Author: Ross Wintle

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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!!

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”

…

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?

Oh! I forgot to say. https://caniphp.com/ has an “API” now. It’s just a static JSON version of the data. There’s no parameters of filters. But it might be useful if you want to build anything on top of the data.

Please cache this if you use it. Thanks.

https://caniphp.com/features.json

#php

Am I the first to do this? No.

Do I care? No.

Was this fun to make? Yes!

Any other questions?

So… showable progress on the little static #WordPress 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 (https://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.

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.

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! 😂

… 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: https://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…

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! …

In which frameworks and tooling that normally make things so easy, really messed up my “quick prototype” this evening. 😬

https://rosswintle.uk/2023/12/wordpress-rest-api-with-a-laravel-zero-cli-and-tinkerwell/

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? 🤔

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/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/

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/gallery/comedy-wildlife-2023-competition-winners.php

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. 😃

So I started writing this little web-app version of an old WordPress site that consumed the API.

And now… of course… I'm thinking I might be able to abstract it into a universal generator for statically-served, mobile-friendly web-apps based on WordPress sites.

No, Ross. You don't need to do this!!!! 😂

AI thoughts continued…

– I should say that my wife’s CV is excellent. And that has very little to do with the few tiny things that I helped with while proof reading.

– No AI was involved in writing my wife’s CV (if future employers are reading)…

– … but even if it was, is that a bad thing?

– I really don’t know what to make of these LLMs and chat interfaces, but the questions and conversations around them are FASCINATING!!

– “It’s like a thesaurus, but for whole paragraphs!” 😎

AI thoughts continued…

Doesn’t the AI make stuff up? It doesn’t understand anything!

—

Sometimes. You can fact check it. Humans are still required. And so what if it doesn’t understanding anything? Do *I* understand your CV?

Maybe. But I’ve seen a bunch of CVs and CV writing advice and I kinda know how to structure a good CV. I’ve seen what you’ve written and edited it into that kind of format. You’ll still read it and make changes to what I’ve done.

That’s no different to asking ChatGPT.