2023-12-15 07:53:44

I have reason to want to look at a Facebook group today.

Oh my. What has that thing become?!

It’s just – what – ads of all the different sorts: marketplace ads, businesses posting their wares, and actual paid ads.

2023-12-13 09:27:55

The lesson: Think about what the other person needs to know to fulfil your requirement without needing further exchange of information.

Otherwise, further communication is needed, which slows you down. OR, the person makes their own assumptions ("here's a 50g packet of flaked almonds!”) and the whole process becomes blocked and rework is needed.

It takes longer to do the initial work, but you get your cake baked on time for the birthday party!!

2023-12-13 09:24:58

Came up with a great analogy yesterday for how specific requirements help everyone:

I often do the grocery shopping.

My wife often lists things like “almonds”.

I arrive at the shop.

There are ground almonds, flaked almonds, blanched almonds, whole almonds. They are on the snack aisle, the baking aisle and in the produce department.

There are various packet sizes.

The actual requirement is something like:

"Ground Almonds, 150g for baking cake”

2023-12-13 08:55:46

A screen grab of me asking ChatGPT “What do I need to know about this week?” And a succinct summary in reply of the key things I need to know about schools this week.

OK. This is for real. This needs to be done.

I gave ChatGPT a prompt and then copied and pasted all the recent school emails, from both schools, into it. And then asked it to summarise what I needed to know about this week and it's frickin' amazing (no personal data was sent as a part of this experiment):

2023-12-12 23:40:21

I need gift ideas for a 12-year old kid who loves gaming (mostly Nintendo) and coding but who we don’t want to buy more games for.

We also don’t want/need:
– any more LED lights
– bike/skateboard/scooter
– board games
– books
– watches
– headphones

Any creative ideas out there?

2023-12-10 19:26:25

So… showable progress on the little static mobile headless web app thing.

This little tool:

– Scraped the REST API of my local copy of my blog
– Saved all the JSON responses as static files
– Indexed using Pagefind (pagefind.app/)
– Has a thin JS (actually Alpine.js) and HTML layer on top
– 100% static files!

Neat!

Not QUITE ready for consumption yet. And has MANY caveats. But no reason it shouldn't work with simple blog sites.

2023-12-10 09:55:10

Another thing about this is: Gosh coding a clean PHP project with types and data objects and services and PHPStorm/static analysis is a JOY!!

I’ve said this before – I FLY in this environment.

2023-12-10 09:43:05

Also: I’ve now added to my list of things-a-web-dev-must-build that I have built:

– Chatbot
– Todo list
– Static site generator
– Geolocation app
– Snake game
– Simple social network/chat
– CMS
– Cards Against Humanity clone
– Wordle clone
– Mobile headless app framework

I think I just need to make a drag-and-drop Kanban board and I’ve qualified! 😂

2023-12-10 09:35:46

… I figured if I constrained it I could make this a framework/toolkit.

I’m well on the way with this! I have a nice CLI scraping tool. Grabs and saves all the JSON.

In theory I can just layer my little web app code on top and be done! Yay!

However, I recently found Pagefind – a static site search library: pagefind.app/

I wanted to integrate this. BUT it crawls HTML pages.

So I’m wondering if I need to to save and serve HTML instead of JSON.

Hmm…

2023-12-10 09:31:19

A while ago I made a little web app that re-presents a very static website in an app-like interface. This is private because it’s technically using copyrighted content (I own the book, FWIW, and the website version of the content is free to view).

I made this by scraping the content using the WordPress REST API and storing/serving the resulting JSON statically.

It’s effectively a simple headless content app! …

2023-12-05 10:31:18

I did some looking around…Websites that sell to developers have virtually NO PEOPLE on them!!

– Vectors, illustrations, screenshots
– Show-me-the-product
– Very few pop-ups and exit intents (even without ad blockers)
– Lots of dark mode

What does this say about marketing to this audience? 🤔

2023-12-02 09:06:05

Well, THIS is interesting. An argument that you should commit ALL your dependencies (including build toolchain) to version control. I get the argument. Is this practical anywhere right now?

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/depen

2023-12-01 11:21:10

I'm not sure the right photo won the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards (the owl is the best, IMO!). But they're a fun Friday thing:

https://www.comedywildlifephoto.com/galler

2023-12-01 08:01:57

I’m not a fancy car dude. But the novelty of remote controlling it to turn the heater and demister on is going to take a while to fade. 😃