoaHeads, Mike Zornek

Philly CocoaHeads, Group Shot

Philly CocoaHeads, Slopes

Philly CocoaHeads, Group Shot

Terminal Tip: Quickly Launch Into Servers and Services

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0500

With my enjoyment of Elixir and things like the new engine of this blog I find myself back in the Mac OS X Terminal more and more.

One quick tip I think many might miss, is that you can launch new Terminal windows based on a profile. Out of the box the only difference for the default profiles is color themes, but for each profile you can have it execute a series of commands when the new window is created.

For me, I like to use this to quickly jump to project folders or even quickly start up local servers. I also find it helpful to use different colors for different things, like say red for the web server, blue for the database and black for my main command line.

Give it a shot and save yourself some repetitive typing.

Local Food Banks Need Help During Shutdown

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 15:55:55 -0500

Philabundance Blog writes:

We at Philabundance hope that this government shutdown will come to an end quickly. We will do our best to serve everyone who needs food, but we know we cannot make up the difference of SNAP or other government programs. The longer it continues the more people will struggle to support themselves and their families. This shutdown is hurting our nation today and needs to end.

DONATE TODAY

The README File

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 12:51:32 -0500

This article is part of a series, Professional iOS Projects.

One of the most crucial documents in any project is its README file, a plain text file (sometimes formatted in Markdown) located in the root of the project directory, clearly named, usually in all caps, README.

README is the initial point of contact for product owners, current and future developers and sometimes end users. Even if your project is a solo private endeavor taking the time to produce a good REAME file will answer many questions your future self will have.

Core Components

Project Name and Branding

Name, tagline, logo, and a short description help market and explain what this project is all about. If available, links to more detailed marketing sites is also helpful.

Project Status

Many project, particularly open source ones, like to promote their own status regarding test coverage, current versions, continuous integration, and more. Sometimes this comes in the form of small clickable badge images.

Other helpful links for this section would be to a modern CHANGELOG file and Release Note document.

Feature List

Included towards the top, the goal of this feature list section is to help people understand a project’s core competencies and if it is a good match for their needs. Don’t be afraid to embed high level architectural graphs, screenshots thumbnails or links to screencast demos. There is no reason a README should be text only.

Installation and Getting Started

Dedicated to the users, this section should help people understand what it takes to get to a working version of this software stood up. If prebuilt binaries are available, those should be the linked and recommended.

If there are other setup needs those should be documented here as well. The basic goal is to help the user get to a Hello World demo of the core competency of the project. When it comes to more complex configuration settings, those should probably live in the main documentation, help system.

Development and Contribution

Dedicated to the current and future developers of the project, this section should help someone who wants to contribute or test a development version of the project how to get their environment prepped and how to build the code base.

If there are processes for contributing bug reports, pull requests or documentation updates those should be documented here as well.

If you have specific code style guidelines, those should also be linked to.

Try not to make too many assumptions (we were all green devs at some point) and be as detailed as possible.

Deployment

Deployment can mean a lot of different things to different projects but it doesn’t hurt to have a short summary in the README with more details in a separate guide.

If you have an active TestFlight beta page, link to it here.

Links

While many will encounter your README on places like GitHub, project repos can be moved around, archived, and so on. For that and general convenience, it’s a great idea to have a raw list of project links. From a project’s home page to it’s repository URL to other things like issue trackers, support forums and related blog posts.

If you want to be really helpful link to your competition and other related projects too.

Licensing

To help make it clear what others can do with this project it’s important to pick and document your license. A LICENSE file is a great place for the full legal speak, but a one liner and link on the README can answer most people’s questions in a single glance.

If you need help picking a license help is available. Also keep in mind the license of any third-party code libraries you are using, be sure to reference those as well.

Examples

awesome-labs/iOS-readme-template

README.md template for your iOS open-source projects.

Apple Radar Bug Report

#47121832 - Xcode Project Templates should come with a opinionated README template.

If you have a suggested edit or addition, let me know. See you next time for Anatomy of a Modern iOS App.

New Series: Professional iOS Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 12:40:03 -0500

One of the lessons learned from The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas is to learn a new language every year.

Different languages solve the same problems in different ways. By learning several different approaches, you can help broaden your thinking and avoid getting stuck in a rut. Additionally, learning many languages is far easier now, thanks to the wealth of freely available software on the Internet.

Over the last few years I’ve really tried to take this to heart and have worked with and dabbled in lots of languages, including:

Objective-C
Go
JavaScript
Elm
Ruby
Elixir
Swift

…and related frameworks/tools:

Ember
ReactJS
Rails
Phoenix
GraphQL

With that context, one of the biggest issues I have with iOS development is that our projects, as a community, lack professional consistency.

If you open a project in any of the frameworks I mentioned above you’ll find very specific places for each piece of the codebase; you’ll find code generators that follow these patterns for new files and tests; you’ll find community accepting tooling standards for bringing it all together. This consistency takes a whole world of questions and decisions off the table making your development life so much easier.

On iOS, every Xcode project is its own unique beast. There are some patterns we get from UIKit but it only gets us so far.

I feel like Apple has dropped the ball. In my opinion, Xcode should have more opinionated and structured project templates to offer. It should have open integration to third-party project templates to easily allow the community to drive us forward. Following “good practices” like migrating code to frameworks, should be easier. Testing should be more streamlined. Failure to add inline documentation should cause warnings. I can go on and on, and I will.

“Professional iOS Projects” is a new blog series where I want to explore what we can do to improve our iOS projects. Apple of course drives us with its closed-sourced, time limited Xcode release schedule, but there is plenty we can work on ourselves, from lint tools to documentation, testing, folder structure, system design and more. It’s a series that could go on forever. 😱

The first post is ready. It’s all about the README file. Please check it out and let me know what you think. I also welcome topic ideas for future articles.

Going to shoot for a weekly release schedule so grab that RSS feed and join me.

2018 Retrospective; 2019 Goals

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:14:50 -0500

Overall 2018 was a pretty good year.

The Good:

2018 marked the first full year of my self-employment comeback.
I was able to maintain billable client projects the entire year.
After having a few down productive months, decided to rejoin IndyHall as a full time member in July. It’s a bit costly (I pay extra for parking too), but this has helped me focus, both on client work and personal projects.
Attended WWDC and had some social fun.
Attended ElixirConf and doubled down on my excitement for this language, community and ecosystem.
Finished my handoff of Philly CocoaHeads admin duties (still active member), giving me more time for new things.
Continued to expand my web education.
Paid off some long time debits.
Started a savings account for a possible house down payment.

The Bad:

Many of my recent side projects have died on the vine. Lots of false starts. I’m not shipping like I want to.
Most of my consulting income comes from one large client. Need to diversify.

2019 Goals

Diversify and increase my income.
- Add more clients so less dependent on single large client.
- Add passive income through a new product/service.
- Shoot for a 10% income increase.
Be better at shipping/executing.
- 2017 & 2018 was a lot of learning new tech, demo projects.
- 2019 needs to be about shipping real value.
Do a better job of tracking my time.
- 20-30 client hours/week
- 20-30 project hours/week
- 50 total “work” hours/week
Better code documentation.
Utilize work byproducts as education / blog opportunities.

Network Design Talk at Philly CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 10:25:00 -0500

I’m going to be giving a talk at the local CocoaHeads next week. If you are in Philly area you should stop by.

Thursday, January 10, 2019
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
IndyHall
399 Market Street, Suite 360
Meetup RSVP

Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack

When an app is young and has simple networking needs it’s not uncommon to use URLSession tasks directly inside of a view controller. However as the app needs grow to include things like authenticated requests, token renewal, testing, cancelation, caching and more – you’ll want to have a more defined networking stack to lean on. On a client project over the summer, the iOS team and I started to document a networking wish list and over the past few months we’ve started to execute it, first on some smaller features and then a demos app. Now we are preparing for a new greenfield iOS app where we should be able to hit the ground running with our new ideas.

In this talk I’ll review the network design we’ve come up with. I’ll demo what we have working and talk about how we want to extend it in the future. Attendee should walk away with new ideas that they can integrate into their own networking stacks.

I think it will go well and hopefull kickstart some good conversations.

New Year, New Site

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 19:51:21 -0500

Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone had a nice break and is recharged for the new year.

While most of my own break was quiet I did have one side project, rebuilding this website. It’s now hosted through a toolchain that includes Hugo, a static site generator written in Go, GitHub, CircleCI and Linode, replacing the previous WordPress setup.

I have nothing against WordPress, but it was overkill for my own needs and I generally like the idea of keeping my server lean, and a static site makes that easier.

The setup is very similar to my previous build of the PhillyCocoa website. The theme is not custom like PhillyCocoa, but a hack job on the Pickles theme. It’ll do for now but is as a good a base as any.

If you utilize the RSS feed for this site you might want to resubscribe. I’ve setup some redirects for old feed paths but other formats that WordPress provided (like ATOM) are not currently supported.

Similarly I’ve updated my Micro.Blog to use my own domain now, so its RSS feed is updated as well.

Feels good to check this project off the list. Hopefully it will encourage some more writing in the future. Stay tuned.

Meetup.com Survey Links

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 17:06:54 +0000

Someone has breached Meetup.com security and been sending out links to some sketchy surveys.

I saw some more yesterday so I figured I’d post a warning.

Meetup.com seems to be aware of it (as the messages are being deleted) but alas when I asked support I got no response and I see no mention of the security breach on their site.

If you see these, do not click on the links.

UPDATE

Meetup’s Response:

Marianka (Meetup)

Dec 8, 4:14 PM EST

Hi Mike,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Please know that those messages were not posted by Meetup HQ.

We take reports of fake accounts very seriously, and we’re working as a team to be more proactive in our rooting out of profiles like the one in your report and to grow our resources for members to flag them. Reports like yours help us fine tune our processes and improve our tools. Should you see anything like this going forward, please exercise caution and be sure to report the matter to us. In the future, please make sure you contact us directly from the email address associated with your Meetup account.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mike.

All the best.

Sincerely,
Marianka
Integrity Specialist

Ugly Swift Syntax for Checking Errors

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 19:19:08 +0000

A common code pattern I see a lot in iOS code is:

service.execute(request) { (response, error) in
    if let error = error {
        handleError(error)
        return
    }

    // work with response...
}

I don’t like that if statement. I’d much rather use a guard statement.

For those who don’t know guard, the docs explain:

A guard statement, like an if statement, executes statements depending on the Boolean value of an expression. You use a guard statement to require that a condition must be true in order for the code after the guard statement to be executed.

I like guard over if cause it’s more expressive about my intentions that the code after it should only run if there was no error found. Unfortunately, because of the boolean nature of the guard clause, to do this requires using Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals.

service.execute(request) { (response, error) in
    guard error == nil else {
        handleError(error!)
        return
    }

    // work with response...
}

I really try to avoid Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals, so much so I use SwiftLint to throw warnings for their use. Adding lint exceptions for this regular occurrence, for me, is not an option.

If you have more control over the service implementation you might choose to use a Result type.

enum Result<T> {
    case success(T)
    case failure(Error)
}

service.execute(request) { (result) in
    switch result {
    case .failure(let error):
        handleError(error)
    case .success(let response):
        handleResponse(response)
    }
}

I generally like this but it doesn’t work if you need to support a mixed Swift/Objective-C environment. It also doesn’t account UIKit itself does not use a Result type.

Code should be beautiful and so I think it’s important to document these things. I’d love to find a better solution and welcome feedback.

Swift Style: Dequeuing and Populating Cells From UITableView

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 23:03:40 +0000

Everyone has an opinion when it comes to Swift code style, and here is mine when it comes to dequeuing and populating cells from UITableView.

First you should know Apple maintains two methods for dequeuing cells from UITableView:

func dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier identifier: String) -> UITableViewCell?

and

func dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier identifier: String, for indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell

The second version, with the indexPath argument addition and non-optional return value, was added in iOS 6 but strangely the original version was never marked as deprecated. The indexPath version is the one you should use. (I know of no reason why anyone should prefer the original, but I welcome feedback.)

Now let’s take a look at an implimentation:

func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: CustomCell.identifier, for: indexPath)
    if let customCell = cell as? CustomCell {
        customCell.item = itemForIndexPath(indexPath)
    }
    return cell
}

First we dequeue our cell. Notice how we use a class property to provide the cell identifier string value. We do it this way to avoid typos and enable easier refactoring.

Also note how we avoid any type casting on this dequeue line and instead capture the cell in a simple UITableViewCell reference. We do this because there is a chance that our tableview might not be properly registered with the cell identifier. Under such a scenario we’ll still get a cell instance but it will not be a CustomCell instance. I’d much rather return a boring UITableViewCell than crash with some explicit type casting using as! here.

Next we do our type casting using the more forgiving as?, making a new casted reference if a match happens.

To populate our cell there are two basic paterns. One would have a very generic cell expose its interface outlets and so you could configure the cell as you see fit depending on your model. The second approach would be to keep the cell’s outlets private and instead have the cell accept a model the cell is suppose to represent.

I generally lean towards the model approach. I also like to make a method called itemForIndexPath which helps if I ever refactor the view and introduce sections. If you are worried about coupling consider building a model just for the cell’s needs; a CellViewModel or something similar.

And finally, we return our cell reference. 👍

Hello Firefox, Goodbye Chrome

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 01:46:34 +0000

A few weeks ago I said to myself, enough was enough and dropped the Chrome web browser.

If you aren’t actively following the web development world it’s easy to miss, but Google and Chrome have really been hostile toward the open web over the last few years. A few examples:

In 2016 Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages. From its wikipedia page:

AMP has been widely criticized by many in the tech industry for being an attempt by Google to exert its dominance on the Web by dictating how websites are built and monetized, and that “AMP is Google’s attempt to lock publishers into its ecosystem”. AMP has also been linked to Google’s attempt to deprecate URLs so that users will not be able to immediately see whether they are viewing a webpage on the open Web or an AMP page that is hosted on Google’s servers. AMP has been described as being “poisonous to the underlying concept of an open internet.”

In Chrome 68 they began to deprecate HTTP and now list HTTP sites as insecure.

In Chrome 69 they added a behavior that strips the www subdomain from the URL bar. (Try visiting www.mikezornek.com and it becomes mikezornek.com. This may feel like a small thing for users but as a developer its a firm violation for how the web URL works.

Just this weekend I read a story of some more shenanigans:

Matthew Green:

A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you.

Paul Frazee:

There’s a reason people are reacting to Chrome like this. This isn’t an overreaction over one single event. It’s a delayed reaction to a pattern of bad behavior.

It’s contextualized by the very messed-up power dynamic between Google and the open Web.

Google’s influence over the web through its search was already over the line in many ways but to see its once celebrated browser go down this road is depressing.

Actions speak and Firefox is treating me well. I now use it across my computers and devices, from MacOS to iOS and even my Windows gaming tower. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine (and has been for like a year now) and works well too. It feels good to be using products from people who share my interests to heart.

Apple’s Use of Donations as Marketing

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 16:07:40 +0000

The other day Tim Cook (‪@tim_cook‬) tweeted:

Our hearts go out to the people of Sulawesi and all of Indonesia after this weekend’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. Apple is donating $1 million to aid relief efforts as this beautiful country starts to rebuild.

I feel bad for the earthquake victims too, but this kind of marketing makes me a little ill.

Best I can tell Apple reported 53.8 billion dollars in profit over the last year. If you compared the ratio of their donation to say a person making $100,000 a year, the donation would be $1.86.

Now I don’t want to say a million dollars isn’t a big impact to the receivers of the donation, I’m sure it is — but it just feels a little cheap to announce it and have everyone retweet it, the media website repost it, all to build up this fake “good will” sentiment. Hell, you can’t even buy a media ad campaign for that cheap.

Anytime you read this stuff remember, these are the same big corporations dodging taxes that could normally fund proper emergency relief and preparedness along with other infrastructure needs.

Some might say, well Apple needs to answer to their shareholders and this is how every company works. Well I say, everyone has a choice, and yeah it can be easier to fall in line and do the expected but I root for the person who is going to step out of line and Think Different.

At a minimum, donate your $1.86 annomously without looking for a thank you.

Gaming Update, September 2018

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:24:04 +0000

Forgive me, it’s been a while since my last gaming update. So, what am I playing?

Well first off, I’m officially done with Hearthstone. It’s a shame cause I like the game, but the price has just gotten out of control.

I was playing a bunch of World of Warcraft over the summer and into the new expansion. I leveled my rogue Paperkut to 120 but ended up unsubscribing right when the raid came out. I’m not interested in doing the whole “guild and 2-3 nights a week” raiding schedule and while I’m sure I would enjoy the braindead yet soothing process of leveling and gearing my alts it will still be there for me in a few months. For now I wanted to try some new games and put some more time into programming side projects.

After WoW, I went retro, starting games of Wind Waker, Earthbound and even a Pokemon Platinum Nuzlock. I consider them all still active playthroughs. Since my last nuzlock update I was able to finish the second gym with only one death so far. (RIP Perch, the Starly.)

And finally, last weekend I bought Cities Skylines — and oh man am I having fun building my cities. I’ll fault the game with having a poor built-in tutorial process but I was saved by lots of helpful web tips and tutorials. The base game is $29 with lots of paid for DLC. You don’t need the DLC to get started so if you fancy city simulators and have not checked it out yet, I do recommend. PC preferred, since it has a large mod community.

Let me know what you are playing! Email is fine, but blogging is better. See ya next time.

ElixirConf 2018 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:54:59 +0000

After attending ElixirConf I am as confident as ever that Elixir is a language, community and ecosystem I want to continue to personally invest and participate in.

About two years ago I made the decision that I needed to diversify my technical skills outside the Apple ecosystem. I then went on to experiment and research lots of different languages and frameworks, including EmberJS, Go, Rust, Elm, HTML5 updates, React and Elixir.

The Elixir interest started from a broad recommendation from Dave Thomas who I had years before followed heavily while doing Ruby on Rails development. Elixir also had gotten momentum from my interests in Functional Programming and looking to solve problems outside of traditional Object Oriented Programming design patterns. Over the last few months I’ve gotten deeper into Elixir and I really like what I’ve found.

I’ll do a post in the future about why I’m liking Elixir so much. It’s a potentially large topic and I want to give it the space it deservers.

ElixirConf was a great event. Two days of training and two days of conference sessions; I took it all in. My personal estimate would put the training day attendance at around 150 and the full conference at around 500.

While educational, I found the class pacing to be mixed. I felt one went a little too slow and the other a little too fast. There was a wide gamut of Elixir experience in the audience so I think it’s challenging for the instructors to find a pace everyone can agree with. That said, I learned a ton in each of the two more introduction-based classes I attended. I was envious of the more advanced classes that were covering GraphQL and hardware development using Nerves — I heard people were very impressed with them. Maybe next year.

For the conference days we had some great keynotes and session. I loved hearing José Valim (creator of Elixir) talk about the future of the language including the core teams failed experiments with adding a type system and why it’s not on the horizon. Chris McCord (creator of Phoenix) did a closing keynote, reviewing progress with the framework including a preview of Phoenix LiveView which was very impressive and has an opportunity to shake things up in the single-page app space. Aaron Renner had a great talk on taming complexity which mirrored some of my previous iOS code patters with way better naming. Aaron Votre’s excitement about GraphQL is contagious and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty. Andrew Bennett has some great tips in his Sustainable Testing talk. Daniel Azuma did a great job showing how we can mix and match Docker with traditional OTP deployments for unique benefits. Some time slots were competitive for my attention. I sadly missed Boyd Multerer’s Introduction of Scenic and Eric Oestrich’s Going Multi-Node session which both were well received from chat in the hallways. I’ll be sure to watch them on YouTube in the week ahead. In fact the majority of the conference keynotes and sessions are already posted on YouTube if you want to take a look.

Despite my general shyness, the community was very welcoming and friendly when I put myself out there. I had some great conversations during breaks and lunch. Hopefully these will continue on the community Slack and forums — I need to spend some more time with those.

Finally, everyone is hiring. Almost every speaker who represented a company said they were hiring. While I’m not looking for full time employment its relieving to see such hiring interest in a more niche language than say my current source of income, iOS.

Next year ElixirConf will be in Denver and assuming I find a way to keep Elixir active in my development schedule (I have a potential Elixir subcontract in the fall as well as some personal projects) I plan to be there.

For more on Elixir check out its homepage.

Photos

Self Employment Estimate Numbers

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 20:22:16 +0000

In a world of being self-employed you need to constantly be evaluating your finances. I was lucky enough recently to finish paying off some long standing debit and so I did a revisit. Today I want to share with you how I do my estimate numbers and hopefully you can use some of these ideas to help plan your own independence and/or make sure your current indie life is in good shape.

The software I use to do this is Soulver. Think of it as a really smart text editor for crunching numbers. Watch the demo video on their site to see it in action. If you are not interested in Soulver, any spreadsheet should do fine. Just keep it on file somewhere so you can come back and rework it as needed.

First thing you need is a list of personal expenses. If you are single you can do this yourself but if you are married or in a relationship where you share expenses get them involved too. You want to have a full and truthful collection of costs here. The goal is understanding what you need to survive and ultimately what you can cut to help make your dream that much more possible.

I did this by first using my credit card and debit card statements as a source. Every item needs to be recorded. Make three lists, some will be monthly expenses, some yearly expenses and some one-time expenses. Once you get done with the statement history try to brainstorm where the undocumented cash goes. Hopefully these lists will help.

Personal Monthly Expense Examples:

Rent / Mortgage
Home / Renters Insurance
Car Payments
Car Insurance
Car Maintenance
Car Fuel
Health Insurance
Expected Monthly Copays / Medicines
Netflix
Hulu
Monthly Gaming Subscriptions
Game Purchases
Eat Out Food
Spotify
iTunes
Patreon Gifts
Podcast Subscriptions
Haircut

Some of these items might be hard to quantify as monthly. If so just make a yearly entry for them.

Personal Yearly Expense Examples:

Christmas Presents
Birthday Presents
Yearly Clothes Budget
Vacations
Car Inspection

Once I have my yearly and one time costs I like to total them as a monthly expenses (YearlyTotal+OneTime/12) so I can later think in terms of months. This is fine for back of the hand estimates but if you need to plan out your money for specific times (summer vacation, fall back-to-school kind of stuff) you’ll need to do more planning.

Now do the same for your company.

Company Monthly Expense Examples:

Coworking Membership
Downtown Parking
GitHub Membership
Linode Hosting
Amazon Hosting
Books
Google Apps
Verizon Phone
Dropbox
Micro.Blog
Clicky / Web Statistics
Cushion / Finacial Software
Frontend Masters / Online Education

Company Yearly Expense Examples:

Two Conferences Events: $4000
Tax Preparation
New Mac every other year: $4000 × 0.5
New iPad every other year: $1100 × 0.5
New iPhone every other year: $1000 × 0.5
Vimeo PRO Membership
Apple Developer Membership
Trello
Hover Domains
Other Software

Notice how I distribute the costs of various hardware upgrades, which are bi-yearly, and do keep in mind this is all for rough estimating. I in-fact have held off on upgrading my iPhone recently so that’s extra money in the bank (kind of).

Next I work out my income:

## hours a week
## hours × $### per hour
{WeeklyRevenue} × 4 weeks
{MonthlyRevenue} - {TotalOfCompanyMonthlyExpenses} tax-free
{AdjustedMonthlyRevenueA} - 0.10 for Savings
{AdjustedMonthlyRevenueB} - 0.30 Tax Estimate Payments
{AdjustedMonthlyRevenueC} x 10 months // assuming 8 weeks off
{AdjustedYearlyRevenue} / 12 months of payouts
{AdjustedMonthlyIncome} $/month personal income

This last number needs to be able to cover your personal expenses. Using this formula you can get an idea of how many hours and at what rate you want to target for the year. Also, just covering personal expenses is probably a risky goal. You might want to up that savings calculation until you have 12 months of living expenses in the bank.

These things vary person to person, hopefully you’ve found this post useful. If I’ve forgotten anything blog your additions and share along. Thanks for reading.

Rainy Monday

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 19:09:29 +0000

Rain washes out my way to work, It’s a Riker flashback lunchtime episode, and WoW Patch Day!

Happy Patch Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmsMSQDVPM

Hearthstone is too expensive.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 13:25:31 +0000

Some chat about how Hearthstone went from expensive to ludicrous expensive over the last year — and I’m out.

Links:

Back to Full Time at IndyHall (video 5m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 20:06:18 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRuJdIaM_sE

I’m back at IndyHall full-time. What is IndyHall? It’s Philadelphia’s best coworking space. Watch to learn more.

Links:

On Using and Not Using Twitter (video 8m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 18:27:14 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Dwcpa21JM

A quick and dirty video journal reviewing my past and future use of Twitter. My issues with the platform and my upcoming interest in marketing some new education content that’s been in the works.

Links:

WWDC 2018 Social Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 02:49:05 +0000

I just got back from my WWDC 2018 Social trip and it was a lot of fun. I figured I’d do a quick recap of the social side and leave room to talk about the tech stuff as I get deeper into the session videos in the weeks to come.

Costs

With a nod to Manton’s lead I thought I too would share my costs in order to help others understand what is possible despite WWDC generally being a large cost these days.

Plane fare (Southwest, Philadelphia to San Jose Roundtrip taking the early and late times to save a little bit extra): $564.00
Hotel: ($125/night, 4 nights + taxes & early checkin fee). Booked early on event date assumptions, was cancelable.: $642.00
Airport cab fair: $25 each way.
WWDC conference ticket: $0 (Big savings here obviously. If you can get value from the labs, the $1700 ticket cost can pay for itself but if you just want to watch the sessions, enjoy the free video streams on delay).
AltConf conference ticket: $0 (I’ve bought the $300 Hero ticket in the past but held back this year since I’m on my own again and trying to keep costs down. Kind of feel bad considering how well I enjoyed the talks there this year.)
Food and drinks: ~$300 Made a point to get some supplies at a grocery store early in the week so I could supplement eating out with some in-room breakfast mornings and snacks.
Podcast and other event tickets: ~$50

Total: ~$1600

TL;DR: Make your decision about WWDC early and keep an eye on the rumored dates. Book early with hotels that are cancelable. If you need some more help, find a roommate to split hotel/cab costs with.

Events

On Sunday night I attended the sjMacIndie party and saw a lot of conference friends. Venue was a little on the warm side but plenty of space so it didn’t get too stuffy. I did not recognize much of San Jose from my earlier WWDC trips (2002-2004) but I did recognize this venue as the previous pool hall where the student scholarship winners once had a party. In fact it was at said party where I won an iPod which I later sold to help cover my plane fare back in the day.

You can check out some of the old WWDC 2002 Student coverage we did via Wayback Machine and this video, with footage from the pool hall, I was able to find and re-upload.

On Monday I watched the Keynote and State of the Union with friends at the hotel. We had to jump wifi networks a few times but overall was very successful. Afterwords I headed to the live recording of ATP podcast which was a lot of fun.

On Tuesday I took in a few AltConf talks and also attended the Micro.Blog meetup. Really enjoyed the Setapp talk about their growth/recommendations and the detailed talk on improving app startup times. I also took some time on Tuesday to work on my own project, finally breaking down a long list of tasks into a new Pivotal Tracker project so I can start to track things better.

On Wednesday did more AltConf stuff. Really enjoyed Paul Hudson’s review of new iOS 12 additions. Also had a good time in the Finding Product Fit lab. At night I attended the Relay FM podcast recording which went great. Afterwords I went to the Breakpoint / AppCampForGirls event. I didn’t stay too long though, place was really dark and loud. Also kind of irked me that there was a separate VIP section. I really dislike the social cliques that pop up at industry conferences and seeing the VIP thing put a bad taste in my mouth.

Aside: I’d love to see some options for non-bar night events at conferences. A 24 hour hacking lab with whiteboard grouping around ideas; maybe with room corners for Mario Karting or boardgames/poker. I like hanging out but I don’t like drinking too much and I can’t hear people over the crowds. I miss MacHack in many ways. Maybe I’ll lead by example some day should I ever dawn my event organizer hat again.

On Thursday I got to attend a few morning talks at AltConf before heading home. Of them I really enjoyed the review of what Firebase is offering these days. I’ve been watching them since before they were bought by Google. Like any third-party component you have to accept some risk but I welcome the opportunity to use them to bootstrap a new idea some time in the future.

The journey home took a long while. I didn’t sleep much but did enjoy a bunch of podcasts.

Overall WWDC 2018 Social was a great success. It was awesome to say hi to some internet/conference friends and hear how everyone is doing. Now that I’m home it’s time to jump into the technical content and see what the WWDC sessions have to share. I’ll post more on that as I experiment.

Say Hello at WWDC!

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 01:49:44 +0000

A short message to say, yes I will be in San Jose for WWDC next week. No, I will not be in the conference itself but I will be hanging around AltConf and other events. If you see me, please say hi.

Gaming Update, May 2018

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 18 May 2018 15:15:35 +0000

From April trends, I continued to play Stardew Valley into early May. It kind of died off over the last few weeks though since I don’t have much left to do, beside more and more money.

I also finished April pretty heavy into the new Hearthstone expansion. It was fun to see the new cards and decks. Nothing ground breaking, fun times and good fodder while I also listen to podcasts.

What’s new for me is my second attempt at Zelda on Switch. I’ve made it much further than my first attempt (~ 15 hours in) and am getting better with the controls (though some mistakes still happen in the heat of battle). Exploring is fun though if I’m honest I feel like I would benefit from a little more direction. In my last play session I was tasked to fetch some arrows on a hill. There is a mob up there who I attempted to kill. I say attempted cause he kicked my ass repeatedly. I’ve been trying to avoid walkthroughs for this game but I wanted to take a peek to see if I was suppose to be here later in play, with more hearts and armor — turns out you are suppose to be stealthy and avoid this mob. We’ll see how that goes.

Second big update for me is Civilization 6! I bought the game when it first came out but never got too deep into it. I think I tripped over a YouTube video or something which put it back in my mind but yeah, I’m really enjoying it. It’s my first ever Civ game and the rules are overwhelming but fun to learn. The games last forever and it’s hard to put down so be prepared to dump major hours into game sessions. I’ve been playing standard games but it does have a lot of scenarios for a quicker experience I want to try out.

What’s next? Probably more Civilization 6 and Zelda. I also did purchase via pre-order Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and Hyrule Warriors for Switch. I never got to play them on the WiiU but they look like fun. Also getting excited for E3 in June. There have been some Pokemon leaks for the Switch game and I’m a little nervous about the Go integration rumors but we’ll see how it turns out.

Micro.Manton

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 18:56:35 +0000

Long time Apple developer Manton Reece is broken, sources in the Reece household have shared. After embracing a micro format with Micro.blog and now microcasts, Manton has now instituted “micro” all over his household, from Micro.bed to Micro.dinner.

“Dinner is now severed on these little Barbie-sized plates. It’s a sick joke. I’m starving.”

Apparently the family is looking into a Micro.therapist for assistance. Manton could not be reached for Micro.comment.

Right to Repair

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:00:54 +0000

Via phoneArena:

It has been reported that iOS 11.3 has disabled some iPhone 8 touch displays. The devices affected are those who have had third party displays installed. These displays are typically installed by local repair shops and are not affiliated with Apple.

I’ve been a supporter of the Right to Repair movement and Apple once again disappoints. Perhaps the issue is a anomaly but if the past is pattern and without providing comment, then it feels like spite.

Louis Rossman has a good breakdown video you can watch for more info.

UPDATE: Another relivent story today: FTC: Warranty-voiding language like Nintendo’s and Sony’s is illegal

Hello from Linode

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 19:20:26 +0000

If you are reading this, then the DNS gods have shown you to my new Linode web server!

Not really sure if I’m happy with WordPress in the long term, but I wanted to move this blog off my old server asap so I stuck with it through the migration. This was the last site to be moved off that old server and now I can close up that account and save $40 a month.

Feels great to be back on Linode too. We used to use Linode back in the day during a old startup I was in (had a few app server nodes, node balancer, db node). I really like the raw access we get on Linode and that it feels like a real computer (unlike AWS which feels like witchcraft for me).

Gaming Update, April 2018

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:57:29 +0000

So last month I explained how I recently unsubscribed from WoW, somewhat because of it’s addictive nature and somewhat due to an interest in catching up with my growing game backlog. A few weeks in what do I do but replace it with new crack in the form of Stardew Valley.

I remember buying and playing Stardew Valley when it first came out (along side when I built my current PC gaming rig) and while I thought it was neat at the time it didn’t grab my attention from WoW.

A few years later, one of my let’s player subs starts doing a series with it and it got me really hooked. It shares a lot of the “build” feelings I get from Dragon Quest Builders (which has sadly died down since I started my farm) but adds a lot of personality with it’s pixel art style and unique town characters. The realtime day cycle and never ending things to do makes it extremely addictive to play for me. (Just one more day…)

So yeah, I’m in Year 3 of my farm. It’s pretty much end game content and achievement stuff now. I am contemplating doing my own Let’s Play (with a new farm) with it but we’ll see.

In other game news, I have been continuing to play Secret of Mana. I probably have 2 more sessions before that one will be done. I think I’m going to finish the story but leave the grind-y achievements be and move on.

Last month I mentioned Pokemon Ultra Moon and I didn’t get too far. I finished the first island but not feeling it at the moment so put it down. (This despite catching a shiny Zorua too!)

I did fire up Hearthstone for a few play sessions at the end of the month. Wanted to make sure I got my card back for the month’s season. Also looking forward to the new expansion which should land mid-April.

One nice thing they are doing right now is rewarding full packs with quest completion. The cost to own cards is something that makes it hard for me to recommend Hearthstone to new players. Let’s hope their generosity continues in the year to come.

Up next? I’d really like to give Zelda: Breath of the Wild a second chance. I put in like 5 hours when I first got it but nothing since.

WWDC 2018 Social, Booked

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 19:39:04 +0000

I’m fully booked for WWDC week (Sunday, June 3rd – Thursday, June 7th) out in San Jose. No plans to attend the conference proper but looking forward to saying hi to friends and meeting some new ones at the alternative events.

If you end up going, please find me and say hi!

Gaming Update, March 2018

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 04 Mar 2018 21:23:00 +0000

Things have been pretty quite here so I thought I’d update you all on some things, you know the important stuff — like gaming!

First, what I’m not playing, World of Warcraft. I still love WoW. I think the Legion expansion went very well. I do however find myself playing it too much. As an example, I can sit down for a WoW play session and it will go on for hours, sometimes filling up most of the day. Whereas when I play other games I usually cap out at a healthy 90 minutes or so. Thats what I need to do so I can keep up with my work side projects as well as get into a pile of games I’ve bought over the last year but haven’t gotten into. I’m sure I’ll be back to WoW in time but I’m due for a good break.

So what am I playing? First up, I’ve been enjoying Dragon Quest Builders on the Switch the last two weeks or so. It’s a mix of Minecraft and live action RPG gameplay. It plays in the Dragon Quest 1 world and oozes nostalgia in it’s monsters, music and lore.

Next up is the Secret of Mana remake on PS4. This was one of my top games growing up and has an OST that I still listen to on a weekly basis while I work. The remake has been very controversial in gaming circles, mostly for the new music not living up to expectations. Overall I still prefer the SNES music as well but I don’t hate the remake at all. I find it a fun revisit to a classic game with a new flavor. And if you want the original music, it is included as a option.

Finally we have Pokemon Ultra Moon. I didn’t get too far into this remix version Generation 7 when it first came out. At the time I had just finished collecting the regional dex for Pokemon Sun so I ended up taking a break. Having been a few months out, it’s nice to be back. Despite the repetitive nature of the “remix” I still have fun. I even was lucky enough to get a Shiny Zorua for my early team.

What you playing? Ping me on Micro.Blog or email with your own gaming update.

2017 Retrospective

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 04:22:45 +0000

I’ve been kind of heads down with client work the last few months but wanted to say hi to those who still follow me here.

2017 was a bit of a sucker punch for me, but I survive.

After losing my job and having a neck surgery to open the year I was able to reboot my self employment under a new LLC. It took a few months but I finally landed some client work and have things pretty stable these days.

As for side projects I put a lot of time into OwlDeck in the spring but sadly it took a backseat to client work and revenue once summer rolled around. There is a good chance of it finding a second wind in 2018 as I have a bunch of teaching planned and it would be a great tool to have onhand.

I also decided this year to hand off my Philly CocoaHead responsibilities. I had been lead organizer for about 7 years and figured it was time. I still plan to be an active member but hope the extra hours can be put towards side projects in 2018.

Finally I’ve been learning new tech! I really want to get back into some web development and dedicated a fair amount of 2017 to relearning the web, from HTML5, to modern CSS (Flex, Grid, etc.) as well as new languages like Elixir and Elm.

My first Elm site is underway and I’ll share more as it comes together.

Thanks for checking in. Be sure to follow me on Micro.Blog as well. Have a great 2018!

Follow Me on Micro.Blog

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 18:31:33 +0000

Been leaning towards Micro.blog over Twitter the last few weeks. The new Mac desktop client helps a lot. If you are over there, consider following me.

Philly Blockchain Tech Meetup

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:41:47 +0000

Local geek friend Ben DiFrancesco is starting up a new meetup called Philly Blockchain Tech:

Don’t miss the first ever meeting of Philly Blockchain Tech! Special thanks to our gracious hosts, Elsevier, for providing the space, food, and beverages!

Pizza and drinks will be served at 6:00 PM. At roughly 6:30, we’ll hear two brief talks from our organizers. In addition to introducing the group, sponsors, and thoughts for the future, Ben will discuss “Why Technologists and Entrepreneurs Should be Excited About Blockchain” and Ryan will present “A Look at the Cryptocurrency Landscape” from a developer’s point of view.

After the talks, we’ll leave time for open discussion about the meetup. We want to hear from you about how you’d like to see this meetup evolve and what you’re hoping to get from it! Any remaining time will be for socializing and open conversation.

Please share this event with anyone you know who might find this interesting! While we hope to focus on technology and entrepreneurship, we welcome people with all experience levels and professional backgrounds!

RSVP if you plan to attend!

360iDev 2017 Takeaways

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 01:48:40 +0000

360iDev is a long standing iOS developer conference held out in Denver, Colorado. This was my first year attending after hearing many good things from friends. Some quick notes:

Sunday, was a pre-conference education day. It had a mix of full day and half day workshops. I think there was some good content to be had, but I don’t think the majority of the workshops were scheduled and paced right. Some felt like runaway session presentations, more than training. I will admit though I am very biased in what I like to see in my workshops / bootcamp environments being a teacher myself.
Monday saw the official kickoff of the conference. The opening keynote from Soroush Khanlou reviewed how his own blog had influenced his career and encouraged us all to share more, which I think is great.
The closing keynote on Monday came from Mike Lee and he tore apart the tech industry’s obsession with growth and how it has negatively impacted us all. He wasn’t afraid to point out how we enable it and I will say, while Mike’s loud presence can sometimes put me off, he does get me thinking.
Tuesday opened with a second blast of harsh reality with Jay Freeman’s, “That’s How You Get a Dystopia”. In this talk Jay pointed out how we are enabling some pretty scary scenarios, from the fragility of the Tor network, to Apple pulling VPNs from China. For more personal actionable ideas, Jay pointed out how we could augment our own data capturing methods to make sure if the data is ever breached its value could be lessened, eg: no need to capture the identifiable IP addresses of people when zip codes will do and are not 1:1 trackable).
Tuesday closed with a Stump the Experts panel and funny enough I ended up on the panel. (Must be my gray hair.) I was very happy to get an Apple IIc piracy/drm question right. Was also happy to hear Conrad’s Philly CocoaHead talk get quoted as a source to help the panel get 10 points for some other question.
On Wednesday, John (conference organizer) opened with a very transparent take on how this year conference went and it’s trajectory. While there are many positives experiences it was sad to hear the conference ended up running as a ~$10,000 loss this year. This is obviously a labor of love for John and his crew and to have a negative cash flow on top of all the volunteering is disappointing. They have started up a new Patreon to try help balance the loss. I’m signed up for a $10 monthly donation and if you want to support one of the longest running iOS conferences I’d love to see you join too.
Lunches came in the form of vouchers to visit the local eateries in favor of drab hotel catering which I think worked out great. Getting out of the hotel for some sun is a nice break too. My only real feedback here, would be to extend the lunch break a bit more, since I got the feeling more than a handful were late when returning and it’s not fair for the people doing presentations after lunch break.
The sessions themselves broke down into a mix of technical and social/skill topics and there were usually a choice of 3 or 4 per time slot. The fact that there were many hard choices is a good sign for the content’s quality.
I did two talks. One was on Running a Meetup and the other on Code Review. The Meetup talk had light attendance, which I kind of expected going in — it’s a niche topic. But, for the people who did come, they seemed to enjoy and I’m looking forward to seeing it hosted online for others. The Code Review talk saw a good crowd and many even stayed well after for discussion in favor of running out to lunch which I took as a good sign.
Walking away from the conference I’m very excited to get back to work and try some of these things out (both on current projects and new ideas). I also have a strong feeling to get more into open sourcing my code and in general sharing my work.

My thanks to John and all of the rest of the staff.

I'm Teaching a Half Day iOS Refactoring Workshop in July

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 15:38:30 +0000

When I re-entered the self-employed world last March and launched Zorn Labs LLC one of my main goals was to find a way to continue my education work. The first output of this effort has been workshops, specifically one on Refactoring iOS.

I’ve developed and taught the workshop for a local development studio Tonic Design and am now going to run it publicly.

iOS Refactoring Workshop

Throwing away bad code and writing something new from scratch is both risky and expensive. You need to avoid this temptation and instead learn to master small improvements over time.

Refactoring is the art of improving code without changing user behavior. Adding dedicated refactoring time to your workflow and sprints can pay for itself many times over in both added source code flexibility and application stability.

In this workshop we will review refactoring concepts from a high level and then explore example cases found in many iOS projects. As a group we’ll refactor and discuss the benefits of our changes. We’ll then work on our own (or in pairs) to execute what we’ve learned and then demonstrate the results for the class.

This workshop is targeted at those iOS developers who are getting over the hump of learning iOS and now want to know how to write higher quality iOS code. This workshop is capped at 12 people to make sure there is plenty of time for questions and individual attention.

Tickets for the half day workshop cost $189.00 even (we take care of all the ticketing fees). For more information on the agenda, see the event page.

TICKETS NO LONGER FOR SALE

Local performances of this workshop (and others in development) are available for corporate purchase. Contact us for more information.

Speaking at 360iDev, Come Join Us.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 May 2017 16:17:25 +0000

I’m happy to report some recent talk proposals were accepted and I’ll be speaking at 360iDev this August in Denver. I was already going to go to 360iDev regardless of the talks, I’ve heard great things from recent years, so this just makes the week that much more exciting.

My Talks:

Overcoming the Stress Surrounding Code Review, for the Betterment of Your Project and Career

Code Review is a practice where before a change is made to a code base, the code is first posted somewhere for peer review and critique. Code Review is an extremely productive way to catch problems before they are delivered to users as well as help individuals mature as programmers. In this talk we’ll explore Code Review by documenting the responsibilities of those involved, the person posting the code, the person (or people) reviewing the code, and then again back to the poster, as they react to the feedback given. In addition to the raw process of these stages we’ll also review the very human side of Code Review using real world stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. We’ll close with more general tips and tools that can help, as well as cover some of the how and why you might want to utilize these practices even in your own solo work. The best audience for this talk are people who are looking to improve their personal or team code processes. Those who attend will leave with very actionable strategies to execute productive code review on their own projects.

Starting, Growing and Running a Successful Developer Meetup

One of the most rewarding aspects of my career has been attending and then helping to run my local Apple developer meetup group. Meetup groups provide great learning opportunities but more importantly they provide great relationship opportunities for its members. In this talk I’ll share the story and lessons learned from running my local CocoaHeads chapter. After a quick review of the benefits and challenges of running a local developer group we’ll jump into actionable items for people starting, growing or running their own group. From defining success, to time expectations, marketing, sponsorship, planning content, tools and more. To close the session we’ll invite a few other group leaders from the audience to the front for a broad question and answer session about your specific issues and concerns. This talk is targeted at those who are running or would like to run a local developer meetup. It may also be helpful to those who attend a current group that needs guidance and/or focus.

If you are an iOS developer you should consider joining us. It’s going to be a great conference. Per CocoaHeads, use the coupon code “cocoacommunity” for 15% off all tickets.

Video: UIKit is Dead, Long Live UIKit!

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 08 May 2017 17:52:22 +0000

Philly CocoaHeads held a joint meetup with our Android friends for Philly Tech Week. At said meetup there were a bunch of lightning talks, and I did one.

UIKit is Dead, Long Live UIKit!

With the introduction of Swift and the rise of functional programming ideals in the community, UIKit and its MVC heritage has become a bottleneck for new ideas. This talk speculates how Apple might overcome this in the years to come. Attendee should walk away with a curiosity about the other UI patterns being developed and a resource list to learn more.

UIKit is Dead, Long Live UIKit! from Philly CocoaHeads on Vimeo.

I actually had a few vocal flubs in the recording (was a little stressed about the 10 minute limit) but figured I’d use the live one anyways since it has more humanity than me speaking to myself in my room. I hope you enjoy!

Meet OwlDeck, a New Mac Presentation App for Programmers and Markdown Geeks.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 May 2017 02:44:09 +0000

Today I’m launching the teaser site for my new app, OwlDeck.

OwlDeck is a new macOS presentation tool for programmers and geeks who need to display code and love Markdown.

If you are interested in OwlDeck I’d love for you to signup to its newsletter and email me your thoughts.

If you are interested in some behinds the scene stuff you can checkout the project journal I’ve been keeping over at Rested Experience. I hope to share more now that things are going public and timelines are set.

Really excited to be working on products again. 🙂

Introducing Zorn Labs LLC

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 17:44:06 +0000

As I alluded to after loosing my job at the end of January, I knew I’d take the majority of February to recover from my neck surgery and then get serious about work in March. We’ll it’s almost the end of March so I figured I’d do an update.

First, welcome Zorn Labs LLC, my new company. It will house my future consulting and product work.

Second, I am still looking for work. My goal is to find something 10-30 hours a week, doing iOS or iOS mentoring. To help express my skill set and goals I’ll point you to the new company site. I would appreciate all friends and followers to help spread the word.

Outside of setting up the new business and website, much of March has been spent towards marketing and planning. I had many lunches and coffees with prospects and friends. I even had a few offers but they sadly weren’t the right fit for me at this time. When I haven’t been marketing I’ve been trying to jumpstart some new web skills, refreshing my HTML5/CSS3 knowledge, getting deeper into Hugo template design for the new Philly CocoaHead website, and experimenting with Elixir and Phoenix.

For those interested in my Mac app project, you can also check out my project journal blog at: http://restedexperience.com. I’ve been trying to update that a little more often with my recent progress.

So that’s my March update. Thanks for the interest! More to come in April! 🙂

Neck Surgery Recovery Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 19:53:35 +0000

My neck surgery on Friday was a success.

It was more complicated than expected (2.5 hours under instead of the planned 45-60 minutes). The cyst had grown much larger than anticipated and was interwoven between lots of muscle and attached itself all over, including my spine. It was removed, unruptured, and the muscles rebuilt to hopefully fill in the void without too much of an indentation.

I have a large line of stitches but the hope is it should heal without too much of a scar. I’ll see the doctor in two weeks for a checkup and have been taking it easy with a lot of bed rest. Overall, the pain has been pretty manageable, the area is mostly just tight feeling.

Cabin fever is totally setting in and I’m looking forward to getting out of the apartment later this week. Plan to do IndyHall one day and then Side Project Saturday with the CocoaHeads.

I know I owe a bunch of people lunch and or happy hour drinks. If you want to get together let me know.

Fever Dreams

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 02:11:31 +0000

While I had hopes of doing more productive things, I ended up spending the last few days in bed fighting off a pretty lousy sinus / chest cold.

Between the medicines and the fever, I don’t think I had more than 90 consecutive minutes of sleep. The dreams were awful too. Not like vivid/scary but it was as if I’m trying to solve an algebra problem and the rules don’t make sense. Sometimes I had these really long dreams and then I’d wake up only to find I was asleep for an hour or so.

Nothing like being sick to help remind you to appreciate the importance of your health.

Anyways, I’m on the mend and taking some antibiotics to help make sure my system is clean for Friday’s neck surgery. I’m hopeful the recovery of that will be easier than this past weekend. I think it should be.

On Thursday we’ve got CocoaHeads! I’ll be there to MC but will probably take it easy at the bar afterwords for obvious reasons.

Finally, I want to take a quick moment to say thanks to everyone who reached out to me regarding my unemployment news from last week. I really appreciate the well wishes and leads. Getting that kind of response really helps put my stress at ease. Thanks so much.

“For the times they are a-changing”

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 17:33:35 +0000

I am no longer an employee of Big Nerd Ranch. The news came down on Monday. I can’t speak to any of the details but suffice to say I am disappointed. I really enjoyed working at BNR. My time there was productive, for my own personal growth as well as that of my students and clients. I wish them well, and continue to recommend them as a good source for iOS education.

So, what’s next for me?

On the immediate horizon, I’m a bit focused on my neck surgery, which is on Feb 10th. Its been scheduled since November. The goal is to remove a large cyst on the back of my neck. I will be put under for this surgery, so tomorrow I have to get a bunch of blood work and X-rays done.

For work, I open to ideas. Generally speaking I’m unlikely to make long term plans and would probably prefer to take on some smaller consulting work. I’d like to steep a bit on my long term options. If you have anyone who might be in need for an experienced iOS or Mac developer, let me know. Thanks for your help.

Rethinking My Music Storage

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 02:58:07 +0000

I’m not a huge music collector, at least not compared to some other people I know. I do have about 150 GBs of music in my iTunes collection — lots of it being video game soundtracks I enjoy listening to while I program.

A few things I have not liked about my historic setup:

Because the collection was 150 GB I could not store it on my main computer’s SSD (which was 256 GB in size).
iTunes sucks. I don’t want to get into details here but as a music player and organization tool it’s awful.

Some goals for my new setup:

I want to get rid of iTunes.
I’d like to store my music on Dropbox, preferably in a way where I can control which Music (if any) gets synced to my other Dropbox setups.
I have recently become a Spotify member. It’s got a nice collection I feel I can lean on AND it has some tools the player UI to support local files as well as streaming songs which I think will be key.

With all that said, what I’m up to:

First thing, I made a new iTunes library on my desktop and have started re-downloading my old iTunes music purchases. I have lots of music that is still DRM wrapped and these new downloads do not have such DRM.

Next, I’m going to slowly start to put the music into Dropbox. I’ll have a root level Music folder but inside I’m going to split the collection into Rare and Common. Common being for songs that are streamable from Spotify and thus being a folder I can selectively NOT sync on my other computers. The Rare folder will have all of my video game soundtracks and other albums I find to be incomplete or missing on Spotify. As I said, I like how Spotify can bring in local music into playlists and even lets you control the source folders and I’m hopeful this will work nicely.

We’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks. I’d love to hear if anyone else has an exotic setup like this.

Also, next up for a rethink is photos. Again, I’m really not happy with the current Apple solution and am thinking of alternatives. Feedback welcome.

Accessibility

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 19:28:54 +0000

At the Apple event a few weeks ago they began with a short video on accessibility.

I’ve learned a lot about accessibility on iOS over the last few years. Apple’s products are some of the most accessible in the world and for all the frustrations I have with Apple, this is definitely one of the high points I’m proud of.

I was also really pleased to see our own Philly CocoaHeads give accessibility some attention at a recent Side Project Saturday event. A group of people worked on improving the accessibility of the Wikipedia iOS app.

Anyways, I think the time is right for development agencies and indy consultants to put accessibility front and center. For them to say loud and proud, any app you hire us to build will have some basic level of accessibility.

Some people whom I bounced this idea off of thought it would be bad for sales. Maybe. But these are the probably the same clients who question code review because they think it is a similar waste of money. At the end of the day we all have have some level of standards onto which we execute our craft. People hire us because they can’t build software. They need us to point them in the right direction.

Somewhere out there, a construction agency is in a discussion whether or not to add a wheelchair ramp to the current project. Some people will add it because it’s required by law, others will add it because it’s the right thing to do.

The software industry moves incredibly fast, maybe even too fast. We don’t have regulations and inspectors like other industries. We have to regulate ourselves. The tools to improve access for our creations are ready. They work really well. They sit there, waiting for us to use them.

I don’t want to come off like I’m some know it all when it comes to accessibility. If you need real help with your app, contact my friend Austin who does consulting on the subject.

I do have some experience enhancing a few personal iOS apps and hope to make it a larger priority with my upcoming side project. Like a lot of things, I think the goal here is for continual learning and small, iterative improvements.

Dongle Emotions

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 22:08:18 +0000

After letting my bedroom / office get out of hand, I took some time today to clean up and get organized. I wrapped and grouped up my wires and even opened up some of the new USB3/Thunderbolt3 dongles I had ordered to go along with my new MacBook Pro order.

Now I don’t want to get into the current dongle drama surrounding the new MacBook Pro — but I do have a funny story.

A few years ago I worked as a self-employed contractor doing iOS work. I was at a meeting with a new prospective client. Overall the meeting went well and it looked like we’d be working together. At the end I was packing up all my gear and there was an accusation that I had taken their projector dongle. I was fairly certain I was in the right and this was a dongle from my laptop bag but did I really want to risk this multi-month contract for a $30 dongle? It was something out of a Seinfeld episode. Suffice to say, I left the dongle with the client that day to ease tensions.

Don’t mess with another man’s dongle.

These days I mark all my dongles (and I need a ton of them as a traveling instructor not knowing what a room will have) with “ZORN” to alleviate confusion.

Pre-“Hello Again” Mac Event Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 22:34:21 +0000

Having been a long time Mac user and developer it’s been very disappointing to see Apple ignore the hardware release cycle of the Mac platform over the last few years. I’m really anxious to see what’s going to come of the “Hello Again” event this week and I might even buy a new Mac depending.

Current Mac-state of Mind

So my main personal machine is a 2011 maxed-out iMac. I bought it after waiting and waiting for a proper Mac Pro update in 2011 that was never to come. Overall I’ve been pretty happy with the iMac. I have had to do a USB storage dance with some backups and media drives but overall it’s been a workhorse, with tons of days of Xcode and Warcraft under its belt.

Other Macs in my arsenal include:

A 2011 Mac mini which at times has served as a CI box but as of now is dormant (might be resurrected depending how CI plans turn out for my side project).
A 2012 Macbook Air which I use situationally. Recently for beta testing 10.12 over the summer and the occasional Philly CocoaHeads video capture.
My work provides me a high end Mid 2014 15-inch Macbook Pro. I’m trying to do a better job of keeping that machine in kind of a white room state just for work stuff with mixed success.

I also have a 27-inch Thunderbolt display and a 27-inch Dell display which I use to extend my Macs in various ways at different times.

To Upgrade or Not?

Technically speaking my 2011 iMac is working fine. It does have some issues: occasionally the wifi likes to disconnect, there are some color issues spreading out from the lower left corner of the display, the DVD drive broke (I bought an external one to supplement the occasional need) and the 256 GB SSD is not large enough to hold all my stuff anymore so I have an awkward HD layout with USB storage. The iMac also runs very hot. I suspect part of this is dust build up but have not investigated too much. While annoying, none of these issues are blockers.

The first big upgrade question is laptop or desktop? I’ve always leaned on the desktop experience for pure power but there are many things that push me towards a laptop as my main personal machine right now:

I could setup a very “swap” friendly environment that would allow me to have a home work station letting me plug in my personal or work laptop as needed.
Since I have a Gaming PC now I don’t need the graphic power of the Mac as much making laptop more feasible.
I am traveling more — more conferences, more work trips, single days at IndyHall (instead of a full time desk and me leaving the iMac there). A personal laptop for these days would help me with that home/work separation on the company laptop.

Other welcome improvements:

Retina Display. My iMac does not have a retina display and my hope would be that a new laptop from Apple would support this natively as well as support a future retina external monitor connection.
More SSD storage. Would be nice to consolidate my external drives into one big SSD.
If I go laptop, no need to upgrade two machines every year with a new OS, keeps all the software/licenses in sync.
Complier speed improvements. From a numbers perspective my iMac has a good CPU but I would hope improvements to the bus speeds and other architecture improvements would see some improved Xcode complier times.

I feel like in the process of writing this I’ve talked myself into a upgrade but we’ll see what comes out of Apple on Thursday. Enjoy the show.

You Don’t End Schindler’s List with a Pepsi Ad.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 19:20:01 +0000

It’s Friday. I’m actually a little low energy and so I decide to go out and pick up a late lunch. I’ll eat it in my car listening to a podcast and get some outside / sun time. The podcast of choice is Startup, a podcast about starting a business to make podcasts. It’s a good show, with interesting stories and high production values. It’s in season 4 so we are well past the pitch stuff and into the real forced growth issues that all VCs seem to face.

Today was a particularly powerful episode of Startup with lots of emotion. It even had me a little teary eyed. Then the end came, but it was not the true end. We still had an upbeat MailChimp ad, read by the same podcaster who just seconds ago had us all in tears.

It was one of the most drastic shifts of emotional voice I can remember and it had me rolling my eyes with bewilderment.

You don’t do this. You don’t play the heart strings of your audience and then shove an ad down their throat while they are in the moment. You don’t end Schindler’s List with a Pepsi ad.

The producers of this show are professionals. They are listening to these audio cuts many, many times over, but I suspect they aren’t doing it with the Mailchimp ads weaved in. Maybe they should.

The lesson here, once again is empathy. We need to constantly work to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience. If you have something important or emotional to share with your audience, you don’t weave it into your revenue system. I totally accept the need to use ads for some systems but if you must show ads, maybe for a show with an arc like this you show an extra one in the beginning so you can end clean? Doing it like this just seems emotionally tone deaf for me.

Documentation for NSViewController init(nibName:bundle:) is incorrect

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 17:48:45 +0000

Radar: #28802828

Documentation for NSViewController init(nibName:bundle:) is incorrect from Mike Zornek on Vimeo.

I say the wrong thing a few times in this spontaneous recording but hopefully there is enough here to reveal the problem. Not a major problem by any means but the Mac frameworks need all the love they can get so let’s be sure to report the changes we want to see.

A Few Dental Stories Amongst Subscribers

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 21:39:22 +0000

One of my guilty (and time consuming) pleasures is YouTube.

I watch a lot of YouTube. Mostly video game and movie stuff, lots of WoW channels (even though I’m not playing much right now), a few Let’s Players and of course all of the upcoming Pokemon Sun and Moon hype.

Well overtime, you really come to connect with these hosts, many of which have stories of historically working hard service jobs to now, finally being able to do something they love for a living. You root for these people. Sometimes a life event happens to them, and since they are already sharing so much they share that too.

Yesterday I watched a video from a wise cracking WoW player by the name of Asmongold. In it he shared his ongoing trouble with his teeth, his early inability to treat it, his shame of the problem, the trouble it’s caused and how he is on the path to get things fixed. It hit home for me as I’m in the same boat.

My Own Dental Story

When I was working for myself, I was making money but not tons of money. I had emergency medical insurance when I first started but no dental. In fact growing up we didn’t have enough money for dental so I didn’t see a dentist much past early high school. While my teeth were out of alignment there was no major debilitation. For a while, outside of some embarrassment from the alignment problems it wasn’t that a big deal.

One day while attending a Phillies game we went out for a pre-game dinner. That night was the first fallen domino for me. I bit down on something and cracked my back right molar. I did not see a dentist as I didn’t really have a lot of extra money and in all honesty at this point there was a bit of fear in me about doctor’s in general. I let the problem grow and over time other teeth started to break down.

Fast forward to this year. Once again I had another event, a newly cracked tooth and this time a very painful result. Unfortunately when the pain really started to kick in I was on the road. There wasn’t much I could do outside of Advil and trying to keep the tooth clean with salt water. On the one Thursday I was in so much pain I almost didn’t show up to teach my class. It was a wake up call. I did not want to let this problem which I had procrastinated about for so long interfere with my new teaching job.

When I got home I looked through my employee dental coverage and made arrangements to see a dentist. It took even more time to really start to feel better. The first session was a general consultation, a full mouth set of x-rays to see where I stood. Unsurprisingly, I needed a lot of work. At least a few root canals and at least one extraction/implant (that first cracked molar from years ago, which by this point was ruined). On the second trip we did the first root canal and while the time in the dentist chair was not pleasant it (and a set of antibiotics to help with the infection) did come to quell my pain and I was really happy.

Since then I’ve had a second root canal, build up of the two teeth, and a surgery of the gum to prepare for one of crowns that needs more room. Today, I’m kind of in an awkward state where I have one temporary crown and one tooth “open” to let the gum surgery heal. I have to eat on one side of my mouth (which takes a ton of mental energy btw) and I can’t brush the top left set of teeth (only rinse with a prescription liquid). I’m set to do the two crown molds in another week from now. After that, they’ll take about two weeks to come back in the mail and finally have them installed.

It’s a long process, of which I’m really only just beginning — and yeah, very expensive. I am happy though to be finally on the road to improvement.

Why post this? For one, I’d like to share the story with Asmongold just to say, I’m with ya man — keep up the recovery.

For anyone else who might be in a similar situation, I’ll say this, do try to get your teeth cleaned and/or fixed as soon as possible. It really sucks that it’s so expensive but it’s something that time will only make worse. I do wish I had reached out to my family about the problem and been more proactive about it in the past. I’m sure I would have gotten some support from them to make it happen sooner. If you have people to lean on, don’t be stubborn like me, let them help you. Good luck and feel better soon.

Closing Thoughts on Big Nerd Ranch’s Front End Web Class

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 01:48:24 +0000

I posted a few thoughts while I was attending the Front End Web class last week and I figured I’d put a cap on it with some final thoughts.

Disclaimer: If you happen to find this post and don’t know, I do in fact work for Big Nerd Ranch, so yes I’m partial but these are still my honest opinions.

Who is this class for?

Like other BNR books and classes, there is an expectation of some experience. You don’t need to be an expert by any means for this class but you should be comfortable with the basics of web design, hosting and how the web works. If you are looking for these beginner skills I’d recommend Code School and/or Code Academy.

With the basics taken care of, this class provides an accelerated but thorough tour of modern web development and the toolchains that you need to know. The class is great for people like myself, who have a history of web development but have been out of the game for a few years or mostly focused on the backend systems. Others who would find value include those who are looking to jumpstart a new web skill set for a new job or project.

Having a full week to escape the distractions of work and personal obligations really enables you to focus on the class at hand. Combine this with guided lectures and an experienced instructor to answer questions and discuss patterns, really elevates the value to “priceless”.

The Syllabus

The table of contents titles don’t really do justice to the details of each chapter. In total we build four separate projects:

The first had us work with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to do a moderately complex layout of a slideshow like page that included animations, responsive layout and modern markup techniques.
The second project was a Coffee Order system the helped us use HTML5 forms, Bootstrap styles, and JavaScript to communicate with a backend via AJAX.
The third project was a chat app, that utilized web sockets. For this app we not only built the front end but the backend too, in Node.js.
The fourth and final project was an EmberJS app that would have us catalog monster sightings. Ember is a big framework but I think the book does a fair introduction. We got to work with a relationship of models, and executed all the big features.

I thought the chapter and project progression went really well. There are some who might prefer to end with Angular or React instead of Ember but the good thing to know is the early class concepts give you a great JavaScript foundation to build on so you’ll be empowered to experiment with all of those projects and more over time.

That is a core value of Big Nerd Ranch classes that I really agree with. They teach you from the bottom up so you can understand how things work and not just how to assemble/configure things.

The Extras

There is lots of open lab time at night. You are encouraged to bring a side project to work on. While I did make some progress on my own project, an Ember Wiki project (I have some basic models and forms working, all backed up my a Firebase persistence layer), I did have to dedicate some lab time to the book itself to make sure I kept up.

In the afternoons we’d have time for a walk around the resort and on some of the days we even arranged for a shuttle van to take us to some of the exhibits, like the Birds of Prey and the Butterfly Center. Considering how focused we are during the class, these excursions are very welcome and a great way to clear your head and get a second wind.

Final Thoughts

If you want to learn a new technology, in this case Front End Web Development, and in particular if there is a time-sensitive nature to your needs it’s hard to imagine a better environment than a Big Nerd Ranch class. The ticket price does include lodging and food for the week so keep that in mind when shopping around or putting together a formal company request. If you have any questions, feel free to contact training support. They’ll be happy to help you out.

Should I Sell My Apple Watch?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 21:55:30 +0000

I did not partake in the first release of Apple Watch. I was curious but not curious enough. I bought a Playstation 4 instead.

Last month Apple had its announcements. I wasn’t all that jazzed about the iPhone 7 (even though I am due to upgrade my iPhone 6) so I thought I’d try out the watch instead. I ordered an Apple Watch Series 2, 42mm Stainless Steel w/ Silver Milanese Loop. I also got a Cocoa Sport Band for a little variety.

It’s been about a month with the watch and I’m not sure I should keep it. Few notes:

I suspect a big benefit of the watch is quick glances at notifications — but for me, I’m actively trying to remove notifications from my life. I turn them off completely on the desktop and audit them on iOS significantly.
There is the health tracker / movement component, but for me it’s not a huge draw. I don’t do heavy workouts much. I do like to take the occasional podcast walk, but I feel like I get enough info from my phone’s step counter if I really cared.
I don’t like the pressure that I need to wear the watch all day to fill up my bars. I did not wear a watch before this and it still feels very alien. I like taking it off when I type on my laptop or after I wash my hands (it gets wet and doesn’t dry off right away).
I find myself constantly fiddling with the magnet strap. I like the band to be slightly tight and it feels like it get loose quickly if I move my arms a certain way (putting on my backpack, making my bed, etc.).
The sport band strap is too small for me (even with the larger of the two bands) — it technically fits but is too tight. One more hole would have helped.

Am I missing something? What do you love about your Apple Watch? Let me know. As of now, I’m looking for ways to sell it — I think the money for me would be better put towards a new Mac (should they ever be rev’d again).

Mid-week Checkin

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 01:34:06 +0000

It’s Wednesday night and as expected it’s been both an exhausting and rewarding week so far here at the Front End Web class. Here is the table of contents we’ve been working through:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Setting Up Your Development Environment
Chapter 2: Setting Up Your First Project
Chapter 3: Styles
Chapter 4: Responsive Layouts with Flexbox
Chapter 5: Adaptive Layouts with Media Queries
Chapter 6: Handling Events with JavaScript
Chapter 7: Visual Effects with CSS
Chapter 8: Modules, Objects and Methods
Chapter 9: Introduction to Bootstrap
Chapter 10: Processing Forms with JavaScript
Chapter 11: From Data to DOM
Chapter 12: Validating Forms
Chapter 13: Ajax
Chapter 14: Deferred and Promises
Chapter 15: Introduction to Node.js
Chapter 16: Real-Time Communication with WebSockets

And what’s up next:

Chapter 17: Using ES6 with Babel
Chapter 18: ES6, the Adventure Continues
Chapter 19: Introduction to MVC and Ember
Chapter 20: Routing, Routes and Models
Chapter 21: Models and Data Binding
Chapter 22: Data: Adapters, Serializers and Transforms
Chapter 23: Views and Templates
Chapter 24: Controllers
Chapter 25: Components
Chapter 26: Afterword

Entering the class I was a little worried that my past web development experience would have made the early chapters moot, but to my enjoyment there is a lot of new web features and tools available since I did Rails full time back in 2012. Flexbox is particularly interesting and has me excited to do some testing to see if it will help me solve some layout concerns I have in my side project.

I also enjoyed the time we’ve spent working in pure JavaScript. We built out a very modularized system that would react to a simple coffee order page. I appreciate how we’ve taken the time to learn JavaScript from the bottom up. It makes you better understand and appreciate what more advanced tools like Babel and Ember are doing.

Tonight we closed with web sockets which is something I’m really hoping to embrace on future projects. Live content, no reload and real-time collaboration is where it’s at.

And then of course comes the “ranch” venue itself. Being able to get away and focus on the learning is priceless. Afternoon walks help clear your head. Here are some photos. Wish you were here. 🙂

Greetings, from the Ranch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 02:08:59 +0000

One of the great perks of working at Big Nerd Ranch is that you are allowed to take one Big Nerd Ranch class a year. This week I’m taking the Front End Web class, and am really looking forward to it.

At nights we are encouraged to work on a side project to help practice what we are learning in the day. I think I’m going to work on a wiki app — with a few touches that I myself have an itch for, drag and drop image uploads, code syntax coloring, and more.

I’ll check in later through the week. Wish me luck.

My New Experiment: Journaling All the Things

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 21:34:36 +0000

At CocoaConf I attended a session from my fellow Big Nerd Ranch coworker, Mark Dalrymple. In this session he explored the questions we ask when looking for bugs — or more specifically their solutions.

At one point Mark showcased a text document that in glorious detail documented the assumptions, questions and answers he was going through to solve a problem. Now, this wasn’t a document Mark made for the talk, it was from a real journal entry he had. He was Rubber Ducking but documenting the discussion like a court reporter.

If you ever work with Mark you’ll quickly discover he is a relentless notetaker. This is just one more example of how it can pay off.

Need to step away to work on something else, here is a document to reload your context.
Need to invite someone else on to help solve the problem, here is your knowledge transfer.
Want to write up a blog post to help others in the future, here is your draft.

I left the session very inspired. As a result, for this week, technically my vacation week but I’m working on side projects, I’m starting an experiment where I try to emulate Mark’s journaling habits as best I can. I have 3 documents at the moment:

Daily Journal — Mostly flat list with GOALS for the day and then ACCOMPLISHMENTS of what actually got done at the end. If something in the list has notes in and of itself, it’s hot-linked to those on their own wiki page.
Company Journal — Documenting the efforts I’m putting into my side project and the company that encapsulates it.
Tech Journal — Starting with Apple, here is where I’m collection my thoughts, issues, and bugs relative to Apple technologies. I expect to make more for other stacks like web in the future.

I’m using VoodooPad for the actual files/wikis themselves. It works well letting me organize like a wiki and can handle screenshots too.

We’ll see how I hold up. I want to give it my all for at least a week and then will do a retrospective as to how it’s working out. There are challenges (like my current typing speed) but lots of potential benefits too.

Update: More from Mark’s own blog.

Do you journal like this? Any tips or other feedback? I’d love to hear it. Message me on Twitter @zorn or via email: mike@mikezornek.com.

Isolating Mac Application Menu Behaviors

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:34:58 +0000

A Place for Everything, and Everything in It’s Place

My side project is a Mac app and last week I was working on a small story about sending feedback.

Send Feedback under Help Menu

As a user,

I want to be able to Submit Feedback via the Help menu,

So that I let the developer know what I’d like changed.

Acceptance Criteria:

Under the Help menu there should be option to submit feedback.

Upon selecting this menu item a new email will be open.

to: mzornek+storyteller@gmail.com

subject: [Storyteller Feedback] [1.0(101)] — that is the version number and build number

This was easy enough to get working but I wasn’t in love with my first implementation. If you read up on the Menu documentation for macOS you’ll find out application menus will follow the Responder Chain . A responder chain of a document-based application looks like this:

Now while this is a document-based application this behavior is an application-level behavior. The best spot to put it is in the AppDelegate but I don’t like polluting that class.

My new solutions helps improve the situation in lieu of the framework’s design constraints. I still have the IBAction inside the AppDelegate but it now forwards the behavior to another object that is more isolated, with a single responsibility and is easier to test.

// AppDelegate+SubmitFeedback.swift
import Cocoa

extension AppDelegate {
    @IBAction private func submitFeedback(sender: AnyObject?) {
        submitFeedbackService.submitFeedback()
    }
}


// SubmitFeedbackService.swift
import Cocoa

protocol URLOpener {
    func openURL(url: NSURL) -> Bool
}

extension NSWorkspace: URLOpener { }

struct SubmitFeedbackService {

    private var to: String {
        return "mzornek+storyteller@gmail.com".urlEscape()
    }

    private var subject: String {
        return "[Feedback: Storyteller \(versionString)] ".urlEscape()
    }

    private var versionString: String {
        let appVersion = NSBundle.mainBundle().appVersion
        let bundleVersion = NSBundle.mainBundle().appBundleVersion
        return "\(appVersion) (\(bundleVersion))"
    }

    private let urlOpener: URLOpener

    init(workspace: URLOpener = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace()) {
        urlOpener = workspace
    }

    func submitFeedback() {
        let urlTemplate = "mailto:\(to)?subject=\(subject)"
        guard let emailURL = NSURL(string: urlTemplate) else {
            assertionFailure("Email should parse fine.")
            return
        }
        urlOpener.openURL(emailURL)
    }
}

private extension String {
    func urlEscape() -> String {
        guard let result = self.stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters(NSCharacterSet.URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet()) else {
            assertionFailure("Could not escape string for URL")
            return self
        }
        return result
    }
}

// SubmitFeedbackServiceTests.swift

import XCTest
@testable import Storyteller

class SubmitFeedbackServiceTests: XCTestCase {

    func testCallingSubmitFeedbackOpensAMailtoURL() {
        let mockWorkspace = NSWorkspaceMock()
        let service = SubmitFeedbackService(workspace: mockWorkspace)
        service.submitFeedback()
        XCTAssertNotNil(mockWorkspace.lastOpenedURL)
        XCTAssertEqual(mockWorkspace.lastOpenedURL!.scheme, "mailto")
    }

}

class NSWorkspaceMock: NSObject, URLOpener {
    var lastOpenedURL: NSURL?
    func openURL(url: NSURL) -> Bool {
        lastOpenedURL = url
        return true
    }
}

Feels cleaner to me but I welcome feedback. I also suspect SubmitFeedbackService will evolve in time as there is other communication needs in the future.

PS: I hope to share more about the implementation of project in the future. I know there is a void of Mac application programming discussions going on out in the web. I will try to help out with my own journalling the best I can. Questions welcome.

CocoaConf DC 2016 Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 17:41:00 +0000

Had the pleasure to attend and speak at CocoaConf DC this past weekend.

CocoaConf is a touring training conference for iPhone, iPad, and Mac developers. We bring some of the best authors, trainers, and speakers to the most passionate, engaged developers in a region—together, they make magic!

CocoaConf draws anywhere from 100-120 developers. It’s a very nice, comfortable size. Large enough to host a diverse collection of personalities and ideas, but small enough not to feel overwhelming. People actively mingle and you get to meet lots of new faces without much effort.

This was my third CocoaConf, and first as a speaker. My own talk was at the end of the first day and I spent ample time the previous weeks preparing to avoid the need to do last minute slide updates and miss sessions — and I’m glad I did so.

The sessions were really good at this CocoaConf. Sure it helps that iOS 10 is just out and there is still lots to learn, but even the talks that were version agnostic, covering patterns, architectures and bug hunting skills all got my brain spinning with ideas.

One cool benefit of my work scheduling is now I have a week of stay-home vacation and I can hopefully direct that post-conference enthusiasm towards my side projects and some extra experimentation. Specific items on my list:

Do more interactive prototyping of my side project and follow up with some user interviews.
Do some experimentation with Perfect to build a simple Swift API and host it on Linode.
Continue to polish up my RanchWeather app and start a blog series reviewing the code patterns.
Do some experimentation with Twilio authentication in preparation for a web app project.
Inspired by the journalling abilities of MarkD, dedicate the vacation week to a journaling experiment: Daily Journal, Project Journal, Tool Journal.

As for my talk, I think it went very well. One thing I really like as a speaker is the conference not only has a session review system but they encourage submissions of reviews with a raffle for prizes at the end so you get a lot of feedback. Most of my talk’s feedback was very positive and I appreciate the criticisms, both good and bad. Always room for improvement.

So yeah, if you are considering attending or speaking at a CocoaConf, do it. It’s very rewarding and worthy of your time. If it’s on the east coast you’re more than likely to see me there too — and if so, say hi!

Regarding Knight Rider and Delegation

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 22:14:36 +0000

One of the saddest aspects of being a Big Nerd Ranch instructor in 2016 is that students these days do not appreciate the Michael Knight is to Delegation, as RoboCop is to Subclassing discussion of yesteryear.

From Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide:

Delegation

Let’s start with a story: Once upon a time, there was a man with no name. Knight Industries decided that if this man were given guns and wheels and booster rockets, he would be the perfect crime-fighting tool. First they thought, “Let’s subclass him and override everything we need to add the guns and wheels and booster rockets.” The problem was that to subclass Michael Knight, they needed to wire his insides to the guns, wheels, and booster rockets – a time-consuming task requiring lots of specialized knowledge. So instead, Knight Industries created a helper object, the Knight Industries 2000, or “KITT,” a well-equipped car designed to assist Michael Knight in a variety of crime- fighting situations.

While approaching the perimeter of an arms dealer’s compound, Michael Knight would say, “KITT, I need to get to the other side of that wall.” KITT would then blast a big hole in the wall with a small rocket. After destroying the wall, KITT would return control to Michael, who would charge through the rubble and capture the arms dealer.

Note how creating a helper object is different from the RoboCop approach. RoboCop was a man subclassed and extended. The RoboCop project involved dozens of surgeons who extended the man into a fighting machine. This is the approach taken by many object-oriented frameworks.

In the Cocoa framework, many objects are extended in the Knight Industries way – by supplying them with helper objects. In this section, you are going to provide the speech synthesizer with a type of helper object called a delegate.

What do you think the new metaphor should be?

Join Us at CocoaConf DC, Sept 9-10th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:40:59 +0000

I’ve been to multiple CocoaConfs as an attendee and it’s with great pride I’m happy to say I’ll be a speaker at one soon.

CocoaConf is a traveling conference focused on Apple technologies that has been around since 2011. It’s big enough to have multiple tracks of content but small enough that you’ll have time to socialize with most of the other speakers and attendees throughout the event.

The 2016 “tour” is coming to a close. I’ll be speaking at the Washington DC CocoaConf (Sept 9-10) but if you are on the west coast you might want to consider San Jose, CocoaConf (Nov 4-5th).

When registering use code “COCOAHEADS” for 10% off!

I can’t wait to see everyone. If you will joining us, please come by and say hi. I’ll have some Big Nerd Ranch swag for ya.

New Blog: Rested Experience

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 15:29:25 +0000

I’ve been working on a new Mac app for a month or so and it feels good to be building a product of my own again. I figured I’d blog the experience and hence, the new blog: Rested Experience.

Feedback and retweets very welcome. Thanks!

My New PC Gaming Computer

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 22:53:29 +0000

Final Parts List: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/4Wjcf8

I’m a fairly serious/casual gamer (as in serious love of many games, casual in that I can only play so many hours a week because of other life responsibilities). I play a lot of 3DS (Pokemon, Zelda) and I also own a Wii U, a PS4 and lots of other older/retro consoles.

I’ve been considering a gaming PC for a while. My main drive has been to support a mix of playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. I’ve been playing both on my 2011-era iMac (Bootcamp-ing into Windows for FF14) but the graphics performance of the old machine was starting to become a real limiting factor. Additionally was the interest in playing some PC-only (or PC preferred) games, like Overwatch and Stardew Valley.

A few months ago I started assembling a parts list and talking to some other friends. Part of me just wanted to buy a pre-built system but for better or worse my geeky friends assured me the assembly wouldn’t be that bad and it would let me save some money or buy some better components.

My initial target was to spend about $1500 and go for a upper mid-tier machine. I wasn’t interested in VR right now and just wanted something to play games. After getting acquainted with the video cards and performance I choose the GTX 970. I had a full parts list waiting to go but I didn’t pull the trigger. This was around April and I was still traveling a bit. I was also working towards paying off my student loans and decided I’d do that first.

When I came back to my parts list at the end of May there was the announcement of the new GTX 1080 and 1070. These new cards were destroying the performance charts and I started to get a little greedy. I kept up with the release, and noticing the 1080 was selling out joined an alert website to let me know where and when it became available. I eventually grabbed a Founder’s Edition directly from Nvidia. I will concede the upcoming non-Founder’s Edition cards are probably better cooled and cheaper but I was anxious to play and didn’t want to wait until end of June / July to get my hands on this thing. I splurged.

I came back and cleaned up my final parts list. I ordered the rest of the machine from NewEgg with a few pieces from Amazon. (Even if a bit more I’d prefer to buy from NewEgg and Amazon who are very easy to work with regarding returns and such.)

One item I was not planning to buy but did, was a new monitor. I was really hoping to get dual use out of my Apple Thunderbolt monitor (which I use with my iMac to extend my display) but as I did research it would seem hooking that up to a display port was not going to work out. I ended up buying a Dell Gaming S2716DG 27-inch monitor to make it work, and it does. I just am not enjoying using it with my iMac as much as my other Apple monitor since the colors aren’t matching like they used to.

Assembly

After ordering the parts a week before, I sat at home Friday night and got started with the assembly. I took my time. I read the motherboard and other manuals as I slowly connected it all together.

Some things gave me trouble. It took a few attempts to get the motherboard mounted in the case. In general there was always a scary feeling of putting too much pressure on a part to get it to fit in. The case came with a ton of different screws and I had to take a lot of time to make sure I was using the right pair for the job.

Windows

I worked on Friday from 8pm till about midnight and then Saturday morning 9am until lunch to finish the assembly. Much longer than a seasoned PC gamer I’m sure — but keep in mind this was my first build since college and even then I had a lot of help from my roommate. Once assembled I was lucky in that it powered on into the BIOS right away.

Despite some known gaming headaches, I decided you use Windows 10. It installed fairly quickly. During initial setup I did opt-out of a lot of personalization features that do not interest me. My next challenge, getting the network card working.

My gaming PC is not near my cable modem so I need wireless connectivity and surprisingly this is not on the motherboard — I needed a seperate PCI card. The card I bought seemed to use PCI for the housing but also plugged into the USB on the motherboard. After spending some time downloading the latest drivers and playing the format game with some USB sticks I eventally installed the software but the card would not start up. It took some searching but I eventually found out I had to disable XHCI Handoff to enable the third USB connection on my motherboard which is what I was using to connect the wireless card. With all of that figured out, I had network access on my computer and began downloading some system updates and then some games.

The Games

I’m sure I’ll buy some more in time (and would greatly love your recommendations, email me) but for now the primary PC games for me are:

Final Fantasy 14
Overwatch
Civilization V
World of Warcraft (idle until Legion)
Stardew Valley (New, not played yet)
Rocket League (New, not played yet)
Undertale (New, not played yet)
Hearthstone (I play this on my iMac and iPad as well but there are some nice Windows-only analytics add ons I might try.)

Final Thoughts

I have mixed feeling about the time I spent doing the build. It does feel empowering to refresh my memory of how to do it all — but that said it’s not something I get a ton of enjoyment out of so let’s hope this box keeps ticking without too much maintenance in the years ahead. And while I do carry a little guilt about going for the super high end video card I also look forward to for the next few years being able to turn on ULTRA options without losing frames.

The World Needs a Better Core Data

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 19:50:24 +0000

Lots of WWDC predictions out there this week. Here’s a dream of mine. Sadly one that I’ve given up on, at least from Apple.

A Better Core Data.

Tracking state is 1970s thinking. We should be tracking changes over time and rendering the current state of the object graph.
Migrations, the number one feature. As you add new entities to a store, you do so through a migration. Change a column name, you do it through a migration. The current Core Data migration story is embarrassingly complex and very fragile. We need to have trust in our migrations.
A single, focused, persistent store format. Allowing people to choose between XML, Binary, SQLite, InMemory and Custom adds more pain than it solves. Keep things simple. One on-disk format.

Clash of the Coders: Day 0

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 15:35:33 +0000

One of the many interesting benefits I get working for Big Nerd Ranch is the opportunity to participate in many fun and unique events. One of the bigger ones is called Clash of the Coders.

Clash of the Coders is an annual coding competition, whereby Big Nerd Ranch effectively “shuts down” for a a few days to allow developers to flex their coding muscles in to build something (anything) that is both wizardly and useful.

This years edition of “Clash” starts at 6pm tonight, Wednesday March 30th. While people are encouraged to brainstorm ideas and form teams ahead of time, no code shall be written until the event starts.

During the event we are treated to full time catering, shoulder and neck massages as well as other free-form geek activities. (I hear Christian will have his new Oculus Rift around for testing.)

While remote nerds can choose to stay remote and participate, anyone who wants to come into the office can. Last year I was at home and didn’t really get into it. This year I’m working out of the office so I’m anxious to see how it all works out.

As for my project and team, I’m still working on it. I have an idea and if need be will work on it solo but am also hosting a meeting after lunch for ‘Clash Singles’ to see if we can form some last minute teams.

At the end of Clash (Saturday, 6pm) we have a nice BBQ dinner (spouses and kids welcome) and we run a science fair of sorts, where people demo their work and answer questions. People are judged on project complexity, presentation and other factors. Bonus points are awarded if your team was interdisciplinary (mixing people of different departments) and if you were able to integrate any of the emerging technologies on our watch list. Top prize allows you to choose from list of high end geeky toys (think drones and musical instruments) with second/third prizes getting some nice Amazon gift cards.

I’ll post more as Clash gets going. If you have any questions let me know.

How We Record Talks at Philly CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 22:44:52 +0000

I came across this post from Rico Jones on how he records the Portland Ruby Brigade’s monthly meetings and thought I’d do something similar for how we record the Philly CocoaHead presentations.

Why Only Main Talks

This first thing I’ll note is we do not record the entire meeting. Early on this was to due to the experimental nature of our recording setup but more recently, at a leadership meeting, we made the call to continue to only record our “main talks”. We do this for a few reasons:

Not recording the “show and tell” talks lets those be a little bit more free-form, with less pressure on the presenters (which is a big reason why they are in the agenda).
Many of the show and tells are in-progress app demos, and so there is benefit to keeping them non-public.
We expect a higher level of preparedness for the main talks, and to ask for people to put that much time into a talk, it would seem wrong not to capture it.
If the whole meeting were being captured / broadcast it would encourage people not to come.

The Setup

Starting from the presenter’s laptop we provide an HDMI cable. If they want to present or demo from an iOS device we have an HDMI to Lightning adaptor.

The HDMI cable then feeds into our capture device, an Elgato Game Capture HD. This device is targeted at the streaming game market but is just as viable to capture normal HDMI signals. The device itself is an HDMI passthrough with no frame drops or anything. The device is even powered through the USB cable so no need for a power cord. The video / audio is then compress into mp4 (on device using hardware encoding). The compressed signal is sent to a Macintosh running some custom Elgato software. I use an older Macbook Air to act as our dedicated capture computer. While there are many other features for dedicated streamers, we simply press record.

We then take the other end of the HDMI cable and route it to our projection system. Now the Apple Store that hosts us has a very impressive setup but sadly it’s not as easy as it should be. They have an HDMI connection, and while it works for the Apple TV it doesn’t register when we plug it into a Mac. To get around this we used to use an HDMI to DVI adaptor and the alternate DVI input. It worked fine but doing it this way lost the audio. Recently we’ve fixed this by buying a converter box that splits the HDMI into both DVI and an audio jack. Again, the Apple Store does have a in-house roof speaker system but for us sadly it’s been down. In the interim we’ve been getting by with a Beats Pill Speaker the Apple Store is nice enough to provide.

While not part of the capture, I will give a friendly nod to Fin, an iOS performance timer we run on an iPad mini to help the speakers know how much time they have left. Works great.

I’ll also recommend the presenter remote I use. It’s a Kensington, with a nice simple to use USB dongle that slips into the remote when not in use. It has a laser pointer too but I can’t say I use it much. Battery life has been very good for this device.

So that captures the video and audio from the presenter’s laptop or device but what about the speaker’s voice? For that we use a lapel clip on mic and Digital Audio Recorder. The recorder can work without the mic if you are looking to capture a room discussion but for 1 person, adding the mic is a real quality difference.

After the meeting we combine the video and audio captures using ScreenFlow. Editing is fairly simple for most cases, usually as simple matching up the action and adjusting some audio. The finished product is exported and then uploaded to Vimeo Pro, which acts as our library of sorts. (We pay for Vimeo Pro to keep ads out and to make sure we have API access.) People can watch the talks through Vimeo itself or our new Apple TV app, “PhillyCocoaHeadsTV” (search for “CocoaHeads” on the TV).

Future Improvements

Overall I’m pretty happy with the current setup but I do have some ideas:

It would be nice if we could get the Apple HDMI connection to work, that would simply our wires a bit.
At work we use a Catchbox to help capture Q and A. It would be nice to work out something similar for us.
While it might save a bit of editing time to convert to a wireless mic, it’s pretty low on my list. Would have to improve some other aspect to make it more worth while.
There is a lot of equipment to carry in, setup and carry out. It’s very reliant on me personally at the moment. I’ll probably be missing a meeting or two this year so I hope to train someone else to run this while I’m gone.

Hope you enjoyed my rundown. If you help capture stuff like this and have any tips or tricks, let me know. Thanks.

Managing Remote Teams

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 21:25:28 +0000

Local company Wildbit has been nice enough to host a running series of meetup events focused on running a software business and all that it can entail. Last night we discussed Managing Remote Teams and as a remote employee myself I was interested to hear what others people had to share. Below are some of my notes.

Context

In attendance we had about 12 or so people. Many from Wildbit (many of their remote people were in town), but we also had a pair from another small (6+) local software company, one from a local company researching coworking and myself, whom works remotely for the Big Nerd Ranch, down in Atlanta.

General Observations

Running an all in-person office has unique organization challenges and benefits.
Running an all remote office has unique organization challenges and benefits.
Running a hybrid in-person and remote office has unique organization challenges and benefits.
Even still, things vary based on the size and work of your company.
No rules are true for everyone so be flexible.
Be prepared to spend time and energy on this.

Why Consider Remote Employees

Expands your potential hiring pool greatly.
Very helpful if you are using niche technologies where it can be hard to find experts (Closure, Rust, etc.).
Potential benefits in having time shifted work (but this can also introduce communication problems, lag).

How to Get Started

If you currently have a 100% in-person company, adding remote people will be a significant culture shift. Be prepared.
No one wants to be the first remote hire on a team.
Consider adding multiple remotes at once.
Consider offering work from home to current in-person staff to help the new culture work itself out.

Challenges

It can be hard for a remote employee to demonstrate what they are working on.
Being remote requires more thorough and regular communication than most people expect.
Lots of people romanticize remote work from DHH’s writings and don’t respect the real life challenges of it all.
Sometimes with a hybrid company, teams will be setup where you have two people “in office” and one person remote on a project. It can be real easy for the two people in office to share more face-to-face leaving the remote person feel left out.
If you have employees in different states / countries, you have to make sure you are following the approbate employment laws of those states / countries.
The whole “programming in your underwear” trope is really misguided. Most successful remote people have a schedule, take showers, get properly dressed and have a dedicated work spaces.

Face to Face Retreats

Everyone seemed to agree that it’s a bad idea for the remotes to never come together. Everyone benefits from real face to face time so plan for it early.
Wildbit has yearly company retreats, where they work, plan for the year ahead and otherwise define the goals and values that should guide all their decisions.
Other companies do more vacation oriented retreats to help connect people socially.
It was also suggested that depending on the size of the company it could benefit from have some company wide events and then some smaller more team focused events.

Things You Can Do to Help Remote Employees

Setup a Slack or HipChat for communication.
- Additionally try to have people communicate what they are doing. “Starting feature X”, Reviewing PR Y”, “Stepping out to get some coffee”, “Breaking for an hour to watch a conference talk” — sharing these can help people better understand what’s going on.
Consider giving them an annual office stipend to improve their workspace; equivalent to the money you’d spend giving them an office in your building.
Make sure all in-office systems are available to remote folks. Things like file servers, whitelisted IP API access, etc.
Prefer video chat over audio chat. Seeing human faces helps communication and empathy.
When running a video chat, consider having even the in-office people stay at their desk and connect to give every “virtual head” its own space. (I’ve also had everyone use their laptop for the video and a shared phone for the voice.
If you are presenting and the video is going out to remote people, don’t forget to ask them for questions and check the chat room.
If you are a manager and are set up to have 1:1 monthly meetings with in-office people, consider offering bi-weekly for remotes — since they might be more out of sync.

Equipment

Some people were enjoying the HighFive video conferencing hardware — though they needed more seats than the current solution offers for their company wide stuff.
BNR’s recently been using the YouTube Live service to stream and capture video with fair success for our larger meetings / internal educational talks.
One AV tool BNR uses is a toss-able chat box that contains a microphone so after large meetings, during Q and A, the remote folks can hear the questions being asked.
The Double was brought up reguarding its use as a virtual presence. It’s cool stuff but of questionable return value.

Hope you enjoyed my notes. If you have anything to share about your own remote work let me know.

Xcode Shortcut: Quick Open in Assistant

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 20:57:45 +0000

This answer / revelation caused a bit of a stir in the Philly CocoaHeads Slack so I figured I’d share it here as well.

Lots of people know and live by Xcode’s Quick Open Menu. You hit Command-Shift-O and start typing the name of a file, a class or a method and have some very good options made available to you. Make a selection, hit return and bam, the file is now live in your editor.

But what about the assistant editor? Historically some of the best uses for the assistance editor was to view a file’s counterpart file, the header for an implementation file and visa-versa. With Swift’s lack of a header files, some people have come to put use the assistance editor of test files.

Regardless as to what you want in the assistant editor it’s always been a little clunky to pick the file. Well now you can use the Quick Open menu for this too, and it’s oh so simple.

Hit Command-Shift-O and make your selection as normal. Instead of hitting Return, hit Option-Return — the file will now open in the assistant editor pane, opening it if need be.

That’s all there is to it. It’s a small feature but very handy for those trying to stick to their keyboard and avoid the mouse while moving around in Xcode.

For a handy Xcode 7 Shortcut Reference Card check out the Big Nerd Ranch iOS Course Resource repo for a PDF download. You can also get the card in print by ordering our latest edition of iOS Programming, 5th Edition — updated for Xcode 7 and Swift 2.

PS: Props to @lyricsboy for catching my typos!

Philly CocoaHeads: History

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:53:29 +0000

Being the lead organizer of the Philly chapter of CocoaHeads, I always welcome the opportunity to chat with members of other meetups. It’s great to compare notes on how we run our groups, what’s worked and what’s failed. In particular I’ve recently chatted with the leadership of the Nashville CocoaHeads and was also able to attend an Atlanta CocoaHeads meeting while visiting Big Nerd Ranch. It was a great experience and has me inspired to capture some of my thoughts here on the blog. This first article is a walk down memory lane to document the history of Philly CocoaHeads.

Getting Started

The Philly chapter of CocoaHeads started out of IndyHall in 2008. IndyHall is a coworking space, a place for people who can work from home but choose not to; perhaps because they want a work/home separation or just to participate in the greater creative community. Back then IndyHall was still fairly young but had attracted together a strong tech following including:

Andy Mroczkowski and Far McKon who were working for the local company Neat, and their Mac software / scanner combo.
Jason Allum who was working on RipIt (which would later be sold to The Little App Factory).
Dave Martorana who had a few apps, including MultiFirefox and Multiplex (a media server app ahead of its time).
Joah Aas, who worked for the Mozilla organization and is now most known for his help with the Let’s Encrypt project.
Randy Zauhar, a local professor teaching Bioinformatics and Chemistry at University of Sciences. Randy had previous help run and host a group called: PHAD, Philadelphia Apple Developers.
And myself. I was a basic IndyHall member and was working on ProfitTrain updates at the time.

Philadelphia Apple Developers (PHAD) never grew to be anything very large but I remember it fondly. It would usually be about 4-6 of us sharing a pizza and showing each other our Cocoa projects. I vividly remember Randy showing off his spreadsheet app which listed chemical equations on one side and then had an OpenGL cell rendering the compositions on the other. I also remember doing talks on Subversion and then Core Data. Again, they were small meetings but having even a few people who were interested in or working in Cocoa back then to bounce ideas off was a huge win.

The early meetings of our group were ran by Andy Mroczkowski and actually marketed under the name PhillyCocoa and not CocoaHeads. The meetings were very demo heavy with lots of roundtable questions and discussions filling in the cracks. Some members took to working on a side project, a calculator, outside of the meeting. The project didn’t get too far but the remanence of it have been preserved on GitHub.

This is a photo of IndyHall, Strawberry Street Edition. The first “CocoaHeads” meeting was held in that back meeting hut.

As the iOS SDK (or iPhone SDK as it was called back then) was announced there was a serge in new members and interest in the group. The biggest hurdle seemed to be Objective-C itself so we planned and ran a workshop.

Over two Saturdays, mixing lecture time and coding exercises from Learn Objective-C on the Mac, by Mark Dalrymple, Scott Knaster we got 12 or so people a head start on iPhone programming.

New Leadership

Meetings continued, now at IndyHall’s new home on 3rd Street (or N3RD Street as it would come to be known as). Eventually a December meeting was announced and Andy let it be know that if you were interested in the future of PhillyCocoa to attend. At the meeting Andy announced his upcoming departure to head to San Fransisco to be apart of a startup. Two volunteers came forward to help organize the group in his stead, myself and Mike Deaven.

Meeting Format Changes

Over the next year me and Mike enacted a handful of changes we’d hope improve the group.

One immediate change we did was move the website to WordPress. Previously Andy had a custom Ruby CMS / publish thing going and it wasn’t easily portable. I was able to get all of the old post converted into WordPress. The main goal here being enable multiple people to post and not have the code be machine dependent.

Another change was subtle, but I started to embrace the CocoaHeads brand in our naming and introductions. I always was aware of them and to me it seemed helpful to take the name and have our chapter listed on the main global site.

We also started to fiddle with the meeting format itself. Moving the pizza / social time to the front end of the meeting. This helped since we usually had a lot of stragglers arrive between 6:30 and 7:00, so by having the pizza upfront we could make sure to start the meeting with everyone present.

I also started to be a little more rigid in the introductions, making sure to repeat the basics of the group, who we were, what we did, when we met. I wanted new people to quickly get a sense of expectations.

The hardest thing back then was getting people to do talks. There were many meetings in the early days where we did not have a formal speaker and so it was on my shoulders to build a presentation to keep the group entertained. It was a lot of work but I think a major reason why we were later became more successful. I think it’s incredibly important to be consistent, to have that meeting every 2nd Thursday no matter what. Setting up that pattern and not giving into canceling meetings really helped solidify the group.

To help spur talks we started to request smaller commitments, show and tell time. A short talk or demo usually 5-15m in length. Much less to prepare and much less anxiety. It started slow but eventually kicked off a pattern of people coming forward to do talks, even “main” talks.

Adding Members through Meetup.com

Up to this point Philly CocoaHeads did not promote itself too much. You heard about it through word of mouth or via IndyHall announcements. Looking to grow the community we decided to join Meetup.com for more exposure. It took a few months to get going but eventually started to bring in tons of new faces. Meetings quickly grew from about 10-12 people, closer to 20-25.

As of today we have about 870 registered members on Meetup.com. Now most of them are not active members. I’d guess if you defined “active” as participated in a group event sometime in the last 12 months, you’d probably end up with ~200 members.

Alfie joins us from NY via a Double.

New Events and Expanding the Leadership

When iOS 7 was announced we decided to do a special hack day to celebrate. We sold tickets to help buy a nice catered lunch and gathered at IndyHall on Saturday to hack on new iOS 7 APIs. The event was a huge success.

One newer member wanted to help do this more often and so Tom Piarulli joined the leadership to help run what has now become known as Side Project Saturday. SPS is typically the last Saturday of the month, starting at 10am and running until about 5pm. People come and go, work on their side projects, ask questions and otherwise socialize with their fellow geeks.

At around the same time the leadership also welcomed Kotaro Fujita to help run our website and Twitter account.

Moving to the Apple Store

We are fortunate enough to have a very nice Apple Store here in Philadelphia. Sometime in 2013 I was approached by the business relations manager from the store. He came to a few meetings and introduced himself. He was really impressed with our group and offered to help us out and possibly host the meeting.

I was kind of torn. We had our start at IndyHall and while we were definitely starting to outgrow the space I didn’t want to leave. Me and Kotaro took a trip to the Apple Store to checkout the Briefing Room. The room is incredibly nice. It’s on the second floor of the store, not open to the public. It’s kind of a VIP area for larger demos and meetings. It had 5 mounted TVs, all wired up for AirPlay and sound. A huge wood table with 16 swivel chairs but plenty of space around the edges for fold up chairs. Fully laid out we could host 40-45 people and have a great AV setup to help support the speakers.

We made the move in November 2013 and it’s worked out great. The space is extremely accommodating and many of the members certainly enjoy the prestige of getting to meet in such a private venue.

Workshops, Suburb Side Project Saturdays, and CocoaLove

In 2014, Curtis Herbert who had already been very active in the community as well as doing some talks for us joined the leadership team and started multiple new projects.

Firstly was CocoaLove, which started out best as I can recall as friendly outburst during my “Industry News” section while reviewing upcoming conferences. “Why don’t we have any conferences here in Philly?” — and so it began. CocoaLove is not an official child of CocoaHeads but we obviously share a lot of the same goals.

Curtis also helped spur new educational events we came to call Workshops. Typically one day, 5 hour events with paid for tickets (most money going to the speaker to help compensate them for prep time). We ran about six or so over the last year and a half, covering introductions to Objective-C and then later Swift, App Marketing, UX design, and more. Workshops are incredibly loved by our members and sell out quickly. The hardest part about running them is the custom content creation. We have some ideas on how to improve that moving forward and hope to offer more Workshops in the year ahead so stay tuned.

And finally we have our “Suburb” edition of Side Project Saturday. The city of Philadelphia is very flat and wide, with an extended suburban layout. We have many members who live outside the city and can not always participate with our center city events. To help, we started running a “Suburb” edition of our Side Project Saturday event. These are held at the Apple Store in King of Prussia. We’ve been able to host a few and hope to do more. Again, Curtis has been very helpful in organizing this.

Videos

In 2015 we continued to evolve and expand what we offer, this time with recordings. We’ve been talking about recordings for awhile but in 2015 things started to fall into place. I’ll go into detail as to how we record in a future blog post, but put simply it’s capturing what video we pipe to the monitors and then using a lapel microphone for the speaker to capture their voice. After the meeting we match the two together and then publish to Vimeo. During the fall we also added a custom AppleTV app which streams the content as well (search for “CocoaHeads” and you’ll find it).

Book Club

Another new endeavor for 2015 was the Book Club. We started it over the summer reading through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and then restarted it this winter with HackingWithSwift.com. Book Club basically has members work through chapters and then meet online to discuss how it went. Over the summer we met every other week, while the winter edition has been more aggressive doing it every Monday. A big thanks to Michael Mayer for helping to run the latest Book Club season.

The Future

So it’s 2016 and things continue to look good. I’d say the biggest problem we have is that we occasionally max out of room occupancy at the Apple Store but not enough to really justify a new venue. We also recognize our website could use a lot of work to meet our high standards but it remains a fairly low priority overall.

As the main organizer I’m extremely lucky to have such great support from the members and the rest of the leadership. There is no way we could do this much work if it wasn’t for the many volunteers we have. I’m extremely proud of the community we’ve made and continue to run.

Recommendations

To those running similar meet ups a few closing recommendations:

Be consistent with meeting dates and locations.
Be willing to do a lot of personal presentations and/or MC of roundtables when other speakers are not available in the early days.
Don’t be afraid to shake people down for talks. Also remember it’s much easier to get them to sign up for a talk a few months from now than in a few weeks. Take advantage of that.
If meeting after work try to have some food and drink available. We do pizza cause it’s relatively cheap and easy. You want to feed them but remember they aren’t coming for the food. In the early days a donation jar can usually cover most of the costs, later you might need sponsorship. I’ll have more to say on that in the future.
Help spread the responsibilities. Even smaller things like handing the food, taking meeting notes or running the group Twitter helps turn “the group” into “our group”.
Have fun.

Video: Consuming JSON in Swift

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 17:04:53 +0000

I gave a talk at Philly CocoaHeads last week reviewing various ways to consume JSON using Swift, including a preview a new open source project we have coming out soon™ from Big Nerd Ranch called Freddy.

Update April 27, 2025: Video Unavailable.

Consuming JSON in Swift, Mike Zornek from Philly CocoaHeads on Vimeo.

JSON is a fundamental internet format and if you are building iOS apps the chance you need to download and consume JSON files is extremely high. Additionally, with the introduction of the statically typed Swift language it’s been a little more difficult to work with JSON properly. This talk will cover what JSON is, how one can work with it naturally in Swift, the limitations of doing so, a review of a few popular third party solutions and the introduction of a new JSON tool about to be open sourced by Big Nerd Ranch.

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/zorn/consuming-json-in-swift

31 Days, 31 Products: Skitch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 21:16:17 +0000

Day 31: Skitch

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Skitch is a screenshot and notation tool from Evernote. With Skitch you can take screenshots using various options and then annotate them with vibrant pink arrows, shapes and text. Like this:

I really enjoying using Skitch during app audits where I can take a bunch of screenshots on device and then import them for annotations. Having the visual evidence to help back up your argument is really handy. The software itself is fairly strait forward and focused. With an Evernote account it will sync all your files though I usually import and export them as I need.

Skitch is a free download on the Mac App Store or directly from the Evernote website. Enjoy!

31 Days, 31 Products: OmniDiskSweeper

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 02:40:39 +0000

Day 30: OmniDiskSweeper

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

When choosing software for this series I particularly get a kick out of linking to products I suspect many might not know about. With that in mind, tonight I present OmniDiskSweeper!

OmniDiskSweeper is a little app from the OmniGroup they’ve been distributing for years that let’s you scan a hard drive and sort every folder by the size its taking up. OmniDiskSweeper is a great tool to use when you are trying to figure out how to trim down your hard disk usage.

I currently have an iMac whose main system drive is a 256 GB SSD and between my Dropbox, video games and video editing work it’s very easy to fill up. Using OmniDiskSweeper I quickly figure out what needs to get deleted or migrated to my external media drive when free space gets too small.

OmniDiskSweeper is a free download. Enjoy.

31 Days, 31 Products: iOctocat, GitHub on your iPhone and iPad

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 23:11:29 +0000

Day 29: iOctocat, GitHub on your iPhone and iPad

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

For mobile GitHub management nothing beats iOctocat. If you find yourself on the road and needing to check in with GitHub this is a must have app. I use it mostly for keeping track of pull requests and getting push notification of status changes.

iOctocat is a free download on the App Store with in-app purchased to unlock a Pro feature set for $14.

31 Days, 31 Products: Reeder

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 03:05:02 +0000

Day 28: Reeder

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

I had a bit of an RSS resurgence when I got my iPad Pro last year and my reading app of choice is Reeder.

Simple and consistent can sounds kind of boring but I think that it can also make for the best iOS apps. Apps that get out of the way and let their content be king work best — and for Reeder this is no exception.

Using Reeder you can import your feeds from a large list of “feed hosts” (I use Feed Wrangler). Like similar reading apps Reeder provides a nice sanitized version of the articles as well as quick links to their original HTML version. When you are done reading or skimming, Reeder has actions for Instapaper saving or otherwise sharing what you’d found on Twitter or other social platforms.

While I enjoy Reeder primarily for the iPad, it works for iPhone devices as well. Reeder costs $5 and can be purchased from the App Store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Flixster

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 01:52:03 +0000

Day 27: Flixster

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

We just had a great year of movies and 2016 keeps them coming. The app I use to keep on top of trailers and showtimes is Flixster.

I feel like I installed Flixster when I first got my iPhone. It’s a great app to launch when you have some time to kill. I love watching trailers and looking at the release calendar.

A free download and simple UI. If you don’t have Flixster, give it a shot.

31 Days, 31 Products: Dash

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 18:58:12 +0000

Day 26: Dash

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Dash is a super nice and clean API Documentation Browser.

I use Dash with Xcode and iOS/Mac API primarily but you can in fact integrate Dash with a long list of other third party code editors and download over 150 language/API document sets too.

Having the API docs available at the click of a mouse (or key command) from your favorite text editor is a must have for any serious developer. If you been limited yourself you Xcode’s default experience I highly encourage you to try out Dash.

Dash does have a free trial available with an in-app purchase to unlock the full version for $25. It is available from the App Store as well as direct.

31 Days, 31 Products: Sketch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 27 Dec 2015 18:19:08 +0000

Day 25: Sketch

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Sketch is a vector-based design tool for the Mac that is very good for people designing user interfaces.

I’ve owned Sketch for a while now. I’ve used it to mock up some UI and icons in the past but I’m not really an expert. I know enough to say I do like it and if you are interested in using it for interface design I highly recommend it.

I have a goal for the new year to become more proficient in Sketch. I’m signed up and really looking forward to attending the Big Nerd Ranch class on UI design in April. It includes teaching Sketch along side higher level UI concepts. I’ve also bought an online video course that I hope to start working through soon.

If you are at all curious I encourage you to download the free trial of Sketch and give it a go. If you like it, a license can be purchased for $99 from their online store.

31 Days, 31 Products: SuperDuper!

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 26 Dec 2015 19:47:44 +0000

Day 24: SuperDuper!

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

This is a timely recommendation as just yesterday I had a bit of a scare where my external 2TB (platter-based) media drive decided not to mount. Happy to say the drive did wake up eventually but I wasn’t too concerned since I has a fairly recent backup I made with SuperDuper.

SuperDuper is a cloning tool that can help you clone a hard drive to another drive or DMG file. The drive based clones are fully bootable and can help you out when your main drive bites the dust. SuperDuper can do full or incremental backups, and these can also be scheduled to run overnight.

My current home setup includes an 2011 iMac with 2 internal hard drives. A 256 SSD acts as the main system HD and a 2 TB platter-based drive is cut up for various purposes (1 partition is a Bootcamp drive, 1 is a mirror backup of the SSD and the other is a time machine backup of the SSD). I then have a separate 2 TB external media HD which has my iTunes library and general archive (the largest files consisting of old video projects).

I use SuperDuper on a scheduled backup to clone my main system hard drive and then I use a OmniFocus monthly todo remind me to plug in another 2 TB drive to mirror my main media archive. The incremental backup works get here making the task really quick and easy to do.

SuperDuper has save my ass many times and I highly recommend it as a valuable tool to help you migrate data around and help facilitate your backup strategy.

A free download of SuperDuper is available but if you want to unlock the incremental, scheduling and scripting features you’ll need to purchase a license. A license costs $28 and can be purchased from the Shirt Pocket store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Status Board

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 01:38:22 +0000

Day 23: Status Board

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Status Board is an iOS app from Panic that lets you turn an old iPad into a visual collection of actionable data.

Like all Panic software the app itself is incredibly well put together. New in version 2 you can have multiple boards, wallpapers, photo panels and more. You can even output the status board to a TV to make a large status board (as seen from Panic itself):

While I love having my own old(er) iPad show me status, my biggest complaint, and warning for people interested, is that the default panels provide very basic data and you are more than likely going to have to do some work to get the good numbers out of your system of interest and in into their format. Panic does link to various third parties that can help but I still feel like more could be done to support the community.

Status Board is a free download from the App Store with an in-app purchase to unlock all the panels for $10.

31 Days, 31 Products: BBEdit

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 22:15:07 +0000

Day 22: BBEdit

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

There are lots of text editors out there for Mac OS X and I’ll be up front in saying I use different ones for different tasks. When it comes to extremely large files, large find and replace, text file corruption or general system configuration files, I turn to BBEdit.

I’ve been a long time BBEdit user, going back to when I first started with the Mac during the “Classic” days. It’s one of the most solid, stable text editors out there and a great tool to add to your collection.

BBEdit has a free trial available. A license will cost you $49 and can be purchase directly from the Bare Bones Software store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Vimeo

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 21:55:26 +0000

Day 21: Vimeo

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

When it comes to professional video hosts, I choose Vimeo.

Vimeo is a video hosting site that empowers creators to have more control over how their content is displayed and distributed than other services like YouTube.

I like using Vimeo since I can pay for a Pro account which then let’s me upload HD content, have access to that content via an API and makes sure no ads are ever shown over my content. Vimeo is also much more reasonable about ownership right.

Right now we use Vimeo for Philly CocoaHeads content and I have a personal channel as well with some odd and ends. No doubt as I look to do more work for my upcomming project you’ll see a new channel open up soon.

Vimeo has a few tiers of membership with different options and you get started with a trial account.

31 Days, 31 Products: OmniGraffle

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 19:28:26 +0000

Day 20: OmniGraffle

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

OmniGraffle is a an app from the OmniGroup that lets people design, I’ll call them, component-based compositions; things like data models, website wireframes, and more.

I’ve been a long time user of OmniGraffle, in particular I love using it to make flow charts to help visualize app launch sequences or data download flows. I’ve even recently come to use it to help me plan furniture arrangements in my apartment (side note: I really want to get more space in the future, I miss having a dedicated office space).

OmniGraffle is probably not an app you’ll need on a daily basis but when you do, it’s really nice to use and can help you produce some awesome documentation. Like all the Omni apps, it’s extremely well done with lots of polish and documentation.

While this plug is for the Mac version of OmniGraffle I do want to mention that I did purchase the iOS version when I got my iPad Pro a few weeks ago too. While I’ve only spent 15 minutes with it on the iPad it really feels well done and I encourage you to check it out if interested.

OmniGraffle for Mac does have a free demo available. A license can be purchased for $99 Standard or $199 Pro from the Omni Store or the Mac App Store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Trello

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 02:38:44 +0000

Day 19: Trello

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Trello is a product I’ve been using for years. It’s an online software version of a Kanban board. Google explains:

A Kanban board is a work and workflow visualization tool that enables you to optimize the flow of your work. Physical Kanban boards, like the one pictured below, typically use sticky notes on a whiteboard to communicate status, progress, and issues.

Kanban boards are a great way to organize tasks that have to travel through a status flow. While a physical version of the board has its own merits in my work and collaborations it has been much more important to have these boards online, enter Trello.

You can start using Trello with very simple boards like this:

As you become more familar with the app you can then add media to cards, create checklists, add summaries, assign owners, and so on.

The first time I remember jumping in and really getting a lot out of Trello was back in 2010 when I was part of a startup. We used Trello to manage almost everything; sprints towards our product work, consulting efforts and even our sales pipeline. It worked great.

In more recent time I’ve seen the CocoaLove team use Trello. They tracked marketing efforts, speaker proposals, sales, sponsors and more. Having it all out on a virtual board, shared with the team and updated in real time — it gave a visual sense of completion and progress that was much appreciated.

For more info check out this walkthrough video or Trello’s own Getting Started Guide. Experimenting with Trello is extremely low risk. They have free accounts that let’s you really get to the know the product and then price tiers if you want to start some more sophisticated collaboration or integration. Trello is highly recommended.

31 Days, 31 Products: Postbox

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 01:50:45 +0000

Day 18: Postbox

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Email apps can be a point of contention for many people. For me I’ve settled into a very functional but plain setup.

At the base, I use a few Gmail accounts with lots of server side filtering into folders (for things like mailing lists, automated responses, etc). Then I use an IMAP-friendly desktop app. In recent years the IMAP-client of choice for me has been Postbox, a fairly clean and strait-forward email client that has its roots from the Thunderbird project. Despite the cross platform support of Postbox (it runs on Windows too) it still fits in well on the Mac.

My email flow is as follows. I archive most email while deleting the outright trash. I’ll scan the new messages in my spam folder about once a week. I find I usually pull out a few emails which while are promotional though I wouldn’t consider outright spam. I do try to unsubscribe form things that are too noisy. When I need to search Postbox does a fairly good job for resent stuff though I’d be lying if I didn’t jump to the web version of Gmail for searches that need to go deep into the archives.

So yeah, Postbox is not the sexiest software out there for email but it serves me just fine and might be worth a look if you want something solid and simple.

A free trial of Postbox is available, and, if you like it, a license can be purchased from them directly for $15.

31 Days, 31 Products: Elgato Game Capture HD

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 02:36:44 +0000

Day 17: Elgato Game Capture HD

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Elgato Game Capture HD is actually a hardware/software combo. Its an external capture device that does HDMI passthrough, grabbing whatever video signal you are passing through (be it from a video game console or computer display). It will them compress the video as mp4 on the device and and delver the compressed video to a Mac via a USB cable connection (which is also used for power). On the Mac you’ll run some software that saves the capture to disk and also optionally helps you stream to Twitch.

I originally bought and used the Game Capture HD to help me record some Let’s Plays.

Let’s Plays are video series where an individual will play a game, capture it as well as their commentary while they play. Some personalities are very detailed in the mechanics and secrets of the game while others treat the videos very casually, almost as a diary of sorts, mixing in stories of the past as well as the present.

As for my own “Let’s Play career”, it was short lived. I had a bunch of fun doing a handful of series before quitting mid-way through Final Fantasy IV. I quit because I started to have other life goals and while fun, the amount work it took to produce the videos compared to their small impact — it didn’t feel worth it.

ANYWAYS… the Elgato Game Capture HD found its way to be useful for me once more this past year when we decided to start capturing CocoaHead talks. I now use the device to capture our HDMI output (before it’s redirected to the televisions) and I have to say the recorder software holds up well to us switching machines, resolutions and what not while recording. After the meeting, I take the videos from here and then match a separate audio capture we do through a lapel microphone to build our final video, (edited in ScreenFlow, and published on Vimeo).

If you are interested in video capture you can browse the Elgato Gaming site for a rundown of the current product lineup. The device I use is the base model and costs $150 retail but there are other options if you want higher frame rate capture (mine is 30 fps, they also have 60 fps available).

31 Days, 31 Products: Hearthstone

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 05:01:10 +0000

Day 16: Hearthstone

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Everyone needs something to destress, something to be a friendly distraction in-between long coding sessions. For me as of late this is a mix of podcast walks and Hearthstone.

Hearthstone is an online card game from Blizzard, designed around the heroes of Warcraft. Warcraft lore is not a requirement but will be enjoyed for those have some background. Leeroy!

The format of the game has you pick a hero class and build a deck of 30 cards (a mix of class specific cards, and general cards). As you play the game you’ll draw cards, spend mana to play cards, use cards to fight other cards and hopefully, overtime, kill your opponent. It sounds more complicated than it really is. The good news is Hearthstone is extremely welcoming to new players. It has some great tutorials to get you started.

Hearthstone is a free to play game. You can earn gold through daily quests (win 2 games as mage, etc.) and other means which let you buy more cards, expansion packs or play special Arena mode games (which itself rewards cards). These things can also be unlocked for cash directly should you start to enjoy the game and want to progress your card collection a little faster.

As it goes, being a free to play game, you’ll have a plenty of opportunity to experience the game to see if you like it without spending any money. If you do like the game, you will probably want to buy some cards to jumpstart your collection. The need for this will also vary with how much you like to experiment with new decks. Sure enough there are players our there who have gotten Legendary rank using pure Free 2 Play accounts.

The game itself is playable on the Mac/Windows, iPhone or iPad. If you every want to throw down, my Battle.net name is zorn711. Good luck.

31 Days, 31 Products: Charles Proxy

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:04:11 +0000

Day 15: Charles Proxy

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Setting up an HTTP proxy to observe internet traffic on your machine is incredibly valuable when developing web or mobile applications. My tool of choice for such is Charles Proxy.

It’s been a while since I really evaluated what else is on the market for this kind of need but as the saying goes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I find Charles Proxy works well, particularly for observing SSL traffic on the iOS simulator which requires a bit of setup to get working right.

Charles Proxy has a free trial available and if you like it a license will cost you $50 from their site directly.

31 Days, 31 Products: OmniFocus

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 23:22:05 +0000

Day 14: OmniFocus

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

OmniFocus, from the OmniGroup, is a task manager that embraces the work style of Getting Things Done.

I’ve been an on again and off again user of GTD / OmniFocus for many years now. I’ve done GTD through index cards, automated scripts over OmniOutliner and then eventually OmniFocus. For the years where I did stop, it was mostly because I was taking time off my side work and frankly didn’t have that much to keep track of. Over the last few months however I’ve been taking on more things and setting up some long term goals. OmniFocus has really helped me stay on track and keep up with my responsibilities.

A bit about my setup. I use the Mac version primarily but also own the iOS version for occasional reference and general OmniGroup UI-fanboy reasons. I have project folders for Personal, Work, CocoaHeads and Clickable Bliss (Relaunch). I also have projects named “Tasks” and “Someday Maybe” for each responsibility which is a great place for one-off things. I’m much better about doing my Reviews since restarting, typically doing them on Mondays. I take the time to not only cleanup my inbox, mark done things which I have yet to check off but to also flag those items for which I want to work on that week. Some of my flags are a little more well-wishing then they should be but I like having the flag context be my ‘sit down at desk, what do I need to do today’ list.

I also use a browser extension for quick recording of URLs. This isn’t the Read Later stuff I send to Instapaper, but more the, hey I’m writing an app in EmberJS and here’s a great article on authentication. Let me add it to the EmberJS research project. Or, heres a great gift idea for my sister, let me add the URL to the Buy Christmas Presents project.

OmniFocus for Mac does have a free trial. When you are ready to buy you can use the Mac App Store or buy from OmniGroup direct. Standard Edition is $40, Pro is $80. The iOS app (App Store) is similarly, $40 for Standard and $60 for Pro.

Dropbox Shuts Down Mailbox

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 19:37:06 +0000

From the Mailbox homepage:

It’s with heavy hearts that we let you know we’ll be shutting down Mailbox on February 26, 2016.

… as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email. We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.

I wasn’t a Mailbox user myself but do feel sad for the people who bought into it and are now left on their own.

There is nothing wrong with apps being shutdown. Some companies do it to regain focus, others because the app itself didn’t find its market. However in this case you get the feeling Mailbox itself isn’t being shutdown because the app is a failure on its own, but because it’s not meeting the growth curve required to legitimize a foolish $10 billion evaluation of its owner Dropbox.

That’s what hurts the most I think, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen this. Large VC-funded company X buying up an upcoming app Y or studio Z just to fuel the unrealistic growth forecast of their VC owners. It’s not good for the user and it’s not good for long term innovation/competition.

31 Days, 31 Products: SourceTree

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 20:52:01 +0000

Day 13: SourceTree

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

SourceTree is Mac OS X app that serves as a UI front end for the popular version control system Git. (Upon writing this it seems to also support Mercurial as well, though my comments below are from the perspective of a git user.)

While I think it’s important for all git users to be comfortable with the command line interface I can’t help but personally prefer to interact with my repos more visually on a day-to-day basis. The SourceTree UI isn’t going to win any Apple Design Awards since it leaks the command line git to the user, but that’s fine with me. I’m not looking for visual-only version control for non-geeks — I just want a solid UI for my git interactions.

My favorite features include, spell checking my commit messages, diff-ing branches, easily stashing and de-stashing code snippets and the open in terminal window (for when I need it). I also enjoy having a visual UI for when I’m reviewing the commit stage and want to make sure no frivolous xib changes are going to be committed via accidental saves in Xcode.

SourceTree is a free download available from the Atlassian website though you may need to register for an unlock license.

31 Days, 31 Products: Instapaper

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 03:12:52 +0000

Day 12: Instapaper

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Instapaper is an app that let’s you mark articles to be “read later” and then presents them to you in a very clean, ad-free environment. I’ve been a long time Instapaper fan (before similar services like Pocket or Safari’s own reading list were even available); it’s an app that really shines on the iPad for long couch sessions. It’s also pretty good about storing the content for offline reading in case you are on a plane with a no connection.

I highly recommend Instapaper. The ability to collect up all your readings is particularly efficient. Additionally, you may find that when your time is being blocked off you might be a little more choosy about which article you want to give your time. Do not put pressure on yourself to empty your list. Treat it as an basket of possibilities.

Instapaper has clients for iOS, Android and the desktop web. The apps and the service are free, but there is a premium option for $29/year to help symbolize your support and get a few more features.

31 Days, 31 Products: TextExpander

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 17:14:29 +0000

Day 11: TextExpander

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

TextExpander is an app that expands text. 🙂

Seriously though, TextExpander is a great system wide tool for Mac OS X that helps you type out a single word or string and then it will expand it into the full message you wanted. Some examples of my own use:

mike@cb.com into mike@clickablebliss.com
cphone into 215-555-5555
hphone into 215-555-4444
ac- into Acceptance Criteria:
git- into (a long gitignore useful for Xcode Projects)
ddate into (current date)
ttime into (current time)

For me TextExpander really shined while I was doing customer support for my products. I would be able to break down most email responses with answers and other messaging really quickly, while at the same time mixing in the personal side of the response and not sound like a robot. I also love that I can store my TextExpander dictionary on Dropbox and share it on all my devices. Makes every machine feel like home.

TextExpander has a free trial available. A license will cost you $44.95 and can be bought from the Smile online store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Byword

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 01:38:20 +0000

Day 10: Byword

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Today is kind of a two-for-one in that I’d like promote both Markdown and my favorite Markdown editor, Byword.

Markdown is a plain text format originally designed by John Gruber that let’s you style up text for later transformation into HTML. The big idea with Markdown is that the plain text itself should still be readable and convey the intent, even in plain text.

Byword is a Markdown and Plain Text editor for Mac OS X that offers a simple interface that let’s you focus on the content instead of the tools. While Byword is also available on iOS I primarily use it on Mac OS X.

I’ve been using Markdown as far back am I can remember having the option. I also remember back in the day there was a lot of competition with another format called Textile, which had a lot of support from 37signals. Markdown seems to have won the day. In particular I really like GitHub’s flavor. I do sometimes wish for something more. One feature I’d like it to be able to highlight lines or chunks of code for tutorial purposes. I’d also like to see more open source Markdown into ebook options.

I’ve been a pretty regular Byword user since its introduction. I love the content-focused UI. I like the little features, like using my h1 as the file name for a new document. I also enjoy the HTML preview window quite a bit. There are various forms on Meetup.com and some want HTML, others want rich text. Using Byword I can generate both really quickly.

Byword for Mac is available exclusively through the Mac App Store for $11.99 with a $4.99 in-app purchase to add blog publishing features.

31 Days, 31 Products: Today

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 20:09:06 +0000

Day 09: Today

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Weather apps are probably one of the biggest category of apps out there. Everyone has a favorite, and Today is mine.

For me the view I like the most is the visual seven day, showing the highs and the lows, using colors to express heat.

Not sure what else to say, it’s a simple app for a simple problem with a clean design and a unique take.

Today costs $1.99 and is available on the App Store.

31 Days, 31 Products: SimPholders

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:38:25 +0000

Day 08: SimPholders

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

SimPholders is a great example of identifying a small but troublesome issue and building a simple solution for it. SimPholders is a menu bar extension that helps you quickly get at the most recent Xcode simulator builds in the Finder as well as a handful of other useful features.

I’ve been using SimPholders for a while and it’s really handy. I find myself often needing to sneak into a app’s documents folder to inspect a Core Data database, or fidget with some other resource and SimPholders makes it super easy. This despite all of the latest complexities of Xcode and the growth in simulator devices / platforms.

SimPholders has a free trial and when it’s up you can buy a license for $11 from their website.

My Personal Computer History, How I Came to Work on the Mac

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 16:14:25 +0000

I’m working on some other posts to recount the history of our CocoaHeads chapter. While brainstorming for it I couldn’t help but start to capture my own history and how I came to work on the Mac so I figured I’d write it up and share.

The following post has a lot of “Way Back Machine” links to see sites as they used to be, a fun trip down memory lane.

I didn’t start learning computer stuff until high school (1995) and even then it was on a 286 using DOS for BASIC and PASCAL. Starting college (1997) I finally got to buy a computer of my own, it was a Windows machine but I didn’t really mind at the time. After my first year of college I got to take my co-op experience. Through it I ended up doing web design for a small company just outside Philly. I got to work with a former Apple employee and he was quick to saturate me in the ways of the Mac. Overall I was impressed and by the end of the co-op was considering a Mac of my own. Now being in college and just having bought a Windows computer I wasn’t in a financial position to change, but the seeds were planted.

By 2000 I was doing web design part time for Seybold, using a Mac at work and Windows at home. I was getting into the server side of web development, learning about UNIX, Apache, MySQL and the like. Around this time Mac OS X was announced. The idea of running Photoshop next to Apache pretty much sold me and I knew right then I wanted to participate on this platform.

I probably watched Steve introduce the Aqua UI over a dozen times.

With the 2001 Macworld Keynote came the release of the Titanium PowerBook G4. I got the high end 500 MHz model. I split the cost across two credit cards and some cash. I couldn’t afford this machine but I had to have it. It was the first personal Mac I ever owned.

Initially I ran Mac OS 9 on my TiBook, but on Saturday March 24, 2001 I drove out into the rain to my local UPS warehouse to pick up the copy of Mac OS X I had ordered (No way I was going to wait until Monday for delivery!). I came home, installed it and never went back.

Well, technically I did go back to OS 9 on occasion. Some apps like Final Cut Pro (which I was using for my film class) didn’t work in the Classic environment at all and other apps, well, just worked better booted into 9. That said, I really enjoyed working in OS X. Despite all of its performance issues and bugs I was too busy enjoying all the new stuff: the new UI and the new APIs (my first time programming for a native window UI).

Time moves on, it’s 2003 or so. By now I’m a total Apple geek. Regularly reading As the Apple Turns and Daring Fireball. I’m marking my calendar and listening to Your Mac Life’s live radio shows. I’m reading tons of books about the history of Apple.

I’m now also now looking to connect with other Mac users. I eventually come to join MacBUS a local Mac User Group focused on the business side of the Mac. I also visit other groups in the area from time to time such as the Main Line Mac User Group’s Programming Special Interest Group. A fun group but there was little coverage of Cocoa, it was mostly scripting languages like AppleScript and PHP.

It was however through these groups and connections I met Randy Zauhar, a professor at the University of the Science. He and some of his students were working in Cocoa and wanted to start a regular meetup. We called it PHAD, Philadelphia Apple Developers.

And that’s it for now. I’ll recount more of PHAD and how it eventually lead into Philly CocoaHeads in my next post.

31 Days, 31 Products: TweetBot & Twitterrific

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:35:51 +0000

Day 07: TweetBot & Twitterrific

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Doing a two for one special today (Cyber Monday and all!) with two of my favorite Twitter clients.

For me, the only reason I found Twitter usable and joined in 2007 was because of Twitterrific for Mac OS X. There was no way I was going to visit the Twitter website to stay active but the idea of having my timeline live on my desktop was a killer feature, and thus a killer app.

Later on iOS, I with many others experienced an orgy of Twitter app options. I personally favored Tweetie but after that was bought and killed by Twitter itself I moved on to TweetBot.

Random aside, it’s a real shame that TweetBot has given up so much of its historic personality / UI identity to fit in within the new iOS aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the features set of the app, but the current version has very little personality compared to its early days.

I do prefer TweetBot on the phone, but when it comes to my iPad I’m back to Twitterrific. While a bit bulky to look at, I just love the full screen view of my timeline.

Twitterrific for iOS is a free download on the App Store with a $4.99 in-app purchase to unlock the full app. Twitterrific for Mac also has a free trial which can be licensed through the Iconfactory Store for $9.95 or purchased through the Mac App Store.

TweetBot for iOS is a pay for download on the App Store and will costs you $4.99. TweetBot for Mac is also a pay for download on the Mac App Store and will cost you $9.99.

31 Days, 31 Products: Duet

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 21:15:42 +0000

Day 06: Duet

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Duet is a new addition to my toolset, one of the many apps I bought after getting my iPad Pro, and wow is it good. Duet lets you use your iPad as a secondary monitor and unlike some previous Airplay-based solutions of the past, Duet actually uses a wired connection for a zero lag experience. To run Duet you’ll install an app on the iPad and then a secondary app on your Mac or Windows desktop machine. When the iOS app launches you’ll instantly connect and have a secondary monitor available in System Preferences, just like a “real” monitor. The connection process is seamless and there is no lag on the iPad.

I’ve been using Duet at home with my iMac and it’s so helpful to have the extra space for chat rooms or long running videos. I was also considering buying a portable monitor to use while I’m on the road teaching (one screen for slide and Xcode demo, and the other for my notes) and Duet looks like it will solve that problem too.

As mentioned above it takes two apps to run Duet. The iOS app is available on the App Store for $15.99 and the Mac and Windows clients are free downloads available on their website.

31 Days, 31 Products: ScreenFlow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 22:48:48 +0000

Day 05: ScreenFlow

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

ScreenFlow is a best in class tool for screen capturing and video editing. Typically I use ScreenFlow to make screencasts, short videos primary featuring action from my desktop with a voice narration. These screencasts are incredibly powerful, wether it’s a short demo to accompany a code pull request or feature walkthrough for the client. Having these screencasts not only answers questions but creates archivable value in that they can be replayed for new developers or stakeholders in the future. I also use ScreenFlow to assemble and edit the video and audio sources for our CocoaHead videos.

So even though modern OS X has limited support in QuickTime for capturing the screen, I still recommend ScreenFlow. Its capture tools are really easy to use and can capture multiple things at once (like the desktop, your camera, your voice and the computer audio — all on separate editing tracks). Once your editing you’ll have even more power to trim the movie, speed up boring things like text entry, and cleanup the audio track.

ScreenFlow has a free trial download available on it’s website and when your ready to buy a license it will cost you $99 from Telestream’s store or the Mac App Store.

31 Days, 31 Products: Acorn

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 20:54:47 +0000

Day 04: Acorn

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Acorn is an image editor for Mac OS X built with tons of love, from the native UI that feels like it truly belongs on Mac OS X to some of the most impressive documentation and tutorials you’ll find. When you choose Acorn you’re getting a first class product.

I’ve been a long time Acorn user. I find it’s much quicker to open and do some quick image cropping or color adjustments than some other monster app like Photoshop. I’ve also made use of it’s excellent scripting features before to automate screenshot processing and the like. It’s a huge time saver.

Acorn has a free trial available on it’s website and when you are ready to buy you can buy direct or via the Mac App Store. A license will cost you $29.99.

31 Days, 31 Products: 1Password

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 18:25:57 +0000

Day 03: 1Password

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Usernames and passwords are a broken system, yet sadly one we’re likely to still be using for a while to come. 1Password is tool that can help you generate and retrieve good (hard to crack) and unique passwords for every site you use. With apps for every platform and features like browser extensions with form fill, thumbprint identification on iOS and security warnings about hacked sites, I find 1Password to be a must have app and one of the first apps I install on a new machine.

I’ve even enjoy using 1Password to share stuff. For example, at CocoaHeads we share a group vault for a handful of credentials shared via Dropbox. Now I know they just introduced a new team sharing feature so maybe this is a little old school, but it’s working for us and we like it.

My biggest feature request for 1Password is to get something more advanced than the master password for my Mac. Some thumbprint hardware would be cool, or maybe even a face+voice recognition alternative. This would obviously get some push if Apple introduced a native thumbprint scanner on their Macbook line. Maybe some day…

1Password can be bought through the Mac App Store or their site. A Mac license costs $49 (with a free trial available) and the iOS client is a free download on the App Store with a $9.99 in-app purchase for some more advanced features. Windows and Android versions are also available for similar pricing; again, see their store page for details.

31 Days, 31 Products: Fin

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 17:05:38 +0000

Day 02: Fin

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Fin is an app for iOS that turns your device into a large countdown timer; particularly helpful for presentations and performances. Fin is a universal app that works well for iPad as well as iPhone. It even has Watch support.

I’ve been using Fin via an iPad mini at CocoaHeads and it really helps us stay on time with our busy agenda. I really like the color warnings when time is running out and generally how easy it is to reset / change times with gestures.

Fin is available from the App Store for $4.99 and you can find out more about it on its website.

31 Days, 31 Products: MindNode

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 22:42:19 +0000

Day 01: MindNode

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

MindNode is a tool for mind mapping. Mind mapping is a process where you take a word, phrase or topic and place it in the middle of a piece of paper. From there you create branches off that first object to help explore or document an idea. Similar to brainstorming through a text-based outline, mind maps tend to be favored by people who think visually and like to accompany their maps with color assignments, drawings and more.

I’ve been using MindNode for a few months now, both on Mac OS X as well as iOS and it works great. The document format works on both sides so you can start a mind map on the iPad and bring it back the Mac with no issues. The UI of MindNode is simple but familiar. If you have experience with Keynote or Pages, you should feel well at home.

As for what I mind map, well, related to my recent announcements it’s mostly been things like naming (companies, products) and then pro/con list for different app ideas. I also recently did a map for how I organize my Dropbox files (a future blog post maybe).

MindNode is available from the Mac App Store ($29) as well as the iOS App Store ($9). A free trial for Mac can be downloaded from their website.

31 Days, 31 Products: Launch Post

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 22:38:33 +0000

At CocoaLove 2015 we had the pleasure of listening to Jaimee Newberry speak and from my notes I recollect the following from her talk:

Just Do It! and more specifically, don’t let your high taste of quality hold you hostage from creating and shipping. Get it out into the world and improve it over time.

Even before the talk, I was already inspired by Jaimee’s “31 days” series of writings and video posts. I’ve been wanting to get more writing practice and have been kicking the can on starting my own series but no more!

Today begins 31 Days, 31 Products — a blog series where once a day for 31 days I’ll post a short story sharing some of the products and services I’ve come to enjoy using. I hope you like it and discover a new helpful tool along the way.

PragProg Thanksgiving Sale

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 19:08:58 +0000

I started reading books from the Pragmatic Programmers back when I started learning about Rails 1.0 and over the years have built up quite a significant library from them.

They are having their annual Thanksgiving sale, 40% off all ebooks (code “turkeysale2015”). A great time to load up for some holiday reading.

My recommendation this year is The Nature of Software Development. It shares many core values I have about software development. It’s a short read with lots of quirky sketches. I highly recommend it.

There was also a talk at ETE from Ron about the book but I’ll continue to recommend the book itself more as I think it’s a little more focused, better value for your time.

iOS Mobile Design with Sketch at Big Nerd Ranch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 03:01:39 +0000

I’ve wanted to get better at using Sketch for a while now and it looks like I might get my wish!

At work we’ve revamped our mobile design class and it now includes learning Sketch alongside mobile design fundamentals. The class summary:

If you have basic design experience in UI, UX, web or responsive web design, this class will teach you to bring your designs to iOS in just five days.

In this intense week of learning about design for iOS devices, you will design an iOS app, from concept to delivery. With a focus on Sketch, you will learn a process that you can use in any future app design projects.

If this sounds interesting to you I highly encourage you to register and join us in January. I’m registered and really looking forward to the class.

Rebooting My Professional Side Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 04:25:06 +0000

It’s been a little over two years since I put Clickable Bliss, the company name for my personal projects, then self-employment, on hiatus after taking a job at DmgCtrl (which then turned into a job at Big Nerd Ranch). Back then when I wrote about the change, I mentioned that team work was something I was really missing after my group startup Shindig ended. The good news is, in the last 2 years time I’ve gotten to work with some very talented people and have learned a ton from them. The sad news is, the yearning to work on something longterm, something of my own, something I can have a meaningful impact on does not go away. Today I’d like to share my intent to reboot my professional side projects.

I say “professional” side projects because I do want these to be serious projects that result in profitable products. I want to create software that people enjoy using, solve meaningful problems and people are willing to pay for. I’m not looking to quit my job but I don’t want that to be an excuse for lack of progression or service level, I want to make sure my customers are taken care of.

So what’s next? Well right now I’m working on breaking down some project ideas and otherwise trying to get up to speed with some tech stacks I’m considering using. I’m also trying to figure out the legal and branding side of things. Some questions on my mind:

Do I continue to do work under the name Clickable Bliss (which is a D.B.A.) or do I come up with a new company name that helps distinguish this new era and long term team intent (I do hope to bring on help for these new projects sooner than later).
If I do a new company name, do I run it as an LLC?
Do I promote these products under the company brand or just build brands around the project(s) themselves. (The two leading ideas I’d like to work on have fairly divergent audiences although longterm I’d say my interest is in providing tools for people who embrace technology to create things.)
I want to start to build up a newsletter as soon as I have some more concrete things to share. How do I migrate those people from the old Clickable Bliss mailing list? Should I?

So that’s what’s going on. Will share more when I have it. If you have any feedback or comments, please shoot me an email!

24 Hours with My iPad Pro

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:46:33 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of the iPad. I’ve owned an: iPad 1, iPad 2 (which I sold to upgrade to an iPad 3), an iPad mini (retina), and now an iPad Pro.

I’ve been pretty antsy for an iPad Pro since I saw the original announcement. I can’t say I have any unquie plans for it (outside reading Big Nerd Ranch book drafts in PDF format on a much bigger screen). Mostly I just want to experiment with the all the new features like the pencil and multitasking.

As of right now I have the iPad Pro itself (I went with the high end, 128 GB with cellular) and the keyboard cover. The pencil has been a little harder to come by so until then I’m making due with the 53 Pencil I bought a while ago but never really got into due to the smallness of the iPad mini. So far, it plus the larger screen is working out well. I look forward to comparing this to Apple’s version.

There are lots of great iPad Pro reviews out there so I won’t go into major detail. The things I’m liking a lot: the huge screen, the sound system and the battery life. The things that got me down a bit: the removal of the split keyboard (it’s hard to type holding the iPad Pro in portrait mode), lack of 3D Touch and the lack of the newer thumbprint scanner.

All that said, when it comes down to it, it’s about the software. I think I’ve spent $100 in new software playing around with things. If you know of some must have iPad software let me know cause I want to see how hard I can push this thing. Tomorrow should be a great test as I fly down to Atlanta to visit the home office of Big Nerd Ranch.

Release Notes Conference Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 16:38:42 +0000

This post is delayed due to a head cold I had last week, but considering the amount of effort and love that went into producing the Release Notes Conference I figured the least I can do is share my reaction.

In short, I think Joe and Charles have a really cool product here. Despite a somewhat saturated iOS conference space I think they have chiseled out a much needed and action-oriented event. The idea of an entire conference of content focused on building and growing your Apple-related business is great enough, but then consider you’ll end up mingling with similar minded people results in an incredible event.

I don’t want to understate the importance of actionable. There are a lot of tech conferences out there where you’ll see some very interesting talks that showcase some new language features or APIs but you can’t always come home and apply them to your current work right away. I think one of the best aspects of the Release Notes Conference is that no matter how young or old your business or product is, there were tons of actionable tasks to walk away with.

In many ways the conference reminded me fondly of the (pre-iPhone) MacSB (Mac Software Business) mailing list and IRC channel where a small group of us would hang out, post question and share notes. It was small, very welcoming and extremely helpful group.

My understanding is that the talks were recorded and will be published online, so if you are interested I highly recommend signing up for their mailing list for the announcement. Of course, if you aren’t subscribed already I’ll also recommend their weekly podcast which started it all.

Memorable Songs from Pivotal Indy Moments of Your Life

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 20:44:04 +0000

While attending the Release Notes Conference this past week I saw a talk by Mike Hurley of RelayFM fame. A lot of the talk was pulling wisdoms from Mike’s own story, the history of his past projects up to working on RelayFM. One tidbit included an attachment to a song when he quit his job. For him the song was Another One Bites the Dust, Queen.

For me when I quit my full time job with ASMP to focus on my Mac development work the song was Maggie’s Farm, Bob Dylan. I was really into Dylan at the time and the lyrics just fit. I remember blasting it from my office and hearing it play throughout the apartment those first few indy days working at home.

I’d love to hear what songs match up to your own big indy life moments. Shoot me an email or tweet me your story.

Staying Secure on OS X with a Few Unsigned Apps

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:10:33 +0000

I could get into some real heavy talk regarding Apple’s policies about installing software outside their stores (and maybe I will someday) but for now let us all be thankful that not all Mac software must come to us through Cupertino. Let us also be thankful for Gatekeeper, a nice compromise Apple offers.

With Gatekeeper, Apple allows people to distribute Mac software outside the store but requires it be signed with an identity registered with Apple. The general idea being if a developer gets marked as distributing malware Apple can blacklist them so as to not effect users in the future. I’m not aware of any honest developer being wrongfully blacklisted and my general understanding is that the program is working well with known limitations.

OS X ships with a nice safe default via Settings > Security,

“Allow apps downloaded from:” set to “Mac App Store and identified developers”. Unfortunately even though Gatekeeper has been around since 10.7 there are some apps that are not signed nor will never ever be signed that you want to run. Most users will sadly turn off the Gatekeeper check entirely at this point, leaving their system vulnerable. Below I’ll walk you though how to allow a unsigned app to run while leaving the security setting as-is.

By default OS X ships with the setting set to “Mac App Store and identified developers”.

When you try to open an unsigned app you’ll get a prompt like this:

Click OK and then go back to System Preferences and you might notice the pane has changed:

Now you can choose to “Open Anyway” for the last app blocked by Gatekeeper. Go back and try to launch the app again. You’ll get a final prompt asking if you sure, and upon clicking Open you’ll be able to run you unsigned app while still maintaining the default security setting.

While a little tedious jumping back and fourth for the initial approval, I’d much rather do this and leave Gatekeeper on than to run without the identity check. I highly recommend you do so too, and if you can, maybe a friendly email to your app developer asking him to sign his app.

UPDATE: Was informed by @boredzo and @ abrahamvegh that there is a shortcut to this flow if you anticipate the app requiring approval. For example, if you download an app you know will need this special exception you can control-click it and choose Open from the context menu. Doing so will cause a similar prompt that will whitelist the non-signed app and allow you to run it without turning off Gatekeeper. Thanks for the extra info guys!

Sweating the Little Details of UI Copy

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 22:10:43 +0000

While user interface design is not a core responsibility at my current job I do believe it is an important skill in my field and I try to improve all the time. A large aspect of user interface design is choosing the right words. For example, a good UI designer when crafting an iOS alert will honor and consider Apple recommendations. Some notes from the HIG:

Place buttons appropriately. Ideally, the button that’s most natural to tap should meet two criteria: It should perform the action that users are most likely to want and it should be the least likely to cause problems if a user taps it inadvertently. Specifically:

When the most likely button performs a nondestructive action, it should be on the right in a two-button alert. The button that cancels this action should be on the left.

When the most likely button performs a destructive action, it should be on the left in a two-button alert. The button that cancels this action should be on the right.

Give alert buttons short, logical titles. The best button titles consist of one or two words that describe the result of tapping the button. Follow these guidelines as you create titles for alert buttons:

As with all button titles, use title-style capitalization and no ending punctuation.

As much as possible, use verbs and verb phrases that relate directly to the alert text—for example, “Cancel,” “View All,” “Reply,” or “Ignore.”

Use “OK” for a simple acceptance option if there is no better alternative. Avoid using “Yes” or “No.”

Avoid “you,” “your,” “me,” and “my” as much as possible. Button titles that use these words are often ambiguous and can appear patronizing.

My personal pet peeve isn’t mentioned in the HIG but is present in almost all systems that require a user account:

Forget your password?

I hate that phrase. I find it to be patronizing and judgmental. As if I’m suppose to remember every password I ever created for every little web site and service. Who could?

Additionally, it’s misleading. If I click a link labeled “New Comment” I expect to be provided a form to make a new comment. If click a link to “Forget your password?” do I expect some flashy animated GIF that will erase some data from my brain? What I want is a link to “Reset Password”. The link title “Reset Password” is clear, focused on the target action to be performed and does not have a hint of judgement.

Sweat the little things. Read and then reread the interface guidelines. Be able to explain why for all your interface choices. Have fun.

How To Play WWDC Sessions at 2x Speed

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:10:37 +0000

Now that all the new bits of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 are in the wild you might find yourself wanting to get up to speed on some of the changes. One great resource to help you get started is Apple’s WWDC videos.

The WWDC video library has a lot going for it: HD and SD video sizes, slide downloads and now even full text search! The only real negative thing is the sheer amount of content out there. It can get overwhelming and time consuming to watch all the stuff you are interested in. Here’s the hint. Like podcasts, WWDC videos are mostly single voices speaking one at a time and if you have the tools to double the playback speed you’ll find them still very comprehensible.

Now for the tools. For downloading you can of course use the Apple website. I like this WWDC Mac app as well. Once you have the video file on your hard drive you’ll unfortunately need to look for something beside the built-in QuickTime player to help. Even with all its enhancements it sadly doesn’t have this tool of QuickTime’s past. The good news is you can still download QuickTime 7 and it works great!

After you open your movie in QuickTime 7 (you’ll find it installed in the Utilities folder), use the Window menu and choose Show A/V Controls. In this panel you’ll see a slider that let’s you adjust the playback speed.

Now you can watch your chosen WWDC videos in half of the time! Enjoy!

UPDATE: My thanks to Paul Brown who let me know that the native QuickTime player can playback faster, even if it is a little hidden. To increase playback speed, bring up the controls with your mouse, then option-click on the fast-forward control. This will increment playback speed by 10% each time you click. You can keep clicking this up to 2.0x playback speed but sadly the audio does not work at 2.0x, you’ll have to limit yourself to 1.9x to retain the faster audio. Thanks again for the help Paul!

Quick Launching for Cocoa Unit Tests

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 01:22:26 +0000

I was doing some proofreading and research today regarding the latest testing features in Xcode 7. In the process I ended up rereading this article from Mark Dalrymple on code coverage. It’s a great article but it also reminded me of a little tip I wanted to share on the blog.

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application
    didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions {
    ...
    // bail out early if we're running as a test harness.
    if (NSClassFromString(@"XCTestCase")) return YES;

    // otherwise load the main storyboard.
    UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard" bundle:nil];
    UIViewController *vc = [storyboard instantiateInitialViewController];
    ...
}

Not only can this type of check help speed up your unit test times by a little bit, but, it also makes sure you aren’t loading things like crash log capture tools, performance monitoring injections, or other things that might otherwise interfere with your unit test logic or code coverage numbers. Now if you are doing the new UI testing you’ll probably have to use some other kind of flag to define this path, but regardless the core idea is the same.

CocoaLove 2015 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:58:44 +0000

This weekend was the second annual CocoaLove event here in Philadelphia.

A conference about people, not tech. CocoaLove highlights the iOS/Mac community’s passions, challenges, and triumphs.

From all accounts, people had a great time. My very heartfelt “thank you” to the speakers, attendees and organizers for making it such a blast.

Some of my own takeaways and notes:

Just Do It! and more specifically, don’t let your high taste of quality hold you hostage from creating and shipping. Get it out in the world and improve it over time.
Don’t let the negativity of the web infect you. Be positive; be constructive.
Make time to help people out. Mentor them, teach them, guide them. It’s probably the most import work you’ll ever do.
Embrace today; do what you love; don’t settle.
Don’t let other people define your life’s scope. Poke life.
The world is in desperate need of good managers. Managers need not be robots; the best managers can have a huge impact on their team and the product.
Don’t let imposter syndrome or other people hold you back.
Humanizing the customer support experience is extremely important. These people are calling out for help, treat them right.
The developer ecosystem is forever changing. Even today the wheels are in motion and a few years from now it’ll be different. Be prepared for change.
Embrace side projects. Start tons of things. Experiment. Do things outside your comfort zone.

While we wait for this years talks to be edited and published, consider stopping by the 2014 video collection. In particular I recommend Joe Cieplinski – The Back of the Fence.

Summer Hiatus Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 20:44:59 +0000

Hello internets. So sorry for the summer hiatus here on the blog. So what have you been up to? (Email me and say hi!)

I’ve been doing good. WWDC was a fun time in June and shortly after that I had 6 days down the shore with my family. At work, I’ve been on a Swift iOS project. It’s my first time using Swift in production and working along side John and Zac has been incredibly educational. I also was able to get on the road and do my first solo teaching gig for Big Nerd Ranch. I really do enjoy teaching and hope to get the opportunity to do more of it in the coming year.

In my off time I’ve been zoning out with video games, movies and the like. I bought a PS4 and have been mixing it in amongst my WoW and FF14 time. I do feel guilty as I keep meaning to start some productive side projects but I struggle to focus on programming after working a full day doing programming. We’ll see how the fall works out. Hoping to get some project inspiration from CocoaLove and Release Notes in October.

I also just (like a week ago) got a new car. Ended up buying a new 2015 Hyundai Sonata Sport. It replaces my old 98 Ford Taurus workhorse. The Sonata is nice; very spacious and a nice mix of value and features. I’m really enjoying the iOS integration (used to use an external bluetooth speaker for podcasts and the like). With a little more confidence in my car now I’m actually hoping to hit to road a bit and do some visits to regional CocoaHead events and the like. If there is an event coming up you’d like to recommend let me know.

Well that’s it for now. Bring on the fall!

WWDC Events and Links

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 19:13:14 +0000

It’s June 1st and WWDC is right around the corner!

My wish list is set and I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about in the weeks and months ahead. It’s going to be a great conference.

I won’t be at WWDC proper this year but will be in town, next door at AltConf. AltConf has a great speaker lineup unto itself and I believe it will also be live streamed.

If you see me in town, please introduce yourself. I love connecting a face to a twitter avatar of a cat.

Other notes and resources…

As for the parties, one good index of events is right here: https://2015.wwdcparties.com/.

Big Nerd Ranch is also reaching out to meet our fans. We are hosting breakfast and dinner meetups. More info: https://twitter.com/bignerdranch/status/604034663150059522

And finally, if you’ll be in Philly instead of San Fransisco, consider attending the CocoaHeads keynote steam event at the Apple Store: http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/events/222711398/

WWDC 2015 Wish List

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 02 May 2015 23:48:58 +0000

While I won’t be at WWDC proper I will be in San Francisco the week of WWDC. I have a ticket to AltConf and otherwise expect to be mingling about.

What do I want to see announced? Here is some of my wish list.

Swift Improvements

Let me use Xcode’s refactor tool to refactor Swift.
Let me use Instruments to measure performance of Swift.
Introduce a tool similar to gofmt
Add standard library tools for processing JSON.
Continue to improve Obj-C Interoperability.
Swift versions of NSDate and NSDecimalNumber
Fix the “I have to make it public or double add the modules” to let tests see code issue.

Xcode

Introduce a cloud service version of Xcode Server.
Improve Xcode Templates (eg: should recommend new test file with new class).
Add code coverage tools.
Improve testing tools. (Maybe add a formal UI testing layer?)
Add a spell checker that is smart about function names and other symbols.
Stability improvements.

Others

Let me slide loads apps outside the App Store.
Improve App Store searching, browsing and discovery.
Formal API to iTunes Connect.
Third Party Siri access.

Code Patterns Talk, Video Now Available

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 17:09:17 +0000

We’ve been trying to a better job of capturing our main talks at Philly CocoaHeads. You can find and subscribe to our small but growing collection of videos on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/phillycocoa.

I did a talk last month reviewing a some iOS code patterns. The runtime is about 27 minutes. Feedback very welcome.

Update April 27, 2025: Video not available.

Some Code Patterns, Mike Zornek from Philly CocoaHeads on Vimeo.

This talk covers a handful of code patterns that were successful on my recent projects. Some of these patterns include Block Safety, “Tell, Don’t Ask”, Using DataSources for your network-based *Service objects.

Apologies the audience participation isn’t well captured.

Farewell Edge Cases

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:43:46 +0000

Cue the Journey song, Edge Cases is ending.

Edge Cases was a podcast hosted by long time Apple developers Andrew Pontious and Wolf Rentzsch. Surprising unlike many other podcasts hosted by Apple developers, Edge Cases actually embraced the code, doing weekly non-topical coverage of coding concepts, practices and history. The show ends after 128 episodes and will be missed.

I’ve been following Wolf since the MacHack days and Andrew since the blogging boom of the early 2000s. Both are incredibly insightful and genuine. I want to thank them for putting on such a great show. The dedication it takes to run a regularly published podcast is no small feat and it was appreciated. I wish them well with their future projects.

If you haven’t listened to the Edge Cases show before I encourage you to browse the archives and give it a try. The content is timeless.

Know Your Role: Contractor or Consultant

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 14:23:12 +0000

I guess I could have use a more sophisticated reference in the title like Know Thyself but I can’t help quoting the most electrifying man in sports entertainment, The Rock.

Know Your Role!

When trying to breakdown the relationship with your clients and to help define expectations you need to define your role. One high level way to do this is to decide if you are a contractor or a consultant.

A contractor is someone who comes on to a job site to execute. They are given all the specifications they need. They act in a professional manner. They produce.

A consultant may produce as well but their primary responsibility is help design the solution. They work with the client to understand, identify and document the problems and the pains. Then through their lens of their experience in the industry propose a solution. Usually they stick around to help build that solution.

If the client looks to you for help to build the product right, you are probably a contractor. If the client looks to you for help to build the right product, you are probably a consultant.

Personally, I consider myself a consultant. I love designing the solutions and while I can code, and continually strive to improve my craft, coding by itself is not truly fulfilling.

It’s been challenging over the last few years since leaving independent life and working for larger companies. These days I don’t have a lot of involvement in the sales process so by the time I’m working a project expectations are already set and a fair amount of time it feels like we are hired as contractors, which I have nothing against, but if I’m going to be a code mercenary you need to be really good about those specifications and more times than not, they fall short. They explain only the happy paths or they misuse platform norms at the cost of more engineering and two steps back in user experience.

I suspect this phenomena is not an isolated problem but discussion about that will have to wait for a future post.

Think of the Smallest Possible Code Change, and Then Make It Smaller

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 03:23:25 +0000

I’m working on a client project right now. We do peer review of the code via pull requests. It works great, but the quality of the reviews you get are very dependent on the size of the pull request you make.

Take for example, one of my recent pull requests, which had the following git characteristics:

1,780 additions
1,618 subtractions
24 files changed

Not my largest pull request ever but still way larger than what I’d prefer. I got zero feedback. It was merged on first pass. Now take one I did the next day:

80 additions
1 subtraction
7 files changed

We had 10 conversation posts on this pull request, discussing three distinct recommendations and/or questions. Questions on things I was already doing for a few pull requests already but I guess slipped by.

I don’t blame the reviewer, I blame myself. It’s really hard to be detail focused when there is so much to review.

So keep those pull requests small and focused. You’ll get better feedback and you’ll probably get integrated faster too!

Mike Monteiro on Selling Design, Getting Paid and Working with Clients

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 18:51:47 +0000

I’m not sure if “Selling Design” is the real title for the Keynote at Interaction15 (1h5m) but that’s the topic your are going to see. Mike Monteiro a does a great job reviewing some of the pitfalls creative people run into when working with and presenting their work to clients and all the delicacies of those relationships. For those doing contract work, a must see.

You might also like Mike’s talk: Fuck You, Pay Me or his books, Design is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

Contracting and project management are topics that regularly come up at my job, Philly CocoaHeads and IndyHall so I’m going to try to do better about writing about those issues here. In the mean time, I highly recommend Mike’s work to get your own brain turning.

Encouraging Impactful User Content

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 18:17:04 +0000

I’m not one to do a ton of online product reviews but after CocoaLove I was asked to do one for the walking tour we took on Sunday. The site was TripAdvisor and from what I hear having good reviews there is really important for companies so I figured I’d share the love.

Since posting the review I’d say I get an email from TripAdvisor every 3 months or so. The email helps explain how much of an impact my review has made.

I really like the email.

I suspect emails like this help encourage further user contributions. If your website or service captures user generated content I’d encourage you to experiment with similar behaviors.

Swift and Cocoa: The Odd Couple

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:30:06 +0000

Swift and Cocoa are like The Odd Couple. Two people, with drastically different personalities who are joined by fate to live with each other.

The Odd Couple Theme Song

One prefers things very explicit and will check and double check things are in order before starting a task. The other is happy letting things happen haphazardly, as things flow; the details can be worked out later.

One would only ever allow a single item type like socks in his drawer. The other is happy to store a mix of things in his.

One is very cautious with things handed to it, slowly unwrapping them. The other is extremely trusting and uses stuff passed to it without question, result be dammed.

Philly CocoaHeads Website Relaunch Project

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 23:37:27 +0000

I haven’t had an active side project in the last few months. When asked I would tell people looking for a new job was my side project. Now that I have that new job search (and my Girl Develop It class behind me it’s time to kick something off; we’re going to rebuild the Philly CocoaHeads website!

When I took over the local chapter of CocoaHeads here in Philly (back in 2010 or so) the previous organizer had a Ruby/Markdown publish system setup. It was kind of neat but involved a lot of setup on the client box to get up and running. I had a few people posting to the site so rather than set up that system on each individual’s box I opted for WordPress. The WordPress site has done ok for us but we’ve been growing a ton and doing a lot more over the last year (workshops, video capture of meeting presentations). I’d love to start to centralize things like keeping track of our members and our money, overall there is a ton that could be automated and it’s time to make it happen.

I don’t want to do this alone and I also would love to start documenting the project as it unfolds. To get started we have a brainstorm session scheduled during Side Project Saturday. If you want to participate please consider stopping by. If you can’t stop by, but want to participate, let me know and maybe we can setup a Google Hangout call-in option. To capture notes I’m going to use Trello. The board is live and open to the public. (You will need to login with a Trello account to edit.) Feel free to start to document your ideas today.

Questions for Your Job Hunt

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 03:45:49 +0000

While looking for a new job last year I slowly built a list of questions I would ask the various companies to help better understand if they were a good fit for me. Some of these questions are ripped from other blog posts, like The Joel Test, but many of them were from personal brainstorming and soul searching about what I wanted.

Hopefully this list helps those out there looking for something new.

Culture

Pretend I know nothing about the company, how do you describe it?
Who owns the company? What are their interests?
How would you describe the company culture?
What are its core values?
How is this evident in everyday action?
There is a great TED talk by Simon Sinek that has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” He describes a circle with the word Why? in the center and then moving outward, How? and then What? — Simon explains that most people can answer the What, what do they do? — some fewer still can answer the How — but the truly successful can answer the Why? Why do they do it? Why does your company do what it does? Why does this company sell paper towels instead?
What can I see / download as a public example of your work?
Name something the company is struggling with and how you are trying to fix it?
Name something the company excels at? What are the lessons to be learned?
What’s going to change at this company over the next year? three years? five years?

Process

How does upper management communicate with the company at large?
How are projects and/or teams organized?
How do teams communicate?
How do you plan and track work?
How do you estimate?
Do people work on multiple projects at the same time? If so, how is time broken up?
What is the process like from napkin idea to deployed feature / service? Where am I in this process?
Who decides what to work on?
Who is the designer? Do they work closely with the development team? How much to they appreciate, expand on norms of the various platforms?
Is there a standard process for the handing off assets, specs, motion simulations from the design team to the development team?
Do you ever do retrospectives? If so when? end of the sprint? end of the project?
Do you ever have internal projects? How do they work?
How would you split up my weekly hours between different responsibilities?
How is customer support handled?
Do I have any interaction with the customers?

Process (Client-based work)

If I’m working on a client project, what is my interaction with them?
How does pricing work for client projects? How is development involved in coming up with these figures? What would my responsibility be in this?

HR

How do you run employee reviews?
How do you gauge employee happiness?
Are there any company events? travel?
Would I be required to interview people?
Do you have an official interview process?
Do new candidates write code during their interview?
How does overtime work? Are people compensated for overtime?
How does vacation work?
Are there sick days? Long term sick days?
Can people work from home? Do they?
Is there a 401K?
Is there a health plan? Dental?
Is there on-site parking? Do I have to pay for it?
Is travel involved for this job?
Do you have a company manual? Can I have a copy?
Do you have an org chart? Can I have a copy?
How is the development group organized?
Who do I report to? Who reports to me (if any)?
How transparent is the company with regard to it’s goals, it’s plans, it’s money?

Education

How do you make sure the staff is continually learning?
Do people get a dedicated budget for things like attending conferences, purchasing books?
Do you allow people to travel to speak at conference during company time?
How do you track staff technical skills? Current abilities, wanted improvements?
Do you have an official mentoring system?

Tools

Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Do you have testers?
Do you do hallway usability testing?

Code

Do you use source control?
Can you make a build in one step?
Do you make daily builds?
Do you have a bug database?
Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Do you have a spec?
Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
Do you do code review?
Do you do pair programming?
Can I have a tour of an active project’s code base?
How many developers are there?
What is the proficiency ratio between senior level / mid level / junior level developers in the company?
Do you let people jump around from stack to stack or do most people stay focused on their specialty?

—

End of list. Best of luck with your job hunt!

My New Job with the Big Nerd Ranch

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:26:40 +0000

As I posted on Twitter a few weeks ago, I recently accepted a new job with the Big Nerd Ranch. The job itself starts tomorrow and I’m really excited.

The Big Nerd Ranch and its founder Aaron Hillegass have already made a huge impact on my career. When I first started to learn to program for Mac OS X I turned to Cocoa Programming for OS X. It was the, then unlabeled, first edition of the book and it was a game changer for me. Not only did I fall in love with Cocoa but the book itself was incredibly well written and helpful. Later while attending MacHack I was even able to get a pre-conference day of training from BNR. It too was great and the teacher, Chris Campbell, was really helpful with me getting my MegaManEffect hack to work. (It even took second place in the hack contest!)

These days Big Nerd Ranch is still known for their awesome books and educational classes, which now cover way more than just Macintosh and include iOS, Android, Rails and a much more. The Big Nerd Ranch also codes for hire, doing consulting projects for various clients big and small.

Myself, I’ll mainly be teaching and preparing new teaching materials to start. To think, I’m going to be helping craft the very books that got me started — it’s a real honor. In time I’ll probably also help do some consulting but for now, the focus is on education.

I’ll work remotely from Philadelphia and travel as needed for the classes (probably 1 week every 5 or so) and to checkin with my coworkers down on the ranch in Atlanta on occation. I’ll post info on my travel plans as they evolve. I’d love to connect with other CocoaHead chapters and various “conference friends” during my travels that I’d otherwise only see at WWDC and such.

To the company I’m leaving, Tonic Design (formerly DmgCtrl), I want to say thank you. DmgCtrl took me in with a very warm welcome when I was in a bit of a rut doing solo consulting (both creatively and emotionally) and I’m extremely grateful to them for the opportunity. Over the past year+ we’ve built a lot of cool stuff together and I wish them the best of luck moving forward.

Anyways it’s going to be an exciting fews days as I get familiar with all the internal Big Nerd Ranch stuff, and to my new coworkers who might find this, I’ll see you in Atlanta for a week of introductions and geeking out real soon.

Girl Develop It: Introduction to iOS Development

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 18:05:32 +0000

The Introduction to iOS Development class I’m teaching for Girl Develop It is open and tickets are for sale.

This class will provide attendees an introduction into iOS development through a mix of lecture-style presentations and lots of hands on coding exercises that in total will demonstrate what it is like to be an iOS developer.

The 2-day class costs $100 and will be held on Saturday Feb 7th and Sunday Feb 8th.

If you know of a woman in the Philadelphia area who is interested in iOS please let them know. Thanks.

An “App Architecture” Kata

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 02:00:29 +0000

At the last Side Project Saturday CocoaHeads event I ran a special little exercise. Here was how I described it.

I’d like to run a little event, (maybe after lunch?) for anyone who wants to participate. Should take like 45-60m.

You will be presented with a mobile app idea. It’ll be fairly basic and we’ll list all of the behaviors we need and some we’d like in the future. You will then pair up with someone and pencil out how this could be architected. Each group will then present their app architecture and answer questions, accept feedback from the rest of the group.

From Wikipedia: A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps a programmer hone their skills through practice and repetition. The term was probably first coined by Dave Thomas, co-author of the book The Pragmatic Programmer, in a bow to the Japanese concept of kata in the martial arts.

App architecture is one of those things I’m always trying to improve so I thought it would be cool to see how other people would solve similar problems.

We had six people participate. We started with a brief explanation of the app we were going to sketch out an architecture for. Then, we broke up into pairs of two. After about 40 minutes we came back and showed the group what we came up with.

The one group ended up documenting behaviors per screen. They did a great job of documenting the little things that developers might look over as assumed behavior (which add up fast). It was pointed out that it’s also a great idea to document the things you will not be doing since there tends to be lots of great ideas during brainstorms but when you are planning a sprint of a version target you need to be clear about what’s in and what’s out.

The other two groups (including my own) were more visual, using tools like OmniGraffle to draw representation of models, controllers and services. There was some common separation of responsibilities with slight differences: the one group making an “APIStore” that combined the state and networking and another (mine) that favored separate “Network” and “Session” managers.

Some of the more high-end abstractions I introduced included a FormController that could take a Form model (that had say a collection of FormFields) which described the form at a model level and then through a FormController might be able to render the form on screen through a TableView for a generic representation or maybe through specific outlets to a custom layout. It could also handle things like input validation. True, this is overkill for our one simple login form but assuming this app might grow to contain edit person forms at some point it might not be too bad of an idea (and plus the whole purpose of this event is to discuss interesting ideas).

I also took the time to introduce a pattern thats been out for a while but is a recent addition to my personal toolkit, that being ViewModel. You can read more about MVVM on objc.io. In short it’s a great way to centralize the code you use to transform model objects for user interface purposes and keep that logic out of the model.

In conclusion, everyone who participated seemed to enjoy the exercise and I would encourage you to replicate it amongst your own peers. It’s still up for debate if “Side Project Saturday” is the best venue for such things as many who come have their own stuff to work.

CocoaConf Boston 2014 Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 01:21:36 +0000

After getting a solid recommendation from Curtis, who attended the Washington DC variant, this weekend I headed north to CocoaConf Boston. It was my first CocoaConf and so I went into the weekend with a lot of blurred expectations.

Spoilers: I say first with intention. TLDR; I had a really great time. The talks and speaker quality were really high and with luck I’ll be able to attend again during a future “tour”.

One of my expectations was size. I thought the attendee count was going to be a bit larger. It felt like ~130 but I’m not sure what the official number was. Not that a small count is bad for me but I’m used to educational events hosting more. I suspect part of this is that CocoaConf is hosting lots more venues now (three arguably “east coast cities” during this fall tour alone). This may make some events smaller but overall a win for the community so as to have more access for those who can’t travel far.

One thing that continues to make me proud is the people of our community. The attendees, the speakers and the event staff of CocoaConf are all incredibly friendly, approachable and inspiring. Meeting new people and catching up with old friends is a big reason why I like attending conferences and CocoaConf does a great job at supplying the “campfire” atmosphere to make that happen.

![Daniel Jalkut’s “Quit Your Job” keynote][3]

As for my favorite talks I’ll mention a few:

[Daniel Jalkut’s][4] “Quit Your Job” keynote and [Rob Rhyne’s][5] “Make Them Care” session were both very inspirational. I leave Boston really hungry to jump into some side projects of mine and get back into the product game outside of my client stuff at work.

For technical wisdom I have to give it up for the full day “Swift Kickstart” workshop [Daniel Steinberg][6] ran as well as the Swift and Objective-C: Best Friends Forever session by [Jonathan Blocksom][7]. CocoaConf Boston is now cemented as the place and time where I really started to appreciate what Apple is trying to accomplish with Swift. This isn’t to say we aren’t in for a bumpy ride but at least now I have a good frame of mind as to the “why” behind it all.

Finally, it was great to meet the people that run CocoaConf. Rather than some large corporation, CocoaConf is actually a family affair. Dave Kline and his family run most of the operation and they seemed very dedicated to making sure everyone had a good time. For all their hard work I say thank you and hope to see you all again soon.

[3]: http://mikezornek.com/media/images/quit-your-job.png “Daniel Jalkut’s “Quit Your Job” keynote” [4]: https://twitter.com/danielpunkass [5]: https://twitter.com/capttaco [6]: https://twitter.com/dimsumthinking [7]: https://twitter.com/jblocksom

Designing & Planning Your iOS App Workshop Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 18:34:29 +0000

Workshops are a new effort from the Philly CocoaHeads group. Basic idea is: one workshop every other month, the workshop is a one day 5-6 hour event, that covers a single topic. Our first one was on Intermediate Objective-C and our second one, which was held last Saturday, covered Designing & Planning Your iOS App.

Overall the workshop went well. Kotaro Fujita was our main presenter and did a great job of alternating lecture and hands on exercise. At the end, attendees presented what they had worked on and how their app ideas were evolving. The crowd was great with lots of great feedback too. Some of my notes:

When brainstorming features consider using index cards or mind mapping software. I like MindNode Pro and Trello.
Spend LOTS of time wire framing, sketching, etc. Be mindful to separate your design time from your production coding time. It’s easy to fall into trap where you are coding things that will not work and this is very expensive. Way better to validate your designs with prototyping first.
Document what problem each screen is suppose to solve. Also document the emotions you expect the user to have. For example, on first launch what is your user asking themselves, how can you help educate them? Are you using verbiage they understand? How fast can you deliver your first WOW moment?
Get users involved as soon as possible. Preferably before you start to code. Should have some level of idea validation before starting.
Once you release a build, make customer support your highest priority. Answer every email/tweet within the hour. Let them call you. Doing this is a huge part of getting people to trust you and then later recommending you and your product.

In the spirit of the talk I wanted to share some other related resources.

So there are two great online courses going on right now regarding starting a startup people might be interested in:

Stanford’s Startup Class http://startupclass.samaltman.com
Philly Startup Leaders’s Startup Bootcamp: http://phillystartupleaders.org/

Some of it is a little heavy on the VC-funding but otherwise lots of great things to think about.

Another video I find really helpful to watch and re-watch whenever thinking about which projects I want to work on: How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek. His explanation of “Why/How/What” is very inspiring for me.

For some design fundamentals consider reading Design for non Designers by Robin Williams and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Finally I’ll mention the the Lean Startup Book which I reviewed back in 2013. It still is a favorite book of mine with some awesome ideas on working fast and based on validations and learning.

Quick CocoaLove Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:35:46 +0000

CocoaLove was a huge success. All of the talks were well received and the attendee side conversations vibrant and interesting. I think I saw 2 laptops open all weekend which to me is a huge sign people were engaged with our content. If you missed out, check out the CocoaLove site for some highlights of our tweet/photo live stream.

While they’ll never capture the event in its full glory, we did record the presentations and will be editing them over the next few weeks to make the available on the web. To find out when the videos are up I’d signup to the mailing list or follow the @CocoaLoveConf twitter account.

I want to thank my fellow organizers, the speakers and the attendees for helping provide a weekend I’ll remember forever.

In particular I’ll give special props to Curtis whom sacrificed countless hours attending to hundreds of details that resulting in a level conference quality that is hard to achieve. Great job!

Phone Names

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:26:27 +0000

I love coming up with fun names for my computer hardware. My computers typically are named after video game characters, for example my Mac mini CI server is called GLaDOS. She loves to test. My phones have similar names.

For my first iPhone, an iPhone 4, I named it Dex after the device Ash uses in Pokemon to look up information. (Not to be confused with the app of the same name I made months later to do just that.)

For my next phone, an iPhone 5, I choose “Navi”, named after the sometimes helpful yet interruption loving fairy side kick of Link in Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

For my new iPhone 6 I went with Ziggy, as in the device / computer AI from Quantum Leap. Feels appropriate for a device where I put in data and ask for advice.

As for the iPhone 6 itself, I think it’s pretty cool (really like the Touch ID and can’t wait to test Apple Pay) — though I am worried about dropping this phone. Not the easiest device to grip. Feels very smooth, too smooth.

CocoaLove Tickets

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 01:02:47 +0000

It’s September, which means next month is October, which means CocoaLove is coming up fast!

We’ve got a great weekend planned and if you haven’t already secured your ticket I’d do so now since we are starting our last marketing push to sell out.

Additionally, if you or a company you know are interested in sponsoring to help show your support for CocoaLove let me know. CocoaLove is passion project from some great folks out of our local CocoaHeads chapter who have donated countless hours in helping to organize this incredible non-profit event. Sponsor support will help us reach our stretch goals and make an already great experience that much better.

See you all soon!

On disappointment with clients who are prioritizing production over quality

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 02:28:52 +0000

A friend of mine emailed me, amongst a few others, asking for advice. He’s been working as a consultant for a little while now but has been unhappy about his recent clients. He says they haven’t been focused on the quality of things as much the general production speed and it disappoints him. My reply:

Without knowing the details of your current experiences I would encourage you to look within to improve the situation. I say this not to let the client off the hook but if you wait for other people to change to make YOUR life easier you are going to be waiting a long fucking time.

One of the huge problems is that most of the clients you will interact with have no experience producing software. It is your job to explain to them what a professional software development process looks like and if all the parties are in agreement, and contracts are signed, it is your job to execute that process.

When you were in the early talks with this client how did you teach them what your professional process was like? How did they react when you explained your core values?

If they agreed to your process and then changed the rules midway, shame on them, Walk away as soon as professionally possible, preferably under the comfort of a contract clause they are breaking.

If you never talked about this and just assumed they knew what was in your head about what the process was going to be like then shame on you.

Look inward. Figure out your core values, your development process. Make this part of the marketing of the consultant you. Make it clear to those interested in hiring you, this is how you work. This is how they will get the best value from your time, their money and in the long run, the code base they will own.

And to be clear, finding good clients is hard work. I think making your own expectations clear to them is half the battle, the other half is getting out there to market yourself to more and more people so that A) in the early days you have enough options to weed out the bad clients and then B) you get to a point that through word of mouth you get more and more clients looking for you because your process worked so well for their friends. If you aren’t turning away 4 projects for every 1 you work on, you probably aren’t marketing enough.

Have a question for me? Send me an email.

A Walled Garden of Shit

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:55:27 +0000

From the App Store Review Guidelines:

We have over a million Apps in the App Store. If your App doesn’t do something useful, unique or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.

I sure wish they would take that guideline to heart and start rejecting some of this shit.

So PBG got an iPad and found some shitty iPad games and I’d like to say these are the exception — but they’re not. There are tons of these crappy apps on the store and while it helps inflate that “total app” number for Apple it really hurts people browsing around trying to discover new apps.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/rm_Y2t51tUE

WEIRD IPAD GAMES!

Philly Craftsmanship

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:52:02 +0000

Software as Craft Philadelphia

A community of professionals dedicated to well-crafted software

Was very happy to attend the inaugural meeting of this group last week. Was a great mix of discussion and hands-on coding/pairing. Thanks to Promptworks for hosting.

During the discussions, the Software Craftsmanship North America conference (as well as its manifesto) were mentioned. You can find a bunch of the conference videos on the eighthlight vimeo channel. Seems like pretty interesting stuff.

In related news (since I think all hosts were in attendance at said meeting), I want to give a plug to the podcast Turing-Incomplete podcast. Finally starting to catch up on this Philly showcase of talent and really enjoying the discussions. Keep up the good work!

July Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 03:08:13 +0000

I’d hate to go a month without posting so here’s some random updates!

Philly CocoaHeads is going as strong as ever. Our WWDC June meeting filled the Apple Store Briefing Room to capacity (~50 people!) with lots of excited geeks. Our Side Project Saturday events continue to see some steady growth (15 people at the July event) and generate lots of interesting conversation and shared ideas. (Funny enough we were talking app bubbles right along side Edge Cases this week even though I didn’t know their topic at the time.) Finally our workshops are finally kicking back into gear with an Intermediate Objective-C course coming in August and a more beginner friendly Introduction to iOS Development course via the Girl Develop It group in September. Philly CocoaHeads is becoming so formal in fact I think we’re going to take the plunge and make it a legit non-profit group to help clean up the financial side of things.

In addition to CocoaHeads, there is also CocoaLove — our upcoming Fall conference. I’ll be doing the main talk Friday night and I’m doing my best to keep the topic upbeat despite my pessimistic tendencies. Big props to Curtis Herbert for really spearheading this event. It looks to be a really interesting and fun weekend. Buy your ticket while you can!

Through my job at Tonic Design things are busy. I have two projects right now, One is for a startup while another an internal app for a large corporation. Sadly these are not public right now so details will have to wait. That said, I’ve been spending a ton of time with iOS animations and I have two things to say. One, the Facebook Pop system is pretty cool and worthy of your time to play with. Two, I’m working on an abstraction system that should help apps with large amounts of animation stay organized. More to come soon on that.

At home, side projects have been back burnered, mostly for CocoaHeads stuff. I am spending time reading up on Swift and playing a little with Go but I’m also trying to keep plenty of time for playing games and relaxing. Can’t be focused on code all the time.

So thats it for July. Hope the summer is treating you all well. Hope to share more soon.

7 Minute Workout Featured on Apple.com

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:24:00 +0000

One of the apps I worked on, 7 Minute Workout, has been featured by Apple again. This time it’s part of the Strength TV ad which features a bunch of great fitness apps on iOS.

In related new the DmgCtrl and Tonic merger is kind of official these days. You can read more about it in Technical.ly Philly. You can also check out the revamped Tonic website which has a bunch of new case studies of some of our recent projects.

Congrats to all involved.

GoldCards 1.1

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 20 May 2014 13:43:03 +0000

GoldCards, a Hearthstone reference guide version 1.1 is live on the App Store.

It is mostly a data update regarding the recent nerf of Unleash the Hounds though I did squeeze in a few other bug fixes.

Video: Getting Started with iOS Development

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 May 2014 13:28:47 +0000

Through my position with the Philadelphia CocoaHeads chapter I am often approached by people who are interested in learning how to program for iOS. The follow presentation serves as a collection of helpful information and recommendations for such people.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

Getting Started with iOS Development from Mike Zornek on Vimeo.

Looking for feedback from Twitter users

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 04 May 2014 02:39:54 +0000

I have an application I’ve been working on. I’d love to get some feedback from people to see if this is a real problem for Twitter users. To do so I’ve made a short survey.

If you use Twitter and have a few min to spare please check it out:

https://clickablebliss.wufoo.com/forms/twitter-research/

Side Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 03:08:02 +0000

Sorry for the dead air over the last few months. Things got a bit hectic at my job and I couldn’t seem to find the free time to post. On the plus side, things are starting to calm down. We’ve shipped some more software and I’m finally catching up with some side projects.

One project which I started at the March CocoaHead Hackday is GoldCards. It’s an iOS reference tool for Hearthstone.

While I want this to be a Universal (iPhone and iPad) app in time I think I’m going to finish up a few more loose ends and release it as an iPhone-only app for now.

Another big side project is CocoaLove, an iOS-focused conference coming to Philly. I’m on the planning committee (sponsorship and AV to be specific). I’d also like to help build a simple conference app with the schedule and what not. Shouldn’t be too hard considering my history with such things.

In addition to all that I’m also trying to catch up with some web tech, Ember and Node to be precise. There are a few things on my idea board that could utilize such skills so I’m taking some time reading books and going through Code School examples to catch up.

iOS Development: Things to Like; Things to Hate

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 01:54:57 +0000

Things I like about iOS Development

I like writing code in the Objective-C language.
I like Apple’s provided frameworks and tools. They are, on the whole, very good.
I like the iOS community’s enthusiasm for great products. It is very inspiring.
I like that people will pay you good money to build apps for them in iOS. Though this is has good and bad implications.
I love attending, and over the last few years running, CocoaHeads in Philadelphia.
I like that the community on a whole is not very secretive. There is a sense we are in this together and people constantly help each other out sharing tips, code and war stories.

Things I hate about iOS Development

I hate the exclusivity of the AppStore distribution.
I hate that I can’t side load apps that people build that Apple doesn’t approve of.
I hate that I have to sign my apps.
I hate the learning curve and the bugs of the signing process for all but especially for people new to iOS.
I hate that Apple has a shitty code validator during app signing that will complain when I have methods on my objects that look like private methods on their objects.
I hate how shitty AppStore search and discovery is.
I hate the corporate politics that let apps get featured in the store because of “connections”.
I hate how people continue to manipulate the AppStore ranking system and I hate how little Apple seems improve the situation when many small developers livelihoods are at stake.
I hate how the Radar bug system doesn’t have tools in place to involve and update the original bug reporter on progress being made. From a third-party perspective most bug reports might as well go into a black hole.
I hate how in the pit of my stomach I believe that, on the whole, the iPhone and its brethren have not improved society. I think the majority of mobile software has only helped to empower “generation ‘me’”, a generation that is “friends” with everyone, but no one. This deserves a post on to itself someday.
I hate the iOS / Mobile bubble. The fact that people are spending way too much building apps and are not getting a proper return of value on the investment.
I hate that building products is way riskier than consulting (bubble related).
I hate that Apple hasn’t shown more interest in providing a library management system. Thankfully we have CocoaPods but since it’s on the outside there is a fear it might not be able to keep up as the tool chain evolves.
I hate that back when Apple first started to integrate OCUnit into Xcode it enviably killed like 3 or 4 other very promising testing systems because the thought at the time was “well Apple made their choice and will build on it” when in fact Apple never did. Only recently did we see XCTest and it is, right now from a functional perspective, a method renamed version of OCUnit with no new features.
I hate how Xcode Bots doesn’t have pre and post scripts.
I hate (hate is a strong word — let’s say disappointed by) the growing community of “Apple Celebrity”. The once full time developers who can build great things but now choose to spend the majority of their time blogging, podcasting and tweeting all day. They partake in a low impact ping pong match of opinions on weekly events and news that frankly doesn’t mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.

MegaManEffect now on GitHub

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 20:25:35 +0000

A few days ago I started to archive a lot of the Clickable Bliss website, replacing it with a smaller “hiatus” version. In the process I moved the MegaManEffect which lived primarily via a blog post and a GoogleCode subversion repo to GitHub.

https://github.com/zorn/MegaManEffect

The MegaManEffect is an application that emulates an effect seen in the classic NES game Mega Man 2. When you launch a Mac OS X application, the screen goes dark, stars sweep the night sky and your application’s icon is presented in a blue letter box bar with a cheesy 8-bit music introduction.

MegaManEffect was written while I attended the ADHOC/MacHack conference in 2004 and took second place in the ADHOC Labs Showcase! In the summer of 2005 the application hit a nerve in the community generating tons of interest and downloads. It is to this day one of the most distributed pieces of code I’ve even written.

Funny enough after tweeting the move I ended up getting an email and later a pull request to update the code base to compile on 10.9. I approved the pull request today (thanks @smithrobs!) with a few other fixes.

The MegaManEffect will be 10 years old this summer.

Enums and Switches

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 17:31:47 +0000

If you are one to use enum to define modes or types in your models or controllers, consider using switch statements to help branch the different behaviors. If you do so, the complier will help you when you have forgotten to implement behavior for a enum value.

Take for example a view controller that might have different behavior if we are in an editing mode, and even more so the editing is handled differently depending on the target device. For this, let’s create an enum like:

typedef enum ViewControllerMode : NSUInteger {
    ViewControllerModeDefault = 0,
    ViewControllerModeEditingiPhone,
    ViewControllerModeEditingiPad,
} ViewControllerMode;

Now if the tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath: method let’s use a switch statement to branch behavior depending on the behaviorMode.

-(void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    switch (self.behaviorMode) {
        case ViewControllerModeDefault:
            [self showRecordAtIndexPath:indexPath];
            break;
        case ViewControllerModeEditingiPhone:
            [self editRecordAtIndexPath:indexPath];
            break;
        case ViewControllerModeEditingiPad:
            [self replaceRecordAtIndexPath:indexPath];
            break;
    }
}

Notice we are not using a switch default behavior here. Now let’s add a new enum type called ViewControllerModeEditingiWatch and compile. Tada! The complier has a warning for us.

Enumeration value 'ViewControllerModeEditingiWatch' not handled in switch

This pattern can be extremely helpful to make sure you are accounting for all needed behaviors. Please consider it next time you are working with enum. Thanks!

Setup Bots Status as a Screensaver

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 03:55:24 +0000

It’s time to turn off that family photo screensaver and switch to something that’s important, CI status screens!

First up you’ll need this screensaver (or something similar), which can be configured to load a single or multiple websites up as a screensaver.

https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

Sadly the screensaver bundle is not developer signed so if you are bit paranoid consider downloading, inspecting and building the thing from source. Or you could be like me and hit run inside of Security after the initial “can’t run, not signed” dialogue.

Next you’ll need some URLs. I run both Xcode Bots and Jenkins off my Mac mini named GLaDOS and for those you’ll want URLs like:

http://glados.local/xcode/bigscreen

http://glados.local:8080/view/Monitor/

For Jenkins I’m currently using the Build Monitor Plugin which is pretty basic but a nice start.

Here’s to hoping all your returns from coffee breaks are bathed in green and passing tests.

Xcode Bots and Branches

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 02:58:05 +0000

Just a little quick tip tonight. If you create a Bot from within Xcode 5 it will assume that the branch you want this Bot to run on is the branch you are currently on. To change this, use the Xcode Bot Web interface. Select your Bot and look for the settings gear in the upper right and then edit the Bot, defining which branch you want to bot to run on.

I’m starting to revive an old side project of mine and it’s feeling good so far. I have Xcode Bots running tests and the static analyzer (all green baby!). I also have Jenkins deploying to HockeyApp when I merge development into my qa branch. Hope to share more details soon.

Podcast Idea

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:54:42 +0000

A podcast idea…

Introducing Merge Conflicts a Cocoa focused debate podcast where people argue for or against different systems / programming patterns. There is a central, ever repeating host who moderates the debate and two guests who argue for either side. Some show ideas include:

Core Data vs. Custom SQL
Storyboards vs. XIBs
Git vs. Mercurial
Homebrew vs. MacPorts
CocoaPods vs. Manual Code Sharing
AppCode vs. Xcode
Code generators (like mogenerator) Love Them vs Hate Them
TestFlight vs. HockeyApp
Kiwi vs. XCTests
Retain vs. Release
And so on…

Thoughts? Let me know via email or the twitters @zorn.

IBOutletCollection

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:35:39 +0000

Did a short show and tell at the last CocoaHeads meeting demoing something I learned at work and hadn’t known about before, that being IBOutletCollections.

For seasoned Cocoa developers we all know that an IBAction is typically how a button sends a message to the controller that something should happen. On the flip side there is IBOutlet which is a pointer to a view in the UI that let’s the controller have access, typically to update the view’s contents or attributes.

Well an IBOutletCollection lets you have access to a whole collection of views via a single connection. In code declaring an IBOutletCollection is going to look something like this:

@property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutletCollection(UITextField) NSSet *textFields;

When you declare the type of the outlet you can be specific such as UITextField or use higher level classes like UIView and connect to many different kinds of views. Technically you can use NSArray but since the order isn’t something I think is guaranteed best to stick to NSSet. Finally, while most outlets should be using weak references, these use strong since the view controller needs to own the array that contains the connections.

When you want to iterate over the collection just use fast enumeration like you normally would with an NSSet.

- (void)updateUI
{
    for (UITextField *textField in self.textFields) {
        textField.text = self.mainTextField.text;
        if (self.isBlue) {
            textField.textColor = self.view.window.tintColor;
        } else {
            textField.textColor = [UIColor redColor];
        }
    }
}

For a simple project demo see my OutletDemo project on GitHub.

Some real world use cases for IBOutletCollection might include theming (outlet collections for various styles, then making connections to view that should be styled) as well as form access and validation. IBOutletCollection was introduced in iOS 4 so theres no reason not to check it out. Enjoy.

Updating Homebrew’s “httpListenAddress” Default for Jenkins

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 02:49:20 +0000

I’ve setup some Jenkins servers in the past for Ruby on Rails apps but these days we are trying to get things running for iOS deployment and testing at work.

To experiment with some plugins and such I have my own Mac mini and installed Jenkins via Homebrew. Overall it’s working great though I was a bit stumped as to why I couldn’t load the Jenkins webpages outside of using localhost:8080 on the Mac mini itself. Worked fine last I did a clean install.

Turns out the Launch Agent settings Homebrew gives you (located at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.jenkins.plist for me) will launch with the following command line parameter --httpListenAddress=127.0.0.1. Edit this to 0.0.0.0 (the default) to allow all addresses.

I know this isn’t the most enjoyable blog post but wanted to post it as Google Food for others who might run into the issue.

My New Job with DmgCtrl

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:00:27 +0000

After almost eight years of self-employment I have decided to jump back in and as of Monday started a new job working at Damage Control (DmgCtrl) here in Philadelphia.

I would suspect most people (especially those outside Philly) will not know the name DmgCtrl and that is kind of intended. The founders Jason Allum and Mac Morgan have never really put much energy in advertising their “brand” and have let their work and client happiness speak for itself. Mac once said:

Do great work and everything sorts itself out. We don’t advertise (you can see from how sparse our website is) and rarely have to even pitch work, people find out about us entirely through word of mouth. So keep your eye on quality. Everything else is a distraction.

I’ve known DmgCtrl through IndyHall and Jason for years and there is really a lot of great things going on here. This isn’t a strait-up “Platform X” development shop. The projects aren’t limited to a single tech stack nor are the employees abilities. Diverse backgrounds are common and education seems to be a core part of the culture.

It may sound trite, but one of things I really came to love about working on Shindig was the benefits of being on a development team. I loved getting feedback via code review; I loved brainstorming ideas over lunch. Going back to contracting, doing 1-man projects all on my own, I felt like I was missing out, like I’m not growing as a programmer as much as I could.

Anyways, I’m really looking forward to working at DmgCtrl. There are a bunch of interesting things in the pipeline, some I might even be able to talk about someday. 🙂

Week in Review: WWDC, E3 and CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:02:27 +0000

It’s been a crazy week. Some random notes and observations…

WWDC

Apple did a tremendous job streaming the Keynote. I watched it live on my Apple TV in the living room while chatting with friends on IRC and Twitter. It was awesome. As for the content, let’s review:

Mac OS X 10.9, Mavericks — Not a huge fan of the name. I liked Sea Lion! As for the user facing features, most are pretty meh for me, I will enjoy better dual monitor support. I also like the idea they are pushing iCloud Keychain and that it will suggest higher quality passwords for people. I myself will stick with 1Password but this is a great feature for users at large. The advanced tech of 10.9 looks great. Love the focus on battery life.

iOS 7 — I have very mixed feelings for the new UI. Some of it I like, some of it I don’t. Between the historic adoption rate of new versions of iOS and the complexity of delivering a consistent experience across iOS 6 and iOS 7, I can see many apps moving to iOS 7 only in the coming months, particularly ones that aren’t released yet.

While not reviewed in detail during the keynote, the real gems for me are in the developer tools and APIs released this week. Xcode 5 looks awesome. The new continuous integration services of OS X Server looks great (though time will tell if it can be a full on replacement for current solutions). Tons of brand new tech including: Text Kit, Sprite Kit, Game Controllers, UIKit Dynamics and better multitasking have been introduced along with some great improvements to current APIs. It’s going to be months until I have time to play with everything.

New Mac Pro — I’ve been a long time customer of the Mac Pro and was in the market for one in 2011 when I sadly, after continued uninspiring updates to the product line, had to settle for a loaded (max RAM / max Graphics Card / 256 SSD) iMac instead. Not to sound like a total dick, the iMac has been great and really fast but I still longed for the multi-drive, graphics card replaceable, mega ram slot tower that I was accustom to. So this new Mac Pro is actually in my eyes more of a loaded Mac mini style device. There is little chance you’ll be replacing these graphic cards (yes cards, it has two of them; probably to support the unannounced retina display this Mac Pro will probably ship along side with) and there doesn’t seem to be much room for extra internal hard disk space. That said, this machine’s stats looks awesome and I have been antsy for a retina display on the desktop. I’ll have to see a price tag before I commit myself but am happy I have options when it comes time to upgrade my current iMac.

There were also new Macbook Airs released at the show. I have and really enjoy my 13-inch Air and while the new extra battery life of these new models are probably very important for some people I am lucky enough to be able to plug-in when needed so will probably skip this generation. If it was a retina screen, maybe I’d change my tune.

Sessions — After the keynote, Apple, like they had promised, started publishing the session videos, usually less than 24 hours after they had been presented. By the end of the week we also had choices for HD or SD variants as well as the PDF slides. This helps take the sting out of not being able to acquire a ticket a lot and I thank Apple for putting forth the extra effort to do so.

E3

I haven’t been keeping up with E3 nearly as much as I have been Apple news, but seems like everyone had a great time out in LA. Playstation 4 announced it will not be following Microsoft’s lead and is promising very little DRM on the PS4 that will inhibit things like game sharing and used game sales. This, plus a cheaper price tag and arguably better under-the-hood tech has pushed itself to the top the console food chain. Time and games will tell how things end. For me, I’m not planning on a day one purchase. I’d like to see how things pan out and find a must have game to push me over the edge.

As for my Nintendo, for which I always have a love/hate relationship with, we saw a new Smash Bros, a new Super Mario 3D World, as well as lots of new info on the new 3DS Pokemon and Zelda titles.

Moving from back to front, I’m getting pretty jazzed for the new Pokemon. Even outside my previous fandom for the series, this new release has a lot of new elements to check out. Being a huge Link to the Past fan has me interested in this new sequel game though I’m still mixed on feelings of curiosity mixed with disappointment that they aren’t doing something more unique. I own Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS and it was not something I really enjoyed. The gameplay was very slow and continued use of the same old Mario platforming was exhausting. Considering the lack of interest New Super Mario Bros got as a Wii U title, you’d think they’d start to catch on that we need real NEW things but alas this seems lost on Nintendo. Finally, Smash Bros fans will inevitably enjoy a new release of Smash Bros. Even I get a little giddy seeing MegaMan added as playable character. Unfortunately I’m not a fighter fan. I no longer share a house with people to regularly play with and even when I do play these games at a party it becomes a button mash as no one knows all the moves. I think I’ve grown out of it. 🙁

CocoaHeads and our iOS 7 Hackday

On Thursday we had our usual monthly meeting for CocoaHeads. With the Apple event still in-progress there was lots of chatter about all the new stuff. When the meeting finally started we actually ended up with so many talks and demos we went over time. Reactive Cocoa in particular kept many a CocoaHead asking questions and thinking out of the box.

Saturday we held a hackday, our first CocoaHead event in some time. The hackday was focused on iOS 7 and had people work solo or team up to experiment with the latest API toys. Throughout the day we provided breakfast, snacks and a home made lunch from IndyHall’s own Kara LaFleur (@KaraLaFleur). At the end of the day we presented our results to the group and awarded book prizes from the Pragmatic Programmers and Big Nerd Ranch. All in all things went great and it was good to see some people attend who normally can’t make our nightly meetings.

Sunday Rest

It’s now Sunday and after an extremely busy week I’m relaxing. I do have plans to head out for some dinner later to wish my Mom to wish her a happy Father’s Day but otherwise am enjoying a lazy day around the apartment.

For all my Apple and gaming friends, I hope you enjoyed this week as well and enjoy the upcoming releases. Have fun!

Star Trek: Into Darkness, Nitpicks and Plot Holes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 May 2013 03:50:06 +0000

This is Spoiler Country. If you aren’t ready for spoilers, you might want to skip this post.

I haven’t even opened my M&Ms and we already got nitpicks.

Why did Khan use his blood to save the girl and have the guy drop a ring into a glass of water to destroy the lab in London? What if when proposed with this opportunity the man called Starfleet police instead? What if he let Khan cure his daughter first and then call Starfleet police? Why take these risks? Can’t Khan with his superior intellect blow up that lab on his own?
How does Spock use a “cold fusion bomb” to freeze a volcano when cold fusion in real science generates heat/energy?
Wouldn’t suddenly freezing an active volcano have other bad side effects for the planet? Volcanos help a planet release pressure. Where is all the pressure going to go now?
Was the Enterprise really designed to function under water? To be able to use thrusters under water?
Why are we hiding the Enterprise under the water just outside the village when the goal is not to be seen? There is no fucking reason for the ship to even be in the atmosphere of this fucking planet. There are shuttle crafts and beaming for this kind of stuff.
Kirk gets stripped of command, sent back to the academy and reinstated as first commander in like what, 5 on-screen minutes? Give him 5 more: Pike dies and he becomes Captain once again. For a movie with a theme of learning responsibility (which is sadly a repeat of the first movie) this just feels wrong.
How does Spock rationalize breaking the prime directive via freezing an active volcano but looses his shit about letting the natives see a starship? What a fucking hypocrite.

An aside on the “The Prime Directive” for you ignorant sluts out there…

The Prime Directive, Articles of the Federation, Chapter I, Article II, Paragraph VII:

Nothing within these Articles Of Federation shall authorize the United Federation of Planets to intervene in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system, or shall require the members to submit such matters to settlement under these Articles Of Federation. But this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII

Jonathan Archer:

Some day, my people are gonna come up with some sort of a doctrine, something that says what we can and can’t do out here, should and shouldn’t do. But until someone tells me that they’ve drafted that…directive, I’m gonna have to remind myself every day that we didn’t come out here to play God.

Jean-Luc Picard:

The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.

Fuck the Prime Directive we have a volcano scene to shoot, I mean to stop!

Khan’s plan makes no sense!

After the events of the first movie Admiral Marcus wants Starfleet to be militarized and needs more powerful weapons. Admiral Marcus starts searching space for an edge of some kind and discovers the Botany Bay. Marcus unfreezes Khan and finds out he has super intelligence and strength. Marcus convinces Khan to help him build long range torpedoes and advanced starships to help militarize Starfleet. Khan goes along with this plan but after a while something changes and Khan leaves the secret base.

What a coincidence, they unfreeze 1 of 73 and it just so happens to be Khan once again. Why not give some screen time to Joachim?
Khan went into cryostasis in 1996, before First Contact and before we had warp capability. How the hell does he know how to make all this shit?
Why didn’t Marcus unfreeze more if not all the other super smart people? Surly more super intelligent people would help him get better weapons and faster too — Mythical Man Month not withstanding.
Why does Khan not demand the rest of his people be unfrozen right away? Perhaps Marcus doesn’t trust Khan, but if that’s true then shouldn’t Marcus have a tail on him. How does Khan get away with so much stuff while under Marcus’s nose?

Based on his character and behaviors let’s assume Khan was working with Marcus as a ruse. Khan knew a day would come where he would betray Marcus to enviably get back his frozen comrades and the advanced starship he had built with all the cool long range torpedoes and shit. This is his plan:

First he’ll take the long distance torpedoes he developed for Marcus and hollow them out. He’ll put his frozen friends in them. He then blows up the lab in London where he and Marcus were doing research and development. I’ll assume the torpedoes we’re not being stored there (maybe they were already onboard the super starship?). I’ll also assume the reason he attacks this base an no other is to help stunt Marcus’s development of advanced weapons.

Khan knows the attack will kick off a protocol meeting of high end Starfleet leaders. He’ll fly a fully armed craft right up to the windows of the meeting room and shoot. However, killing everyone at this meeting is not Khan’s goal. If it were he could just use another ring bomb and be done with them all. Apparently the goal is to scare Marcus and leave a trail to make it clear he is hiding on Kronos. He figures this location is the perfect excuse for Marcus to use those long range torpedoes with all the friends hidden in them.

Khan’s taking an awful risk no one will notice he switched out the contents of these torpedoes with people. If Marcus doesn’t trust Khan you’d think he’d have some cameras and shit on him, like Gus on Walt. You’d think Marcus would notice all the frozen people are missing.
I have to imaging there was a lot of manual labor for this plan, to hollow out these torpedoes and swap in the cryo-tubes. Why didn’t Khan just unfreeze people right there and then while he had access to them all? Why hide them and make up a convoluted plan to get access to them again later?
Khan seemed to be firing that gun pretty recklessly into the meeting room. What if hit Marcus? Considering Khan needs Marcus alive to order the torpedoes with his friends hidden in them be used, it all seems pretty dumb. Maybe he got some pointers from Neo who has no problem shooting guns right at the person he is trying to free.
If there was an attack on Starfleet London don’t you think the main headquarters would be on lock down? How the hell does an armed craft get anywhere near the windows of an Admiral’s meeting? Wouldn’t there be some shields or something?
Does Khan really expect the Enterprise will fire all 72 of these torpedoes at his location?
Why was the Enterprise given so many torpedoes for one target anyways? They at best need 3 or 5. Seems like overkill to me.
Why didn’t Marcus keep any for himself and his ship?
Have these torpedoes been updated to land softly on a planet after being fired?
I would think cryo-tubes are pretty fragile. How does shooting them at warp speeds, traveling through planet ozones and landing effect their ability to keep the people asleep?
If things are so volatile with the Klingons how does the away team fly to their home planet without being noticed from the Enterprise which parked in neural zone?

So instead of firing the torpedoes like Marcus ordered, and as Khan planned for, Kirk takes Khan prisoner instead. I have to assume being taking prisoner was not part of Khan’s plan. If it were it means he assumed a starfleet captain would have been ordered to fire but not done so. One might argue Khan specifically worked things out so Kirk would have been the one given the mission; that Khan knew Kirk would ignore the order and do the morally right thing. In reality though Khan actions killed Pike, Kirk’s father figure which pissed off Kirk a ton. It took the advice of ever officer under him to change his mind from killing Khan using the torpedoes to taking him prisoner.

Beaming as a plot device

With no real cause or reason the first reboot movie had Scotty figure out a whole new style of beaming that let’s people beam onto ships traveling at warp and long distances. It’s been some time since the events of the first movie and Starfleet is apparently using this new tech everywhere (at least when it helps the plot).

Khan can beam from Earth to Kronos but we can’t beam Spock out of a volcano?
Why can’t we beam to Kronos from Earth like Khan did?
Kirk, Spock, Uhura and two red shirts are surrounded by Klingons about to be killed, why can’t we beam them up?
Can’t beam Khan up to the Enterprise from Earth during the end movie chase scene because he is moving too fast on a ground transport BUT we can beam people to him? WTF! THIS MAKES NO SENSE?!?
Why didn’t they just beam Kirk and Khan to the Admiral’s ship instead of that space jump scene? Probably because he had shields up — but if he had shields up why didn’t Kirk and Khan smash in to them after being shot out from the Enterprise? Oh I know, Laaaaaazzzzzzyyyyy wriiiiittttiing.

Spock Prime

Old Spock you money grubbing son of a bitch. Why are you here? Fan service? Did you even come to the set to film this scene? Looks like you did it over Skype(1).

1: Props to RTM for that joke — just had to steal it! 🙂

Hey Spock Prime, give these kids chance to stand on their own! We don’t need you here.

So you do realize that using knowledge from the future to change the past has dire consequences. Well that’s good to know. What? Fuck it all and tell them about Khan anyways. So much for Vulcan oaths.

For Young Spock to call Spock Prime and ask about Khan sure does seem like a shot in the dark when there are a lot of other things going on.

Why is Earth space so fucking empty?

Right before the final space battle the Enterprise is visually kicked out of warp above Earth space. If they weren’t kicked out of warp by the Admiral’s ship they would have traveled lightyears past Earth.
Wouldn’t being kicked out warp that violently cause more damage to the ship?
Why didn’t they pull out of warp right when they were being fired upon in warp. The Admiral’s ship would have zoomed right passed them ala Spaceballs.
Why does the enemy ship in these modern movies always have to be bigger and scarier looking? One of the great things about Wrath of Khan was that Khan disables the Enterprise with the Reliant, a much smaller ship.
The final battle happens right over Earth space. Why aren’t other ships there? If they were there but not shown, don’t they question this mysterious higher tech ship firing on their fellow ship? Let alone the flagship of Starfleet?!?
The first movie of this reboot had Nero torture Pike for codes to deactivate Earth’s “defense grid”. Apparently even as advanced as Nero’s ship was he was scared of Earth’s defense grid. Where the fuck is the defense grid now? Why is it not helping to defend starfleet’s flagship from being attacked?
The Enterprise has lost all power and is slowly falling to earth. Why can’t one of the dozens of ships and/or space docks that should be floating around Earth beam the crew off? Shield are obviously down as they barely have enough power for life support.

Answer: Earth space is empty is because it’s convenient to the plot. The reason the final attack happens above Earth at all is so we can have that sequence of Khan slamming the starship into the Starfleet Headquarters which looks sexy as hell in the trailer but doesn’t effect the plot at all. What’s different after that crash scene? Nothing. Khan jumps off the ship no problem (WTF?!? How is he still alive?) to start the chase scene.

Related: Having the Enterprise underwater was for the trailers too. It helps tease the idea that the Enterprise would crash into Earth at some point as we saw it inside the atmosphere of an M-class planet and we also see a ship crashing.

We may be out of popcorn but not nitpicks!

In the heat of the final battle, Scotty begins to fall and Kirk grabs him. Kirk begins to fall and Chekov grabs him. Little Chekov who weighs 90lbs soaking wet, pulls them both up the to railing. Space muscles!
When Kirk dies they figure out they can bring him back with Khan’s blood. Why Khan and not any of the other 72 frozen people in those tubes? Hell they probably had to take one out when they put Kirk under while they were waiting for Khan’s blood. I suspect coming out of cryo requires care and handling. I bet the guy they kicked out in a hurry, to make room for Kirk died. Poor guy. OMG I hope it wasn’t Joachim! 🙁
Why would injecting human blood (even if it is “magic” human blood) into a Tribble be a good idea for science? Seems like a waste to me. You have to imagine better experiments could be performed on that blood.
Bring Khan back alive they say. As if Spock can kill a man who’s blood brings others back to life?
When Scotty blasts Khan with a phaser set to stun it knocks Khan out, at least for a minute or so. At the end of the movie, for Uhura using the same phaser it takes like 10 shots to do the same thing. (Maybe his genetic enhancement gives him the power to become less susceptible to the stuns after the first experience (ala borg)? Nah, I don’t give the writers that much credit.)
At the end of the movie we never hear what happened to Khan. Did we keep Khan alive? Is he in jail cell? Are we using his magic blood to keep other people alive now?
What happened with the Klingons? We’re told we are on the brink of war and I have to imagine the events of the movie, where like 30 or so Klingons were killed with starfleet weapons, have only escalated things. The movie ends with a year of time passing but all is well on Earth. No war, plenty of time for a ship re-commissioning party. When I saw Kahn’s ship smash into Starfleet Headquarters I said to myself oh shit, Klingons are going to take advantage of this and attack Earth in the next movie. Guess not. 🙁

What year is it anyways?

It’s 2013, I don’t like being spoon fed that in the mid 1990s there was a Eugenics War with genetically enhanced humans and we also had perfected cryostasis too. I was alive in the 90s, there was no war and no frozen people, just grunge rock.

For me and I think most people, the best sci-fi is where everything in the story’s timeline matches up to your own until the event of the story. For example, if I’m in a movie theater in 2013 and we have a movie taking place in 2016 where aliens are invading Earth, I’m pretty likely to let my imagination stay with the movie. If I’m in a theater in 2013 and a movie tells me aliens invaded in 2010 it breaks my illusion immediately. (Unless there is a related multi-demential plot device with a pretty girl who throws me ammo and health in which case I might allow it.)

Movies usually fix this kind of stuff. Take for example early drafts of Back to the Future that reference 1982 as the current year but then changed it to 1985 for the official release. The Matrix did the same, referencing the year as 1997 in its early drafts and then upping the year as the screenplay saw revisions:

You believe the year is 1997 when in fact it is much closer to 2197.

You believe the year is 1998 when in fact it is much closer to 2198.

You believe the year is 1999 when in fact it is much closer to 2199.

With a reboot like this who’s story origins come from 1960s TV it’s hard to work around the “1990s Eugenics Wars” issue I’ll accept but for us nerds who are quick at math and paying attention to the years and ages being thrown around in a movie screenplay like this it still bothers us.

Closing Commentary: The Wrath of Copy and Paste

While I’ll commend the acting and special effects I really have to roll my eyes at the writing in this movie.

I feel like the writers room started with a wall of index cards, one for each reference and action scene they wanted to make and then they wrote a story to make these connect. The writers were not interested in trying to tell a new unique story with these characters. They were interested in creating another trek-themed, reference-filled, no thinking action movie that placates to the masses. Arguably they have succeeded at their goals, I just had higher expectations.

Movies should stand on their own and this one doesn’t. This movie uses way, way too many callbacks to Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan. In fact “callback” or “homage” aren’t really the right words, this movie flat out plagiarizes Wrath of Khan to the point of distraction.

One example, there is the scene where Kirk is questioning his new prisoner and while explaining his past, his true identity, the camera zooms in, a long dramatic pause, “My name is Khan.” Now for anyone who isn’t familiar with the previous movies this is a meaningless event. Even Kirk and Spock “in-character” have no reason to react to the reveal of this alais. They might as well keep calling him John Harrison for all they care.

Hey old Spock, ever have trouble with a “John Harrison” in your days? Nope. Ok thanks anyways.

I’m sure many people enjoyed how they mirrored the Spock/Kirk death scene but for me when Spock died in Wrath of Khan it meant something more. For one, we left the theater with Spock dead. There was a significant ending where Kirk and the audience get to come to grasp with the realities of what had just happened. There was real tension that this was the end for our favorite vulcan.

When Kirk dies in this movie there isn’t much tension if you are paying attention to things and know modern hollywood. The screenplay doesn’t even give the audience enough time to grieve and collect themselves before starting the next sequence, a huge, over the top crash scene that doesn’t impact the plot at all.

Again I’ll give the actors credit, the performance of that death scene was extremely good. They matched the emotion level of the original which is a classic scene for all movies. What doesn’t click though is that the original pair of Kirk and Spock had been adventuring together for years and were extremely close friends. This version of Kirk and Spock had known each other for a year, maybe less, and have not really demonstrated a true friendship bond yet at least not at the same level as their predecessors. Having such an emotional scene copied and mirrored doesn’t really make that much sense when you don’t take into consideration this version of the characters. This version of the characters were not ready for that scene.

I think nostalgia was important for the first movie to help people make connections from the past to this new crew but I was hoping with this second film, now that it has its own timeline and canon, would be able to break out and do new things. It sadly did not and now I’m left to wonder if they ever will or if this new Trek series will simply be a collection of continued nostalgia rehashes from archives, albeit very pretty rehashes.

Video: Introduction to Objective-C Categories

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:01:37 +0000

I’m hoping to do some formal screencasting, educational videos for iOS and Rails, in the future so for practice I hacked together this little Introduction to Objective-C Categories to try some stuff out. It’s not the worst thing ever so I thought I’d share it and my notes.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4

Objective-C Categories from Mike Zornek on Vimeo.

A short introduction to Objective-C categories for iOS and Mac developers.

As far as what I was trying to learn through the process of making this…

What is a good resolution to shoot at?

Ended up trying 1920x1080 which in TV speak is 1080p. This I think worked well. There is enough screen real estate to show Xcode with all “widgets” open, plus enough room for a side app like the iPhone Simulator. Speaking of which, 1080p barely squeezes both portrait iPhone retina and portrait iPad non-retina. Finally, should this ever be pipped out to a TV it should be full screen with no scaling.

What I don’t like is how tiny the file browser and non-source text can be. I envision zooming in on occasion to have those read well when needed.

How is Vimeo these days?

I’ve put up a few videos in the past on Vimeo but for this new project I’m considering using their Pro service so I saw this as an opportunity to play around with their stuff.

Overall things seem good. They are really good about suggesting codec and bit-rate changes to get the most from their platform. They also provide a nice HTML 5 version of their player.

Why not YouTube? Long term I could see some of this content becoming pay-for or subscriber/membership-based and YouTube isn’t really good for that.

To record audio before video or with video?

For the majority of my previous screencast work my typical process included recording the audio on its own and then recording the video, matching everything up in editing. The result is a nice, tight video without any real hesitations or pauses.

For this video I did things more casual. I had a list of things I wanted to demonstrate and recorded my voice right with along the video. There are pros and cons to this.

Pros:

I do enjoy the personality that comes from this style. To hear the typing and a few ums makes a human connection.
If done well, it can shorten overall capture time.
It lends itself to camera shots of the speaker, which again can help create a human connection.

Cons:

Doing the video live with the audio is much, much harder to perform. It’s easy to miss things you intended to showoff (I did so in this video.)
I myself have bad allergies and tend to breath into the mic. If recording the audio on its own it’s easier to isolate this.
Some people will not like hearing the typing.
If the screencast is based off a fixed script I’ll be able to post a text version easier, which is extremely valuable (for Google-food as well as people who pref text over videos).

In the end I think I’ll be going back to audio only first, then screen recording but welcome your feedback.

Other random observations:

Probably want to hide the dock for more “Xcode space”.
Those early “title slides” were done in Keynote. Works great for this kind of stuff, especially animations to explain abstract concepts.
In the future I won’t be typing everything. Longer code will be uncommented in place or dragged in from snippets.
Could have done some some zooming to help visualize things like the new file Xcode sheet, schema editor.
Need to overlay URLs in large type when promoting a website.

Not sure how fast we’ll see real production start on these videos as I do have a few things already cooking but I don’t mind too much as it’s good to be busy. 🙂

New Let’s Play Section

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:38:17 +0000

While I haven’t mentioned it too much on the blog, I’ve recently got back into Let’s Plays. From the new Let’s Play index page:

Let’s Plays (often shortened to LPs) are basically people playing a video game and adding commentary on top. Some people like showing off all the things and secrets, such as HCBaily and ChuggaaConroy, while others treat LPing more as a personal journal, like NintendoCapriSun. I’m still finding my voice but am enjoying the process.

I just finished a Let’s Play of Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and have now started a Let’s Play of Super Mario Galaxy 2.

http://youtube.com/videoseries?list=PLcuknvxBZ9L4GiN4Sj5eCXcxfGjIhB2SG

For more info, RSS links and such check out the new LP index page.

Updated Reading List

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:34:21 +0000

Updated my reading list. Go check it out!

Reading is good for the soul. Thought I’d share my reading list and update it once a month or so. If you have any recommendations shoot me an email or a tweet.

Philly Startup Weekend

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:50:22 +0000

This weekend I got to take part in Philly Startup Weekend!

Startup Weekend is a world wide organization dedicated to hosting events to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs. The goal is to launch a startup in 54 hours. There have been several past Philly incarnations leading to some well known companies. I’ve always wanted to go but have had too many commitments. This weekend worked out and I’m glad it did.

The overall format is pretty self explanatory. For us there were about 110 attendees, 50 pitches, 16 projects selected based on a popular vote via stickers and then informal team formation. The teams worked on their new startup for the next two days with occasional drop-ins from local coaches to help out. The event hosts 4-minute presentations with 3-minutes of Q/A from the the judges for each project. Things closes with awards and a final party/mixer.

What I Liked

The attendees I interacted with were good people. No one there was slacking, nor did I see people looking to milk free work out of volunteers for their pet projects. Everyone genuinely seemed to be there to learn and do what they can to launch these startups.

The coaches that showed up were extremely helpful and provided great feedback as we matured our startups.

Overall, the whole event was a blast.

What I Didn’t Like

The venue / wifi. Once work started it was clear the organizers couldn’t support everyone on the main floor via wifi. Workbridge who is located in the same building was gracious enough to host moving a few teams up to their offices to help the congestion and while it did fix the wifi issue it also disrupted the “single open floor plan” which I think is extremely welcome for events like this.

The value in having an open floor is that you’ll overhear ideas and problems your fellow attendees are having and be able help each other out. It’s a great way to meet people and share ideas. On our 2nd floor space each team was isolated into their own offices so there wasn’t as much cross communication as I would have preferred. To balance things I took walking breaks back down to the main floor and talked with people. Even just having the ability to see the other team’s whiteboards was pretty interesting.

Some Take Aways

When you are given a project to do with a team of people, make sure you modify your plans to get the most out of these people and their skill set. Don’t get bogged down in that you are missing out on a specific developer or designer skill set. If you have someone who has experience with WordPress, figure out how to integrate WordPress into your solution. Make the most of what you have. Embrace constraints!

The overall entrepreneur community is maturing. I think it has been common to think that having a working prototype at the end of a weekend like this is a major goal however from my experience this weekend I was very pleased to see a larger percent of time focused on customer validation and the business model than code. More than working code what I think you need to at the end of the weekend is strong visualization of your product, and this need not be working code. I think UI renders or even a mocked up Keynote deck that fakes your website or app suffices. What you don’t want to do is let the complexities of the code implementation get in the way of prototyping different ideas during the weekend.

Our Project

I helped out with MentorShake, a website that aims to help connect mentors with students. Over the weekend during our validation we actually got back a lot of contradictory feedback from mentors on what they wanted and also struggled with the business model. By presentation time I think we ended up with a pretty good business plan and verbal commitments from over a dozen locals who were willing to be listed as mentors. Time will tell if the idea has legs but if you’re local to Philly and interested please sign up to the mailing list by visiting this page.

Thanks!

I’d like to again thank the organizers of the Philly Startup Weekend. It was a great time and I appreciate their hard work. If you are at all interested in this kind of thing I recommend you be on the lookout for a Startup Weekend in your area.

WWDC Student Scholarships

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:17:59 +0000

Regardless to the near instant sell out of WWDC 2013, if you are a student their is still hope! Apple runs a student scholarship program and the deadline this year is May 2nd. I attended my first WWDC on a student scholarship and met some great people.

If you can go, I highly recommend applying. Good luck.

Panic’s Status Board for iPad

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:39:42 +0000

I finally got some time to play with Panic’s new Status Board today and I have to say it’s pretty cool.

Status Board is an iPad app that helps you produce a visually pleasing status board to keep track of things in your life. There are built-in tools for email, twitter, weather and more. The real power though comes from the free-from widgets that let you build your own data sources.

In my own first draft status board I’m using one such custom source called MintStatusBoardHelper, which is a Mint Pepper that will produce Status Board friendly JSON to help visualize website stats, in my case per-week visit counts. (Note: there was a little bug in this particular per-week source but it was easy enough to fix in PHP. I sent a report to the author as well so hopefully it’ll be gone soon.)

I was particularly happy to see that Status Board only required iOS 5. For me (and I assume others) this means we finally have a good use for those iPad 1s that sadly can’t run iOS 6 and have been collecting dust.

To stand it up I purchased a portable fold-up iPad stand on Amazon for ~ $8. The stand works well though you’ll have to plug the iPad in on the top as there isn’t enough room on the bottom. If you keep the iPad plugged in (to a full power outlet) and set the auto lock to never, the iPad basically becomes an always on screen.

Some things I’d love to see in the future:

More boards, swipe left and right to switch.
Font size options. My poor eyes can’t read the tweets.
Render single and sequences of photos. Think digital picture frame.

I was always jealous of Panic’s old HTML/TV-based status board and now I have my own. So happy! 🙂

Retweet Etiquette

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:12:34 +0000

I know I’ve done it. After months of working on a new project, I release it to the world and am extremely proud. I tweet about it and maybe even occasionally retweet some nice things people are saying.

Dave Winer recently release Fargo and while I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet I do follow Dave on Twitter and he’s been busy promoting his new baby.

I have nothing against this, but along with his own tweets he’s been retweeting other people talking about Fargo, and in my option excessively. The majority of these retweets could be summarized in “Dave made a new outline tool. It’s cool.”

I’ll call these ego tweets, and the problem with ego tweets is that they provide no value. I as a reader of your tweet stream gain no relevant information or resources from them. Their sole purpose is to promote the fact a certain person likes something you are invested in.

As a comparision, one of the retweets Dave sent was good. From Lawrence Lessig:

if you don’t have a DROPBOX account, and want to read about FARGO: smallpicture.com/fargoPress.html

— Lessig (@lessig) April 17, 2013

This is a good retweet. It still has a bit of an ego smell in that here is a well known person talking about my product but the value is present as it gives me something to do. Fargo sadly does require a Dropbox account to do anything so if you don’t have one or are antsy about linking up with a new app blind this is a great resource.

Normally maybe I’d keep this bit of “retweet etiquette” opinion to myself but I was kind of disappointed in how my feedback was taken.

The lesson to be learned here is this:

If someone gives you feedback or criticism, just say thank you. If you want clarification or more information on their comment or disagreement feel free to have an adult conversation. Do not ever tell someone who has taken an interest in you or your products and is providing feedback to go away.

A Mac Pro Guy Getting By in an iMac World: Storage

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:39:47 +0000

Recently I decommissioned my much beloved Mac Pro which served as a lowly file server since I moved to my loaded 27-inch iMac last year. The iMac is working out great though I would have still preferred a new Mac Pro for it’s overall expandability, particular to this post — it’s extra hard drive bays.

On the iMac, I use the 256 GB SSD for my boot drive and have the second internal 2 TB (disk-based) drive partitioned into three other drives, one for a nightly SuperDuper! mirror of said SSD, another for a Time Machine backup and then the final one for 700 GB of misc storage. This “misc storage” used to be for my iTunes library and backups of large downloads like Xcode/Mac OS X installs, but that’s changed now as you’ll see below so I might roll this back into the Time Machine partition or rework it to have a Windows Bootcamp drive again (like I had on my Mac Pro).

All in all, the built-in storage I get with the iMac works fine for day-to-day work but I still needed something for my archives: my monthly backup of cloud/server assets, archives of my video/screencast work and my iTunes library (which has ballooned with WWDC videos and slides).

For a while I debated getting a Drobo, particularly one of the newer Thunderbolt versions. From the outside it looks like a great system but at $850 with no hard drives included I just couldn’t justify it. So what did I end up with?

I bought a pair of Western Digital, My Passport, 2TB Portable External Hard Drives ($139 on Amazon). My digital closet sizes up at around 800 GB right now so I expect these should meet my needs for a good while. I got two of them and use one as my main archive drive and then the other to backup the main. They use USB 3.0 for transfer and while the speed isn’t crazy awesome, it totally meets my needs. I love the small form factor and the fact they do not need an additional power supply. I often throw the backup one in my bag for IndyHall if I’d like to have my iTunes library with me (it’s way to big for my MacBook Air’s SSD). I also love that I’m not using some complex RAID format. I can plug these drives into any Mac and get access to my files.

Anyways, I’ve been using these drives for three months now and all is working well. If you are in the market for some extra external storage, I highly recommend. I’m actually considering buying a third to start a rotation of sorts at IndyHall. With that I believe I’d be safe losing all my home gear to a theft or fire and still have all my digital stuff safe.

Checking In: April Flu, New Desk, Taxes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:17:48 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates. I kind of fell into a work drought over last few weeks with a mixture of a bad stomach bug, a new desk which required lots of teardown of my office and now a few days of tax paperwork. Oh how I loath the tax paperwork.

On the fun side of things, I got to play through the campaign of Starcraft 2 and have been practicing my Protoss skills in some vs AI and ladder. I also picked up a 3DS XL (previously had a normal-sized 3DS) and have been revisiting some older games, playing Super Mario Land 3D and a few others. I also picked up Bioshock: Infinite but sadly due to the state of my room haven’t hooked back up the Xbox 360. Finally I’m playing Link to the Past on YouTube as a new Let’s Play. Been pretty good about posting new episodes daily. Feel free to check it out.

Will be back soon with some updates to my CB Reader project and others. Until then… 🙂

Running Lean: Problem Interviews

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:24:24 +0000

The following post is part of a series of posts related to my new project, currently code named CB Reader. For the latest info, please consider joining the CB Reader mailing list.

When I last posted, I introduced the lean canvas and explained how it helped to defined some user problem hypothesizes. Today we’ll start a new phase of Running Lean, the Problem Interviews, where you’ll interview people to verify if your problem hypothesizes and more than likely discover aspects and existing solutions you never knew existed.

Problem Interviews

With your falsifiable hypothesizes in hand it’s time to start talking to people. The book recommends 10-15 face-to-face interviews that last around 20 minutes each. It provides the following suggested interview format:

Personal Execution and Results

I reached out to the IndyHall community and the Philly CocoaHeads. I did 7 problem interviews, 4 face-to-face and 3 over Skype. I’ve had a few other people say they were up for the interview but they haven’t materialized (yet).

First, the face-to-face interviews went way better than Skype ones. Skype tended to disconnect and get laggy during the calls. This was annoying for the two people whom I’m previously friendly with but for the one interviewee, whom was a new connection for me, it really made the call awkward. Comparatively the face-to-face interviews went a lot smother (even brand new introductions) and I think generated better overall data. Lesson: by all means do face-to-face if possible.

I tried hard to follow the recommended interview format but I found it a bit off focus. For starters that first 10 minutes becomes a lot of you talking with very short bursts of answers from the customer. Part of this is needed as you need to set some context for the interview, however I just felt it was too long considering the target of 20 minutes. The meat of the interview is clearly “the customer’s worldview” section, where they explain what they view as the problems and the solutions they are using currently to solve them (along with their pros and cons). Moving forward I want to rework things to get to that as fast as possible.

Regarding the collection of demographics, the book suggests using tools like Google Forms which can help you graph and measure the various responses. I did this early on but found using the web form during the interview itself to be a bit of a pain as I needed to take notes on things the person was saying that didn’t fit the form. For the most recent interview I sticked to a simple plain text editor, typing in notes manually and then later punching it into Google Forms where appropriate. That said, the biggest value from all this is the free form stuff. Plotting 10-15 points of data isn’t usually that interesting for me so I’d recommend against the forms for this part.

What did I learn?

Before I started I wrote down the following goals:

Problem interviews will confirm pain points:

Multiple apps for RSS, Read Later, Pinboard, Twitter is painful / annoying.

RSS content can take to long to manually browse.

Regrets that you may not be reading enough.

Regrets that the time you do spend reading isn’t the most efficient.

You get value from Twitter but don’t want to monitor it 24/7.

Problem interviews will confirm use of the following alternative solutions:

Instapaper / Pocket / Safari “Read Later”

Reeder for iPad

Google Reader

Pinboard

Twitter

Problem interviews will confirm Entrepreneurs and Blog authors as valid customer segments.

For pain points, the biggest amongst my interview base was clearly the quantity of content being hard to manage. All seemed to share a sense that they weren’t getting the most from their reading time. Very few people considered switch apps to be a problem.

All of my suspected alternative solutions (minus Safari’s Read Later) were mentioned somehow. A few new ones popped up including: Zite, Flipboard (was previously known but forgot to list), FLUD, Umano, Fever, Yammer.

During this phase the Google Reader shutdown was announced as well, which made me aware of even more clients (some current, some in-development). I’ve blogged some thoughts on Google Reader in case you are curious.

Finally, my market segment was verified to include entrepreneurs, blog authors as well as programmers.

What’s next?

With our problem verified we move on to the solution interviews. This is where you mockup your solution, show it to people and gauge their reaction. The goals here are to continue to verify your problem and early adopters, figure our the minimum feature set needed to launch, evaluate if people are willing to pay for your solution and then what price they will bear.

I’m breaking away from the book here and doing this in two phases. One is a very digital phase. Part of this is the release of my new intro video and feature survey. The second part will come with more face-to-face interviews, re-interviewing people from before (now with solution demos in hand) and new people — preferably people whom I’m not previously connected to (which frankly I’ve very worried about finding).

Next up: Solution Interviews

CB Reader Intro Video and Feature Survey

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:16:46 +0000

Released earlier today, the new intro video starts to visualize some of the concepts I have in mind for CB Reader.

I’ve also posted a feature survey that you can fill out to help me gauge what features are must have for the initial launch. There is of course also free form text fields for detailed feedback too.

Thanks again for your interest in CB Reader.

LessConf Diversity

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:51:58 +0000

I read the following LessEverything blog post and tweeted:

Maybe the irony is lost on me but this reads like pretentious bullshit.

@stevenbristol askes:

it’s not at all meant to be. Can you tell me how?

Sure. Let’s tale a look…

You Are Welcome at LessConf, Please Come

The title is nice enough, grats on that one.

Considering this is the last LessConf and what a unique event it is, I’d like to send a special invitation to people not of “privilege” to attend.

I wonder what he means by “people not of ‘privilege’”? Like money? People who can’t afford to attend conferences?

Allan and I are certainly irreverent, sometimes crass, but we always try to included everyone.

irreverent (adjective): showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously

crass (adjective): lacking sensitivity, refinement, or intelligence

Yeah, I can see that.

And by “include everyone” of course he is referring to his conference that has people apply and only after deeming them worthy are they given the privilege of buying a ticket.

That’s how we’ve always been: You know the person at the office who is a bit weird or shy and no one ever invites to lunch? I always invite that person along for lunch. That’s just the kind of people we are.

Ok so now you are defining “people not of ‘privilege’” as people who aren’t social at work or deemed by you as “weird”. Seems off to me but moving on…

LessConf, like most conferences, is filled with white heterosexual men, “people of privilege.” And that’s great, except that it’s also not great.

Ah so people of privilege are “white heterosexual men” and you seem torn if this is great or not so great. I wonder what he means by all this. I hope he explains. (Spoiler: He doesn’t.)

We would like to extend a special invitation to persons who are not white heterosexual men to join us.

I’m no English major but doesn’t that statement mean the invitation is still reserved for heterosexual men of the non-white denomination?

More to the point, using a phrase like “not white heterosexual men” to group the “diversity” you are looking to bring into a conference community is pretty tasteless in my opinion.

LessConf should be a place where all people feel free to be themselves; where everyone is loved and accepted and safe.

And appreciated gratuitous use of the word “and”.

I don’t care who you are or where you fit in, I would like you to fit in at LessConf. Here’s a coupon for $100 off the price of the ticket. LessConfLovesMeTheWayIAm

Please do come and feel safe to be and express who you are.

This is from LessConf 2012: (A photo of what I assume is a group of white heterosexual men hugging.)

If adding diversity to your conference was a real goal you wouldn’t announce it mere weeks before it opened. The whole thing smells like you haven’t sold out and are trying to use the “diversity” angle to sell more tickets, and very poorly at that.

Best I can tell this conference is something you hand made, picking the speakers, picking the attendees. If it’s not diverse you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Here’s an idea if you really want a diverse conference get people of diverse backgrounds to be on the planning committee. Let them attract a diverse speaker roster. Let the diverse speaker roster help attract a diverse audience.

Maybe Steven and company do want a diverse conference but I have to say making moves this late in the game with the above post is a pretty poor attempt.

Running Lean: Building Our Lean Canvas

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:44:02 +0000

The following post is part of a series of posts related to my new project, currently code named CB Reader. For the latest info, please consider joining the CB Reader mailing list.

It’s no secret I enjoyed book The Lean Startup (Review). Afterwords, I followed it up by reading Running Lean, by Ash Maurya, which is a collection of actionable examples for how to implement the Lean Startup for your next project. I’m doing my best to follow along with Ash’s recommendations and will report my progress here on on the blog.

One core concept Ash pushes is getting out there and interviewing your customers, not after the 1.0, but even before you begin coding. There are a few phases to customer interaction before you have a shipping product and with the Lean Startup principal of measurement they are all designed around learning.

However, before we interview customers we need to figure out what we want to learn and to do that we’ll create our first version of the lean canvas, an extremely simple 1-sheet that describes your product and business model. You are encouraged to spend some time on this but not too much time as realistically you’ll be coming back with edits and changes soon enough.

For my own project, I ended up using Ash’s Lean Canvas web app and it worked great. I did one version early on and then a second version as I prepped my problem interview questions. I wasn’t able to fill out all the squares as detailed as I wanted but as Ash explains in the book that’s fine for now. This canvas can and usually does change drastically as you learn from your customers.

The most important info, for this next phase, the Problem Interviews, is defining your falsifiable hypothesizes. These are the problems your believe effect people, the existing alternatives they are currently using to solve them are the most important, and the customer segment these people fall into.

Next: The Problem Interviews

The End of Google Reader

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Alas, as the prophecies foretold, Google Reader will be shutting down July 1st and with it hundreds if not thousands of apps that used Google Reader as their centralized RSS hub will be in trouble.

Many of us saw this coming. I know personally, the previous lack of commitment from Google to improving Reader was one of many things that pushed me to start working on my own CB Reader system.

While in the short term this will be frustrating for many, the long term benefits will outweigh. This is good news.

Announcing a New Project, CB Reader

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:29:06 +0000

Ah, the first public breath of a new project. So much potential and so much to do. Exciting times are afoot.

From the teaser page:

CB Reader (code name) is a new project that aims to help people centralize their many sources of incoming online articles and organize them through semantic analysis and social network influence.

This is an application / service for people who use RSS, “read later” tools, Twitter and other sources to manage and read online articles. The big goal is to help you get the most from your limited reading time.

The only real action for you at the moment is to sign up for the mailing list, should this type of app interest you. From here I will be inviting people to participate in various reviews and beta testing.

I’m going to be doing my best to blog progress at it happens. How this will break down:

Clickable Bliss Blog — major release announcements only
Mike Zornek.com — discussion of the creation process, coding and design
“Future Product Blog” — user experience, tutorials, support, tips and tricks.

It feels great to be building things again. Ever since my return I’ve been drowning in accountants, lawyers, agreements and meetings. It’s been kind of a downer but, with this project starting to get momentum, I’m feeling great.

Book Review: The Lean Startup

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:16:54 +0000

With the sale of ProfitTrain complete, my schedule has room for a new project. There’s a handful of ideas I’m working through, but, before I jump into one, I think that now is a great opportunity to catch up with some business books I’ve had on my radar.

The Lean Startup, written by Eric Ries, is a book I first received from New Relic through some promotion. Sadly, I wasn’t in much of a reading phase at the time, but with a secondary recommendation the other day, I decided to go ahead and start reading.

First, the book defines an entrepreneur as:

an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Using this definition, Eric explains that you can find entrepreneurs everywhere, from the typical garage startup to a division inside a larger corporation that’s been told to start a new initiative or project.

Some might say that we live in a golden age of entrepreneurship, but, while the overall number of new startups is increasing, success continues to be a real challenge. Lots of startups are failing because of elements that can actually be avoided. The Lean Startup is a movement that challenges entrepreneurs to work less on instinct on more on measurement in order to quickly learn what it takes to build a sustainable business.

Too often product ideas will come to a team and they’ll enter a long development cycle, only to find out that they’ve spent all their money and built something they can’t sell or that nobody wants. The Lean Startup encourages building “Minimum Viable Products” which will help start a real feedback loop with customers as soon as possible. Only by working with real customers can you truly learn.

Learning is an important, if not the most important, aspect for the Lean Startup movement. It should be at the center of how you spend all your time. If you are working on something that is not going to help you learn about customer behavior or evaluate a company risk, it’s probably just waste.

The heartbeat of a Lean Startup is the feedback loop, named “Build-Measure-Learn.” In practice, your actual feedback loop might look something like this:

Figure out what you want to learn about your customers.
Figure out how you’ll measure it.
Build it into the product.
Deploy it to the customers.
Measure customer behavior.
Use these measurements and metrics to define future work and pivots.
Repeat.

The feedback loop should be as small as possible.

When it comes to metrics, Lean Startup does warn against “vanity metrics” — these might be reports or charts that look good at first glance but don’t really represent whether your business is really growing. Consider an app that gets 1,000 downloads per day but also has a bounce rate of 80%. What if that remaining 20% decays over time to leave you with only a handful of active users. Showing a “Total Downloads” chart might make the team feel nice inside, but does this represent the real growth rate of the product? What you need to track will vary per business model, but the recommendation to be wary of “vanity metrics” is true for all.

There is more advice in the book, including some suggestions on using “Five Whys” to help find root causes of problems, along with a reminder than no system is perfect for everyone. That said, I really took a liking to the ideas of Lean Startup. I’m currently reading a nice followup book, Running Lean, which has a collection of real world approaches to applying Lean Startup to a business or product prospect.

Regardless of what my next project may be, I’m definitely interested in applying The Lean Startup to see how it works out.

To learn more, you can check out the book’s website: theleanstartup.com.

Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:41:30 +0000

A must watch lecture from Lawrence Lessig about the life of Aaron Swartz and the legal battle that led to his death.

Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age from lessig on Vimeo.

Xcode Documentation Downloads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:22:19 +0000

Rather that use the Mac App Store and re-download Xcode each time I need to install it on a new Mac, I take advantage of developer downloads directory and grab the Xcode DMG file so I can put on my USB disk and move around from Mac to Mac and avoid the duplicate downloads.

Xcode however no longer includes the documentation, so the first thing that happens after you launch is a 1.3 GB download for the docs.

Apple, please consider adding a download with a snapshot of the documentation in place. Maybe even a LAN sync option so it could grab the docs from my desktop (or my co-workers) instead of saturating my internet connection all the time.

November 12, 1955

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:31:25 +0000

Unbelievable that Old Biff could’ve chosen that particular date. It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance, almost as if it were the temporal junction point of the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.

For those not in the loop (and shame on you!), that is a quote from Back to the Future 2.

For me, the last few weeks sure do feel like a “temporal junction point” of sorts. Lots of stuff is going on and I feel like I’ll look back at January/February 2013 and see dozens of paths that my life could have taken. I’ve already posted about my general return to work after a bit of burnout and now I can share something else.

I have sold my first commercial product, ProfitTrain to another developer. Official info can be found on my company blog. While I am sad to let ProfitTrain go, I am also happy because, over the last year or so, I haven’t been able to give the product the attention it warrants. The ProfitTrain users deserve better.

Other developments are, well, still developing. I’ll share more when the time is right. I can say that, while I won’t be out of the woods for a few more weeks, I’m feeling very positive about the upcoming year and am doing a good job of maintaining work/life balance despite the recent stress.

Netflix’d: Peep Show and Breaking Bad

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:10:36 +0000

When it comes to TV, you can usually catch me watching a mix of local sports. On the weekends, it might be some This Old House or Gordon Ramsey.

I don’t tend to get into the episodic TV shows when they are actually released. I’d much prefer to watch these in bunches. Back in the day, it would be West Wing one DVD at a time but now, with Netflix and other streaming services, it is dangerously easy to lose a whole Saturday streaming one episode after another. Of my recent Netflix binges, two shows have been extremely enjoyable…

Peep Show is a British comedy shot in first person POV with lots of internal character narration. The show itself is about two flatmates. Mark is a financially secure, but awkward and socially inept middle-aged man, with a pessimistic and cynical attitude. Jeremy, aka “Jez”, is an unemployed would-be musician who recently moved in with Mark after breaking up with his girlfriend. Jeremy has a more positive, laid-back approach to life and, while he is better with the girls, he isn’t nearly as good as he thinks he is.

The comedy is cringe-inducing and hilarious. While some of the plot lines in the later seasons are predictable, there is still a ton on enjoyment in seeing how the characters of Mark and Jez find their way through everything. You’ll know whether this is your kind of show after a few episodes, but do give the POV perspective some time to get used to. I really enjoyed Peep Show and may even give it a second pass in time.

Note: As I write this, I don’t see it listed for Netflix streaming anymore although Hulu might be a working option.

The other show is far more well-known and that is Breaking Bad. My cousins have been on me to watch this show for years and I finally gave in. Breaking Bad is great TV.

Breaking Bad opens with the main character Walter White, an overqualified high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. To help provide for his family, he partners with former student and drug dealer Jesse to cook and sell methamphetamine. In time, shit hits the fan in multiple ways that result in entertainment for us. The writing is great, the acting is great and even the cinematography is great.

There are 5 seasons in total of Breaking Bad. Seasons 1 through 4 are on Netflix and the first half of season 5 premiered on AMC in 2012. The last half will premier in the summer of 2013.

Hope you enjoyed the recommendations. If you have any for me, let me know via email or twitter.

Early Ember.js Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:03:16 +0000

Over the last three weeks, I’ve been slowly picking up Ember.js while helping some colleagues with a project. It’s pretty interesting tech and I’d like to share some early thoughts.

What is Ember?

To be frank, I don’t think the Ember homepage does a very good job of explaining Ember. It features terms like “less code” and “developer ergonomics,” which are too much like “marketing speak” for me.

How I view Ember. Normally with a web app, you (as a user) will go page to page, sometimes viewing data and then sometimes editing data with forms. That’s what I’ll call a form-based web app. Sometimes you might want a bit of AJAX in these form-based web apps and, to get that, you’ll typically grab a DOM element and manually shove in a bunch of jQuery when needed, including direct commands and event callbacks. This process can work, but the more AJAX and client side stuff you add, the messier you can make things.

Then there is a class of web apps which work as one-page apps, where all interaction and DOM changes happen on the fly, without moving from page to page. Data is sent to and requested from the server in the background. Think of how Gmail and Trello work.

For me, Ember.js is all about giving you the toolchain to provide those types of dynamic, one-page web app experiences. Ember.js is a full stack, client-side, JavaScript-based MVC framework. The main objects you’ll work with client-side in the browser include:

Routers, which match the requested URL to controllers. They also ensure that the client URL is updated to allow the user to bookmark the different states of your app.
Models, to define your business nouns and store/retrieve user data.
Controllers, which handle actions and pass model data to the views.
Views to connect user events like clicks and taps to controller actions.
Templates to describe the HTML on screen.

Some Notable Features

Bindings

If you’ve done AJAX work before, you might recognize that knowing what to update in the DOM can be a nightmare as the app state changes on a given page. Ember is particularly good at dealing with this, and as you build your HTML templates, the substitution hashes like {{ name }} for a person’s name not only are substituted for the real value on the first render, but everything is always kept up-to-date with an internal bindings system. This, combined with calculated attributes, really takes a lot of stress off the developer, in terms of keeping the app state in sync with the UI state.

Persistence

For actually persisting the data, there is the ember-data project which will let you connect and map your client-side Ember models to REST endpoints. If you are using Rails, there are a bunch of gems that can really help to simplify this while providing all the serialization and API endpoints you’ll need. For more info, see this article.

Sharp Edges

As of this writing, Ember itself is version 1.0.0-pre-4 and ember-data is officially considered alpha quality. There is an upcoming Ember Camp, which hopes to see continued progress towards an official 1.0 release. Keep an eye on the Ember blog for more info. I do believe things have settled down to a point where there is value for people who want to get started with Ember and get their hands dirty. As to “production ready” — well, that will greatly depend on the needs of your application and your comfort with working around some sharp edges.

Getting Started

If you’d like to get started with Ember, in addition to the main website, which has some nice and ever-improving documentation, I’d also recommend:

PeepCode’s Fire Up Ember – Brand new, up-to-date, and very focused on the Ember stack. Well worth the $12.
An Ember.js tutorial by Trek – Walked through this myself when I got started. It helped a lot.
Brian Cardarella’s Building an Ember app with RailsAPI – Great walkthrough about starting an Ember app that will use Rails for persistence.

If you are in Philly, also consider stopping by the local Ember Meetup.

Catching Up: How Have You Been?

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:21:24 +0000

Publishing to this blog is something I enjoy, but sadly not something I’m naturally good at doing on a regular basis. Forgive me Internets, it has been three months since my last confession, err blog post.

So what’s been going on? Well, October and early November were a mix of client work and Shindig development, a continuation of a year’s worth of very long, hard development hours for me. This sadly led to a bit of burnout. I felt it coming, so I was honest with my Shindig co-founders and arranged to take some leave.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve worked to excess and gotten burned out. Unfortunately, I’m someone who often lives in extremes, working super hard for a period of time and then not working at all for a period of time. It’s no good and I’m trying to mend my ways.

With my time off after Thanksgiving and into December, I got to catch up with my family, including my mom, who had recently retired. (She was even good enough to re-watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy with me in preparation for the Hobbit release). During this time, I also got sick and then got better. I caught up on some fun movies (Wreck-It Ralph, Sykfall, Hobbit, etc.), and got to check out the latest Warcraft expansion.

Alas, one can not stay cooped up forever, and now I’m working again at IndyHall. I’m trying to balance things better this time, going to hall 2-3 days a week and not overcommitting to projects. It’s been a slow start, but things are picking up a bit. I have a small contract that is under NDA but that is giving me the opportunity to learn some new and interesting tech (Ember.js, PostgreSQL, CoffeScript). I’m also doing a mix of marketing and product development with Shindig. Finally, I’m working to take care of some old personal projects and plan a few new ones.

All in all, things are good and I hope to be posting more soon. As always, thanks for your interest, and best of luck to all in 2013! 🙂

SecondConf 2012 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:20:15 +0000

For those who might not be familiar, SecondConf is a Chicago-based weekend conference that describes itself as:

An annual gathering of technologists passionate about creating great things.

Well-crafted products, delightful experiences, enduring companies, research, journalism, education. Great things take many forms. We explore them all.

While certainly not Apple exclusive, I think it’s a mistake to omit that the majority of the attendees have an Apple development background. SecondConf itself has inspirations from previous local Apple-oriented conferences: C4 and, previous to that, MacHack. I myself was a sporadic attendee of both C4 and MacHack and this was my second SecondConf of the three they’ve had.

While “going indie” could accurately describe the overall feeling of previous years, this year’s SecondConf felt more centered around creativity. Additionally, many sessions broke from the traditional programming and business topics to cover hardware development and electronic music.

A full session list can be found on the SecondConf website and, while I enjoyed a lot of the talks, I must limit my coverage to a few favorites.

Robots!

Erin Kennedy (@RobotGrrl)

I’m not much of a hardware guy, but Erin Kennedy’s talk was really fun and inspirational. Erin is probably the most humble person I’ve met, and the stuff she is doing with her RoboBirds is really impressive. I hear she’s working on construction kits and may even have a Kickstarter project soon. Follow her on Twitter or sign up for her mailing list to learn more.

Blitz Talks

A blitz or lightning talk format is 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with software that automates the presentation.

Creating Custom Bounce Animations with Math!

Soroush Khanlou (@khanlou)

Securing Your Customers’ Privacy

Aijaz Ansari (@\_aijaz\_)

I can honestly say from my own experiences that doing blitz talks are almost harder than full 45 minute sessions. The above two sessions by Soroush and Aijaz were really well done. In fact, they hit a great sweet spot by taking their limited time to explain a problem, outline the current solution, and then provide alternative solutions with real code that people can use today.

Photos

I didn’t take too many pictures, but these fine people have shared a few.

Videos

Like previous years, many of the sessions (minus the Panel and Dr. Wave’s talk) were recorded and should be available online in the near future.

Instapaper Gripes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 03:17:27 +0000

First let me say that I really like Instapaper. It was one of the first apps that gave my iPad real purpose, and I use it pretty much daily. While the comments below might be negative and trite, there are tons of great things to love about this app too, so don’t take things too seriously. If you aren’t already using Instapaper, I’d recommend reading the the MacStories review to see what Instapaper is all about.

A lot of these gripes are based on personal usage (described early in gripe 1) that, in theory, mirror large scale usage. I’ll be the first to say that I could be way off on that. I’m not currently aware of whether Marco captures the kind of usage data that would help him evaluate the effectiveness of the Instapaper user interface, or if he has ever made those numbers public.

The big idea here isn’t to gripe on the Instapaper app for the sake of griping, but I want to start discussing interface design, the tradeoffs we make, how design evolves, and so on. I figured this post would be a good place to start, since I am unhappy with some of the choices made in Instapaper, despite the fact that it is a really good product.

Aside: Gripes, while numbered, are not sorted by importance.

Gripe 1: Always showing the collection chooser is a waste of space.

When you first launch Instapaper, you’ll be taken to the Read Later collection. Before I talk about that collection, let’s talk about overall layout and navigation.

This view tries to accomplish two things at once. First, it’s a collection chooser (overlaid in orange), which lets you switch the collection you are currently browsing. Second, it’s a collection browser (overlaid in blue), which lets you browse the articles of the selected collection and load an article to read.

I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that I am an average Instapaper user. My Instapaper usage is as follows…

Each week I’ll see various articles on the web shared to me via Twitter or mentioned in email. I’ll mark them as Read Later using my desktop browser’s bookmarklet or the built-in Send to Instapaper features of apps like TweetBot. I probably send anywhere from 15 to 25 articles to Instapaper a week. When I do find some time on the couch to read, I’ll open up Instapaper on my iPad. The collection I’ll be browsing is always the Read Later collection. I have to imagine this is the same for most others as well.

If this is true, and the majority of the user’s time is spent in the Read Later collection, I cannot understand why the interface has been designed to dedicate 15% of the screen to collection choosing, which is not something that is common in typical use. I feel like giving this space back to the collection browser, along with some ideas on improving the preview cells of articles, could greatly improve the browsing experience on Instapaper.

Coincidentally, TweetBot for iPad has a similar, always present, sidebar, but here it doesn’t bother me nearly as much, since I do frequently use it to switch collection contexts. With Instapaper, the collection chooser is, for the most part, just dead space for me.

Gripe 2: Centering the title in the collection browser looks misaligned because of the system clock.

Can not be unseen.

And, yes the TweetBot screen has the same problem.

Gripe 3: The “grid” default collection layout style is questionable.

I know there are many popular grid-oriented apps out there for presenting content on iPad. For me, I find the use of the grid in Instapaper to be more of a distraction than anything. I don’t like the flow of my eye path as I have to browse the collection in a grid.

I’d much prefer a purely stacked list of article previews. I feel that this eye flow is better, and, as a bonus, it has great synergy with the vertical scrolling motion.

Thankfully, there is an option to toggle this behavior in Settings. I don’t think it was there immediately upon 4.0’s release, as I vividly remember not liking the grid and not seeing a way to turn it off, but sure enough, I found it while I was prepping this article. Woot!

Aside: The launch image always assumes a grid so on a fresh launch it looks a little clunky to see the grid and then see it go away in favor of the users preference. It’d be nice if the launch image were made more user preference neutral in the future.

Gripe 4: Different collections should have different preview cells.

There are many different collections, but only one basic cell design for the article preview cell. I find this unfortunate because the user’s goals when exploring the different collections are quite varied and could benefit greatly from expanding the different cell preview designs. It would be great if Instapaper could offer some user preferences to suit their needs. Some examples:

Preview Cell Design for “Read Later”

Scenario: I’m browsing the Read Later collection from my couch. I have an hour to kill and want to catch up on things. The sort of the Read Later collection is based on when I added articles, so I’ll see the most recent at the top. My goals for this view are:

to remind myself about the article I added
to determine whether I want to read it now

To remind myself, the preview cell offers a mix of article title, source domain, author, and a short blurb. For me, the blurb is usually overkill. It could be subbed out for more useful information.

While very helpful in reminding me about an article, the preview cell does very little to help me determine whether I should read one article or another. The cell does provide a series of dots which, if you use Instapaper over time, you might come to realize represents the length of time that the article will take to read, and how much of it you have already read. Personally, I’d like to see that changed into a more descriptive, text-based description and drop the “percent of article read” feature. After all, to do it in text would be verbose, and I’d like to think that the majority of users read these web articles in one sitting (again, I don’t have numbers on this).

What I’d really like to see is Instapaper start to take advantage of the friends I’ve added to it and the global data it has, in order to help me realize what of the things I’m browsing is worth my limited time. Which articles have been liked by my friends (show me a few of their tiny little avatars) and what articles are making an impact globally (using global read and liked counts)?

Preview Cell Design for “Liked”

Scenario: I would assume that one of the main reasons I’d be in the Liked collection is because I’m trying to find an article I’ve read and Liked previously. I probably want to reference it myself or send it off to a friend. For me, this would usually involve searching, but I’m going to wait to talk about that later. As for the preview cell design, again we see the same design used in Read Later. How to improve?

In a word, dates. If used often, the “Liked” collection will span months and months of articles. Knowing when an article was published and when I Liked it would help me find what I’m looking for during a browsing session.

Preview Cell Design for “Archive”

I feel like the design for the preview cell in the Archive collection should be a hybrid of my proposed Read Later and Liked preview cell designs.

I also think that the Archive collection (as well as maybe Liked) might do something to help group up articles I’ve read by the same author or from the same site.

Preview Cell Design for “Friends”

More than improvements to the the preview cell, what this collection really needs is a list of my friends. Show me who is actively reading and linking stuff. Let me browse their history, as a collective or as individuals. (I go on about this in more detail in gripe 9).

Gripe 5: Archives and Liked collections should load more articles as necessary.

For what are probably many valid reasons, Instapaper only loads a small portion of your Archive and Liked collections. When you browse to the bottom of these collections, it just stops. If you want to load more, you need to visit settings and tell Instapaper to load more articles for these collections. This seems clunky and non-intuitive to me. There is nothing at the bottom of the list to even suggest that you should go to Settings in order to see more articles.

What I’d prefer to see here is some sort of button that allows users to manually load more articles, or perhaps Instapaper should passively load more by making an endless scrolling list.

Gripe 6: Respect my eye line.

The article view does a great job of letting the content own the space. There is a navigation bar, but unless you interact with it, it will eventually fade away while you read.

There are two ways to bring the bar back. One is by tapping somewhere that isn’t otherwise interactive. The other is by scrolling to the bottom of the article — this is my gripe.

When I read articles in Instapaper, my eye line or reading zone (shown below overlaid in blue) is the very top of the screen. I literally read 1-3 lines and slowly scroll the page up little by little when I’m reading an article.

Eventually, I’ll be almost done reading the article and — BAM — the navigation bar comes up and covers my reading zone. What follows is an unpleasant scrolling dance that I don’t even want to describe.

I understand that it makes sense to automatically show the navigation bar towards the end of the article, but the algorithm needs to be tweaked in order to make sure that the reading zone of the user would never be hidden by the navigation bar, which, from my experience, it clearly can.

When you finish reading an article, part of the reason the navigation bar comes back up is because you have an action to perform:

Like the article by tapping the heart icon.
Archive the article by tapping the trash can and choosing “Move to Archive”.
Delete the article by tapping the trash can and choosing “Delete”.

I feel like the choice of a trash can for the non-destructive action of moving an article from my Read Later collection to the Archive collection is unfortunate and likely confusing to some new users. Trash cans in a computer context mean “I never want to see this file or object again.” A trash can is not a suitable icon for transferring an article, even if the destination is an archive. Ultimately I feel like each of these three actions should have their own icon and remove the popover entierly.

Aside: One alternate way this plays out is if you Like an article first and then tap the trash can the Delete action is removed leaving only Archive. Why would you ever want to present a popover menu where there is only one action? Again my recommendation would be to drop the popover entirely but should a case like this come up just assume the one remaining action and suppress the popover.

Gripe 8: Search is too elementary.

Search in Instapaper works like this: there are various search buttons in the app, and when you tap on them a modal window pops up. Then you type in some terms and a search is done against the full text of all the articles you have in Instapaper. The search happens on Instapaper’s web servers. The results are presented in a list and then, upon tapping an item in the list, you jump to another modal window with the webpage of the article.

There are many problems with this experience:

Search requires an internet connection. There is no way to simply search the stuff you have locally.
In order to accept the search terms and present a result list, Instapaper uses a modal view that fills only 50% of the screen. Half the screen is left underutilized. Why is this not happening inline in the collection browser area, as I would have expected?
There is no way to control your search context. The only option is “All.” For example, you cannot do a search for something in your Liked collection.
There is no way to reorder the results; they are presented in an unknown order. There is no way to sort specifically by the liked on date or search term relevance.
When interacting with a result, the article is presented in a modal webview instead of the expected Instapaper article view. One of the major points of Instapaper is that it filters out a website’s frame for easier article reading. Why not a proper article view here?

Overall search comes off as a minimum viable shipping feature, good enough to ship, but not where it should be. If it were just a young feature that would see improvement over time, I wouldn’t gripe as much, but search is actually the main unlock if you choose to pay extra for a monthly Instapaper subscription. In that context, I really think it’s important that search sees improvements soon. I don’t think it’s right to reward subscription buyers with such an elementary feature.

Gripe 9: The friends collection

Another young and hopefully to-be-improved-upon feature is the social aspect of Instapaper. The current version allows you to connect various friends, but the interface can be pretty clunky at times. For example, you have to add friends with one view and then remove them with another. Why does this require two views?

However, the real problem is the collection browser itself.

As I’ve said before, I really think this view needs to include the avatars of the people who are sending me this content. I know people by their avatar a lot better than by their twitter handle, and this change would make visually browsing things much faster. Also, I want the power to isolate a friend and just see what he or she is promoting. Let me browse by my friends, and then browse what they are sharing specifically.

At the bottom of the Friends collection is a toggle to show “Shared Links” or “Liked by Friends.” First off, it’s really awkward to have a toggle between a noun and a verb. Something is amiss.

What does Instapaper mean by “Shared Links” — these objects are called articles everywhere else in the app — why the difference here? Best I can tell, “Shared Links” represents URLs that people have posted on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other services. I get that there is a naming challenge here, but I am not really happy with the current solution of “Shared Links.”

In fact, I truly wonder if there is any value in having two distinct sub-collections in the friends category. Why not just one collection, and make it clear in the preview cell how this article came to the reader, i.e.: “Liked on Instapaper by Manton Reece @manton” or “Posted to Twitter by Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs?”

I think this, plus the power to browse and isolate content per friend, would be a nice improvement.

Gripe 10: Drop “The Feature” collection.

Described at the top of its view, The Feature is:

Daily editorial selections from the finest articles saved with Instapaper.

I never use this feature/collection. I have enough content to fill my reading time, and the idea of reaching out to this specific collection of content seems strange.

It’s unclear how many articles are posted per day. The blurb says “editorial selections” as if to say, “these aren’t selected by robots,” but then no human editor names appear either. Who is the editor? What makes these articles so “fine?” What is the focus here?

When I click on an article, it doesn’t even load a standard Instapaper article view. Instead, it loads the website. Why would it do this? For me, Instapaper is about an offline, clutter-free reading environment. This provides neither. It feels like an ad.

Maybe I wouldn’t gripe as much if this collection didn’t stare me down every time I opened the app. It just sits there in the static collection chooser area, which I never use. I wish I could turn it off.

Gripe 11: Settings

When I tap Settings in the lower left corner, I get a popover that is about 1/3 the height of the inner view (thus I need to scroll to see everything). Every other navigation-based item in this app has made use of the full screen of the iPad. If Instapaper didn’t have an iPhone version, is this how the Settings view would have been designed? I doubt it.

The Settings view should fill the screen and fit in with the visual style of everything else, probably as a collection browser if the static collection switcher style design is staying. With this extra space, you can be more specific about things, like using labels as well as icons for the various friend services.

Gripe 12: Android

First I want to say thanks to Instapaper for doing an Android version. It was very handy to have a portable tablet version of Instapaper around when iOS 6 bugs were making my iPad less than useful. I will gripe however, that on Android you are not always following along with the Android-isms. For example, I found the behavior of the hardware back button to be somewhat inconsistent. Android apps should feel like Android, and iOS apps should feel like iOS.

The biggest problem with the current Android version is the lack of scroll position saving during orientation switches, which for me are usually involuntary as I move my Nexus 7 to reach for a glass of water or something. I’ll come back and my article is not where I was. Very frustrating.

On Gripes

Again I’ll say that I really do like Instapaper, both the service and the apps overall. My gripes are meant as feedback and kickoffs for other user interface discussions. Please do not take offense.

Researching New Web Tools

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 03:12:52 +0000

I’ve been spec’ing out this app idea off and on for a few months. At first I was going to do it on the Mac, but, as time passed, I decided to make it a web app in the newer style instead. Not a “present form, hit submit, view results” kind of thing, but something that is always saving and receiving messages from the server — very dynamic.

I’m actually blessed that there are a number of great web tools, libraries, and frameworks to choose from these days. One great overview I read last night was Rich JavaScript Applications – the Seven Frameworks by Steven Sanderson. It does a great job listing and categorizing some of the more popular choices out there. New to me on the list was Meteor, and I consider its video a must-see.

I’m still getting my head around many of these things. My general battle plan is to continue reading and playing with the example code of my CoffeeScript book (which also has some basic jQuery and NodeJS stuff), and then work through some of the various implementations of TodoMVC to see what tech speaks to me.

TodoMVC

TodoMVC is a project that offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today. These frameworks include Backbone, Ember, AngularJS, and Spine, to name a few. TodoMVC offers a great way to see how different stacks approach the same problem.

Other tools that are relevant to my cause and look promising include:

Ace

Ace is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript. Our goal is to create a web-based code editor that matches and extends the features, usability, and performance of existing native editors such as TextMate, Vim, or Eclipse. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter (Bespin) Project.

ShareJS

ShareJS is an Operational Transform library for NodeJS & browsers. It lets you easily do live concurrent editing in your app.

While I personally have a lot of Rails experience, I’m not going to shy away from NodeJS and other solutions. I almost welcome the opportunity to try something new these days. I’m also very excited to see that the NodePhilly group has gotten off the ground — I hope to make the next meeting in September.

Focused Testing in Xcode

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:10:55 +0000

I’ve set a very informal goal to produce content for this blog on a daily basis. We’re not there yet, but before the night is lost, here is a quick Xcode tip I fell into today.

So I’m using RestKit in a client project. In this project we POST and PUT lots of records. RestKit does not currently have an option to, when serializing a record, include those record attributes which are nil as nulls in the resulting JSON. While there has been an ongoing ticket for this feature, my own release date is approaching and so I dug in this weekend to see what I could do.

As part of adding this code, I wanted to run and make additions to the RestKit test suite, but running the whole suite over and over as you are making very specific changes is a bit of a time waste. Here is my Xcode tip.

When working in an Xcode project that has lots of tests, you can temporarily setup Xcode to only run the tests you are working on by editing the schema. In the schema editor, look for the test action and from there you can expand the test target.

You’ll see checkboxes for each test file and they expand further for each test case. Check and uncheck to focus in on the tests you are working around. Hold down the Option key as you click on the checkboxes to turn them all on/off with a single click.

This can seriously speed up your editing cycle. Just make sure to switch them all back on (or do this change on a schema that isn’t shared in the repo) and verify that the full test suite passes before you commit your changes.

As for my feature, I think I have it working, but will let things settle down before I generate a nice pull request for the RestKit development branch.

Core Intuition

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 02:48:47 +0000

Core Intuition is a podcast about the indie software business. It has a strong focus on Mac and iOS development, including the vibrant community that surrounds it. Hosted by two long-standing Mac developers — Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece — Core Intuition releases new episodes weekly. Each episode averages about 30 minutes of discussion.

As a old Mac developer myself, I’ve been following both Daniel and Manton for many years now and have been fortunate enough to meet them both at various developer conferences. I’ve always respected their opinions about software development and the Apple ecosystem, so when I heard they started their own podcast, I immediately subscribed.

When they started, Daniel and Manton had phases of regular releases and then periods of inactivity. These days, things at Core Intuition are stronger than ever and weekly releases are the norm. There’s even some sponsorship, which adds extra incentive to hook up the microphones week-to-week.

The team structures the show around popular news threads, yet tends to run off into tangents about personal stories and struggles. Ultimately, these tangents are what I enjoy the most, especially since I get to hear about how these two work through the problems that many self-employed people run into, especially when trying to balance life and shipping code.

For a part-time, two man show, the audio quality is impressive and comparable to many other network podcasts that I hear.

Core Intuition is a great podcast for anyone who works, or is interested in working, in the software development world. The thirty minute episode format makes it easy to squeeze the podcast into the drive home or make it a short diversion during lunch.

Daniel and Manton, thanks for the great content and keep up the good work.

A Change of Scenery

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:43:27 +0000

After considering my options over the past few weeks, I made the move this past Sunday. It was another long Sunday night working at IndyHall, and as I finished my work, I proceeded to pack up my iMac and all of its various wires. For the next few weeks I was going to work from home.

To be clear, this move has nothing to do with IndyHall, the workspace, or the community. It’s more of personal problem. I’ve done a poor job balancing my work time, my investment time, and my personal time.

I’ve been working at IndyHall full-time for almost two years. The best times for me mentally were when I had a single project on which to focus. I would work 4 days a week, usually from 11:00 am til 7:00 pm and then spend Friday working from home, throwing in laundry in between Xcode indexing stints.

These days I have two main projects. One is a consulting gig with an ever-approaching release date. The other is Shindig, which is a startup I joined over a year ago. It has similar big ship dates on the horizon. I also have my own company — Clickable Bliss, which has it’s own customer support needs. Plus, I have an ongoing update to my invoicing product, which has been on hold ever since I started working on Shindig.

Over the last three months, I’ve been spending 6 days a week at IndyHall, many until late at night. It’s become very draining and stressful.

This week is my first week back at home. I’ll go into IndyHall on Thursday to pick up my new MacBook Air and to conduct PhillyCocoa Office Hours, but otherwise it’s back to coding in the bedroom. I don’t have any major goals with this change but I do want to see where it takes me. Previously, I would avoid working from home, especially since doing so can lead to easy distractions and longer lunches. These days, however, I think I need a little of that.

For now, I think I’ll close this up and grab my swim trunks for a few laps at the gym — another thing that’s been off my schedule for too long.

A New Beginning

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:20:46 +0000

I miss blogging. For a while it was a major way I interacted with the community, shared my thoughts, and met new people.

I vaguely remember shutting down this site down in favor of putting my full attention behind Clickable Bliss and its own blog. For a while this worked fine. I limited my blogging to tech things and was legitimately spending most of my time on Clickable Bliss. These days, I find myself splitting my time between Shindig and consulting. I still play video games and would love to work on a real RPG to call my own someday. I want to blog about these things but find the Clickable Bliss focus limiting or inappropriate.

This is a fresh start. A new beginning.

Agency Projects

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Agency Projects

While a full time employee at a pair of large agencies I had the opportunity to work on many iOS projects. However, because of NDA clauses I can not reveal actual clients. Instead I’ll describe the projects in more generic terms:

iPad Roofing Preview App - would let people take a photo of their house, choose roofing tile and preview what it would look like and cost.
iPhone Bluetooth Tool Tracker - Would use the phone to help locate power tools and batteries. Would also report battery charge levels and heat warnings.
iPhone/iPad workout app - a universal iOS app that helped people execute and customize a 7 minute workout routine.
iPhone/iPad doctor/patient diabetes app - a collection of iOS and Android apps that would allow doctor’s and patients to share and visualize data about the patient’s diabetes and potential medications.

Contact

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Email: mike@mikezornek.com

Mastodon: https://jawns.club/@zorn

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mikezornek.com

Calendar: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat

Dex

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dex

Dex was my first real app for iOS. It was a Pokemon reference tool that showed weaknesses, strengths, and stats. Sadly it was taken down from the store at Nintendo legal’s request. It was a huge success though (~1 million downloads) and was the source of my talk on iOS Monetization.

Related Tech: iOS, SQLite, Ruby

Elixir Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Elixir Club

ElixirClub was an outcome-oriented community website that hoped to help Elixir developers finish their side projects. I kicked off the project in December of 2022 and ran it for a few months but did not get the traction I needed and decided to shut down the site about six months later.

You can check out this kickoff video for a sense of what I was trying to build.

As I shared in my shut down announcement blog post:

I ran the site on Circle, hosted some weekly events and async project update threads – but the hard truth is that I was not able to create even the modest-sized community that I was aiming for.

There are reasons and lessons to be learned about pricing, pitches and what not. Ultimately it was very niche target and did not have a strong marketing angle.

Elixir Consulting

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Helping Elixir teams scale faster, reduce technical debt, and ship with confidence.”

Team Leadership • Staff Augmentation
Testing Enhancements • Documentation Refinement
Technical Debt Cleanup • Mentoring

Say hello via email Create a calendar meeting

Testimonials

Michael’s worked with us on multiple projects as a fractional engineering leader and I couldn’t recommend him more highly. He’s excellent at working with non-technical stakeholders and junior engineers alike, he’s a great engineer, and a deep appreciation for context permeates all the work he does. He’s also a really nice guy and very easy to work with. You should work with Mike if you get the chance.

~ Peter Berg, Founder at Forward

Zorn is a great Software Engineer, but also a great mentor to other Engineers on the team and an amazing partner and resource for Product teams. I would love to work with him again!

~ Robert Prehn, Fractional CTO & Tech Lead

We would highly recommend Michael to anyone who would benefit from a senior software developer with an excellent technical approach, wide and deep knowledge as well as a great attitude.

Michael was a valuable contributor to our startup project. His feedback during code reviews was invaluable. He dramatically improved the quality of our code base. As if that wasn’t enough, Michael did an excellent job leading by example in software development best practices, while demonstrating excellent initiative, and self management. We would gladly work with Michael again.

~ Taun Chapman, CTO & Co-founder at ROAR for Good

More testimonials available on LinkedIn.

Recent Client Projects

🧑‍🍳 Kitchen Display System

My role and work: Joined a company that took ownership of a mission-critical kitchen software platform (web/mobile ordering, kitchen terminals, in-person ordering kiosks, etc.) but did not have dedicated software people in-house. Helped strengthen the platform foundations through documentation and execution of upgrades; analyzed active crashes and reduced system error rate; modernized and decommissioned unneeded production hardware to reduce costs.
Product Impact: Maintained high uptime and correctness of the platform through updates and bug fixes. Improved overall confidence and tooling, allowing for ongoing feature additions.

🥇 Budget Proposal Approval System

My role and work: Collaborated with product leadership to refine and document a complex business logic tree request, shaking out many edge case concerns. Crafted the full-stack execution of this vision in Elixir and LiveView.
Product Impact: Added a powerful feature to the client’s budgeting product, allowing their customers to create custom rule-bound approval flows.

📊 Revenue and Expense Interactive Charts

My role and work: Transformed custom chart concepts from the design team and executed them using the Highcharts charting library. Reworked internal data fetching modules to define new data shaping patterns and testing approaches.
Product Impact: With the addition of expressive and interactive visuals, customers have a greater sense of where the money is going.

🔒 Third-party Integrations for a Security Dashboard Platform

My role and work: A security platform wanted to expand its integrations with popular vendors, including Zoom, Google, and Microsoft. I added OAuth authentication workflows and various platform API consumption to centralize a security vision for customer accounts.
Product Impact: Increased customer value in understanding what tools housed insecure accounts. Provided direct guidance on improving security and keeping it secure over time.

🧑‍⚕️ Ongoing Maintenance for HIPAA-compliant Healthcare Platform

My role and work: Took ownership of a platform (web and mobile apps) previously built by a separate development agency. Shepherded it through a down development cycle, addressing bugs and adding features as needed. Nothing too sexy but honest work using a spread of tech, including Elixir, GraphQL, and React Native.
Product Impact: Maintained customer delivery of product during a major developer handoff. Provided confidence and relief to the non-technical founders who could rely on someone when problems arose.

🛠️ Ember.js to LiveView Conversion

My role and work: Augmented a development team building SMS communication software and took ownership of converting some historic corners of the app that were still using Ember.js to a modern LiveView implementation. Some of these pages were rich CSV import flows, and care had to be taken related to maintain speed and stability.
Product Impact: By employing me as a consultant focused on technical debt, the full-time staff was able to focus on more involved and structural platform initiatives. By removing Ember.js, the build and delivery tech stack was greatly simplified.

🎓 Elixir Mentor to Java Converts

My role and work: Augmented a full-time team that recently embraced Elixir and was actively converting the entire platform from Java to Elixir. I joined a team and helped mentor Java developers to master functional programming and Phoenix LiveView patterns. I also owned threads of work related to Facebook Marketplace API integrations.
Product Impact: The team greatly appreciated having Elixir-experienced people around for questions, feedback, and timely pull request code reviews.

Say hello via email Create a calendar meeting

Rate and Availability

I am available and looking for new consulting projects. Ideal engagements are in the 15-32 hours per week range, but happy to be flexible if needed.

My rate is $125-$150 per hour, with discounts available for open-source initiatives or long-term commitments.

Technical Proficiencies

Expert

Elixir

Phoenix

LiveView

Experienced

Absinthe/GraphQL

Tailwind

GitHub Actions

Postgres

Oban

Beginner

CQRS/Event Sourcing

Ash Framework

Rust

Docker

Svelte

SvelteKit

React

Historical

Objective-C

Swift

MacOS

iOS

Ruby on Rails

PHP

Perl

Examples of My Work

Community

Elixir Book Club (group administrator) biweekly book club reading and discussing topics of Elixir and general programming.

Blog Articles

Open Source

Flick is a simple Elixir / Phoenix LiveView app to help capture ranked votes. You can see this project in action at https://rankedvote.app/. This project was built to help the Elixir Book Club pick books but is open for all to use.
Franklin was an intentionally over-engineered blog application written in Elixir. It was a project I worked on to get more familiar with event sourcing using Commanded. While I am anxious to use event sourcing in the future, this project did not ship and remains an abandoned historic tinker space.

Videos

Say hello via email Create a calendar meeting

Elixir Focus / Phoenix by Example

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Elixir Focus / Phoenix by Example

For a while I was considering getting into the paid-for educational content space, targeting Elixir developers. I started with a site called Phoenix by Example, but then migrated it to a new name of Elixir Focus.

I blogged, build some demo projects and did some talks.

Ultimately I decided the market was not big enough for the financial goals I had in mind and while I still would blog and teach from my own Elixir experiences that would be in a more casual and not a for-profit endeavour.

The sites will be closed down soon and any previous work migrated to my personal spaces here and on GitHub.

Follow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

RSS Feeds

Platform Accounts

Franklin

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Franklin

Franklin was a project written in Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView. It was an intentionally over-engineered blog application, an opportunity for me to play around and learn how to build software in an event-sourced / CQRS model using Commanded.

I tinkered with a the project over a very part-time basis during summer of 2022 through spring 2023 but in the end decided to move on to new ideas.

I explained in this blog post, that I had launch cold feet since there was a notable complexity to launching it (and migrating all my Hugo content) and I just wasn’t up for it. There was not enough benefit to justify the cost/time.

The Franklin repo and project board are still on GitHub (though marked as archived).

The documentation page is also still up. Specifically I’m proud of the Testing in Franklin article (I suspect I’ll migrate that to my next project) as well as the idea of building our a decision document list.

GEO

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

GEO

GEO was a team project from around 2010 that came out of an experimental entrepreneurial group at IndyHall. The basic idea is that GEO was an iOS game that would track your location and encourage you to walk around your neighborhood for exercise. As you walked around you’d fight monsters, level up and find treasure. The idea was ahead of it’s time but it never really gained any traction in our simple execution.

I don’t seem to have footage of the final build but this preview will give you an idea of where we were headed:

Guildflow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Guildflow

Guildflow combined my love of meetup groups with the aspirations of the IndieWeb.

After a little more than two years I decided to shut the project down, which was detailed in this blog post.

Guildflow empowers meetup organizers to create a modern group website that respects the data and privacy rights of its members.

Using Guildflow groups:

have more control of their data enabling true data portability
run a website using their own domain
can offer more fine grained privacy options for its members

Related Tech: Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, GraphQL, iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS, Multi-tenant Databases.

MegaManEffect

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

MegaManEffect

My first “real” MacOS app. Based on the Nintendo game MegaMan 2, the MegaManEffect would play a fun animation as you launched apps on Mac OS X. I wrote the app at MacHack (getting 2nd place in the hack contest) and then a year later it blew up on the internet, even getting featured on Attack of the Show.

It remains a very sloppy open source project here: https://github.com/zorn/MegaManEffect

Related Tech: Mac OS X, AppKit, QuickTime

Mike Zornek (Personal Website)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Zornek (Personal Website)

My personal site is far from a complex project, but it is an example of me and my work.

The site is built using Hugo a static website generator with a custom theme handcrafted by myself. The code is open source and hosted on GitHub. Changes to master result in an automated publishing script ran by CircleCI with the final contents published to Linode which hosts the website using a simple Apache VM node.

The setup is not too dissimilar to the work I did for the Philly CocoaHead’s website (though they are hosted using Amazon instead of Linode.)

Related Tech: Hugo, HTML/CSS, GitHub, CircleCI, Linode, Apache

Now

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Updated: April 29, 2026

What is a Now page?

I like to think of a Now page as the things I’d share if you were an old friend and we saw each other and were asking, what’s going on? What are you working on? What are you excited about?

You can find more info here too: https://nownownow.com/about

Personal

Finally starting to shake off the doldrums of winter. Enjoying the warmer weather and getting to open my windows. Trying to soak in the little things, like eating lunch outside. Need to reboot my morning walks.

Work

My part-time maintenance contract is starting to wind down, so I need to push efforts to find more work. Given how bad the job market is right now, I am a bit stressed out.

While I’ll engage the platforms like LinkedIn, my general (and historic) pattern here is to reach out to old peers and just try to publish more. The other half of that effort needs to include some self-improvement / educational tasks (which itself can fuel some publishing).

Side Projects

Started an update branch for Flick, but not much really. Have some ideas I may work on in the next few weeks.

Currently Playing

Enjoying MLB: The Show, though this year’s release has been a buggy mess.

Started a new Stardew Farm a few weeks ago. Still going strong, about to finish up Year 2. Time to decorate while waiting for that wine to process.

Currently Reading

Read about half of Advanced Functional Programming with Elixir (with the book club). It is interesting, but it is not holding me, and I’m likely to put it down.

Read the first two chapters of Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy. No strong feelings yet.

I bought the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and am curious to read it (the first edition was very good), but I may favor the second edition of Observability Engineering.

If you use GoodReads, you can follow me at: https://www.goodreads.com/zorn711

Currently Watching

The Boys (Season 2) – kind of meh writing, but Antony Starr as Homelander is fun to watch.
Project Hail Mary – got to see this in IMAX and it was great. Looking forward to watching it again at home when it releases.

Upcoming Events

Not much. Will go to the shore with my sister in June. Did one Phillies game a week or so ago. Maybe try to do some day trips otherwise.

OwlDeck

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

OwlDeck

The OwlDeck project was to build a new macOS presentation tool geared towards programmers and geeks who need to display code and love Markdown.

I worked on OwlDeck for a few months but inevitably ran into too many headaches with the low level text system of macOS and felt the project unmaintainable. I did learn a lot through the process, including writing my own Markdown parser in Swift which was a plus.

To see some of the early builds in action, check out the development journal videos:

Related Tech: macOS AppKit, Document-based macOS Apps, Markdown, Swift, Parsers, HTML5, Templates

ProfitTrain

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

ProfitTrain

ProfitTrain (formerly Billable) was a time tracking and invoice tool for Mac OS X. While simple, it found an audience and was a very successful product for me.

Sadly when I joined the Shindig team my time was full of Shindig responsibilities and I could not find time to keep ProfitTrain up-to-date. I decided to sell ProfitTrain to RazorAnt hoping it would find some updates. It saw some, but sadly not nearly as many as I wanted. It was discontinued by RazorAnt in 2018.

Related Tech: AppKit, Mac OS X, Cocoa, CoreData

Shindig

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Shindig

Shindig was a startup I participated in as co-owner and CTO that provided a platform that would generate mobile apps (iOS, Android and Web) for attendees of conference-like events. The platform also included an Admin backend for managing all the data written in Rails. I did most of the Rails work and supervised the iOS and Android projects.

While we were about to run some events to satisfied customers, in time we shut down the company as we were not selling enough to match the money / effort we were making elsewhere doing things like freelance consulting. I did a longer retrospective of Shindig, which you can watch here:

Related Tech: Rails, HTML/CSS, iOS, Android, Redis, Linode

Talks

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Update: April 14, 2025 – I don’t do as many prepared talks these days. When I used to do more I maintained this page to track conferences I’d attended and spoke at. Not sure I’ll keep this page up forever, but for now leaving it be.

The following is a list of events and conferences I’ve spoken at or attended in recent years. If you have a speaking opportunity that might be a good fit, let me know.

2021

Attendee: Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2021, May 4-6, Online
Attendee: Code BEAM V America, March 10-12, Online

2020

Attendee: BarCampPhilly, December 5, 2020, Online
Attendee: ElixirConf, September 2 - 5, 2020, Online
Attendee: Web Directions: Code://remote, September 2020, Online
Attendee: 360iDev, August 16-19, 2020, Online
Attendee: Apple WWDC, June 22-26, Online
Attendee: DockerCon, May 21, Online
Attendee: Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2020, April 14-15, Online
Speaker: An Introduction to Elixir, Philly Elixir Group, April, Philadelphia, PA
Attendee: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, April 14-15, Philadelphia, PA
Speaker: Working With Time Zones in an Elixir Phoenix App, Philly Elixir Group, February, Philadelphia, PA

2019

Attendee: Elixir Conf 2019, August 27‑30, Denver, CO
Attendee: iOSDevCampDC, August 9, McLean, VA
Attendee: An Event Apart, July 29–31, Arlington, VA
Speaker: Lightning Talk: Meet Ecto, a Elixir Database Wrapper. PostgresConf Philly, July, Philadelphia, PA
Speaker: Using Triplex to Build a Multi-tenant Application on Top of Ecto, Philly Elixir Meetup, July, Philadelphia, PA
Speaker: Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack, Philly CocoaHeads, January, Philadelphia, PA
Attendee: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, April 23-24, Philadelphia, PA
Speaker: Deployment Concerns, Philly Elixir Meetup, May 6, Philadelphia, PA

2018

Speaker: Show & Tell, Paw App Demo, Philly CocoaHeads, November
Attendee: ElixirConf 2018, Seattle
Social: Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, San Jose

2017

Attendee: Release Notes Conference, Chicago
Speaker: Overcoming the Stress Surrounding Code Review, for the Betterment of Your Project and Career, 360iDev, August
Speaker: Starting, Growing and Running a Successful Developer Meetup, 360iDev, August
Speaker: UIKit it Dead, Long Live UIKit! (Video / Slides), Philly CocoaHeads / Android Alliance Mixer, May
Speaker: Understanding the Many Ways UIViewControllers Can Load Views, Philly CocoaHeads, May

2016

Talks UIPageViewController, Philly CocoaHeads December
Attendee: CocoaLove, Philadelphia
Speaker: Swift Code Patterns From the Ranch, CocoaConf DC, September
Speaker: Swift Code Patterns, Philly CocoaHeads May
Speaker: Consuming JSON in Swift (Video / Slides), Philly CocoaHeads January

2015

Attendee: CocoaLove, Philadelphia
Attendee: Release Notes Conference, Indianapolis
Attendee: WWDC / AltConf, San Fransisco
Speaker: Some Code Patterns (Video / Slides), Philly CocoaHeads April
Speaker: Custom UIViewController Transitions, Philly CocoaHeads January

2014

Attendee: CocoaConf, Boston
Speaker: Modern UITableView, Philly CocoaHeads, September
Speaker: WWDC Roundtable, Philly CocoaHeads, July
Speaker: Mentoring, CocoaLove Conference, Philadelphia, October

2013 - ???

Talks and conferences before 2013 are lost in time, for now.

Props and respect to early RailsConfs, C4, SecondConf, Macworld Expo, Seybold Seminars, MacHack and the other local Ruby, Web and Mac themed meetups that helped make me the geek I am today.

TrafficCast

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

TrafficCast

TrafficCast is the leader in travel time forecasting and traffic information, developing technology, applications and content based on advanced digital traffic data. TrafficCast serves the interactive, mobile, enterprise and public sector markets.

I worked with TrafficCast for over 2 years as a consultant, helping out with two major iOS projects and other general code maintenance. The highlight for me was an opportunity to rebuild their network stack and share the final design through a few different presentations.

http://mikezornek.com/posts/2019/1/designing-a-modern-swift-network-stack-video-and-slides/

Related Tech: Swift, Xcode, CircleCI, URLSession and friends, code reviews, testing, documentation.

TwizShow

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

TwizShow

TwizShow was an iOS game I made that would generate a game show based on your Twitter data. While a ton of fun to build it never really saw any traction and was pulled from the store when Twitter changed their API rules.

Related Tech: iOS, Cocos2d, Twitter API, Core Data

Values

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The values I align with regarding my work in product design and software development.

A People-first Mindset to Business

The primary goal of an ideal business should be to provide a long-term, welcoming and supportive environment for its workers. This environment is provided through relentless prioritizing of customer value but never at the cost of worker satisfaction and well-being. The business entity’s purpose is to organize that relationship and provide stability. While the business can choose to siphon profits and reward stakeholders, to do so too quickly or in too great of quantity will likely harm the balance and sustainability of the system.

Related blog post: The Purpose of a Business is People

Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement is a mindset that acknowledges an ever-present and mutating lack of knowledge alongside a mindful and intentional path to become better. Continuous Improvement takes a lot of energy and grit over the long haul. I try to embrace Continuous Improvement through:

Life-long Learning
- Dedicated reading time; regular book clubs.
- At least one new programming language a year.
- Pair programming to pick up new ideas and get better at communicating abstract problems.
- Asking hard questions while fostering healthy conflict.
Teaching
- Mentoring junior developers.
- Writing documentation and blog posts to capture both victories and failures.
- Prioritizing team code review and pull request feedback.
- Contributing to open source projects.
- Creating a safe space for people to be vulnerable about what they don’t know and want to learn.
Embrace Short Feedback Loops
- Aggressively push for smaller scope and experimentation.
- Running regular team retrospective meetings.
- Having regular 1:1 meetings amongst team members.
- Always prefer refactoring over rewriting.

Empowering Users

When I talk about Empowering Users, I mean to say I value, even at risk to the viability of the business, giving users the tools and opportunities to find the right solution for them. I find it incredibly dysfunctional when a business utilizes its leverage in one area to push the solutions of another. I embrace Empowering Users through:

Creating systems that honor users’ rights to privacy and data ownership.
Building accessible software.
Having relentless empathy for the user’s needs, even during the enviable and stressful complexities of software development.

Meaningful Work

Meaningful work starts with projects that provide an observable good to the user and the world. Meaningful work is then enhanced by the team’s culture, rituals, and processes. To find Meaningful work, I look for environments that:

Have a long-term investment mindset over short-term gains.
Provide ownership and autonomy to its workers, allowing them to craft solutions.
Embrace trust and transparency, allowing for informed decisions.

Mike Zornek

The Moral Struggles of AI Coding

Nonetheless, I use AI

Where I find value

Endless Existential Anguish

Related Reading

GitHub Copilot and Unhonored Branch Protection

Becoming an Accessibility Ally: My Early Journey and Resources

Course Review and Takeaways

1. Accessibility Overview

2. Semantic HTML & Assistive Devices

3. Managing Focus and Tab Order

4. ARIA Labels & Roles

5. Color Contrast

6. Accessibility Tools & Testing

Course Review

Resources and Tools

More Resources

Notes

Future Enhancements

A Visual Tour of Phoenix's Updated 'magic link' Authentication Code Generator

Background on authentication

The sample Hello project

User experience

Navigation updates

Registration page

Opening the confirmation ‘magic link’

Authenticated navigation

Log in with email

Log in with email/password

Settings

Change Email

Save Password

Schemas

Closing thoughts and nitpicks

Open for Software Dev Coffee Talk

Returning to Self-Employment

What Happened?

What’s Next?

A Nervous Excitement

Ranked Vote Flick Demo

Using Google Sheets to Catalog Expenses for Budgeting Considerations

Video Summary

Resources

How to Use a Modern Version of Hugo on Render's Static Site Service

Using a custom build command

Inefficiencies

How I Got Rid of My Google-Hosted Web Fonts

Picking your font

Using your font with Tailwind

Avoiding Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC)

Resources

2025 Tools Audit

Hardware

Office Furniture

Local Software

Software Services

Conference Notes: CodeBEAM America (San Francisco) 2025

Notable Talks

Conference Format

Vibes

Followup Learning Projects

What is Local-first Software?

The Problem

The Solution

The Technologies That Seeds this Dream

Why this Excites Me

What’s Next?

Resources

A Few Good Memes

Phoenix LiveView: Presenting DateTime in User's Time Zone

Elixir time zone basics

The user’s time zone

This is a half solution.

Designing a more complete solution.

A Hook-based approach.

Other Resources

Errata

On Asking Multiple Questions

Best Vinyl of 2024

The sample `Hello` project