Category: Uncategorized

Lesson 12 of my LoopConf talk was “Read your own code”.

Chris Ferdinandi knows this lesson. And the tip on leaving reviewer notes is good too.

https://gomakethings.com/review-your-own-git-pull-requests/

I'm hardly a connoisseur of fine video games, but one of my favourite games on the little PlayDate console is Hyper Meteor, and its now on Steam.

A tiny asteroids-like game, but so much fun, perfect difficulty level, I keep coming back again and again.

I'm gonna wreck a controller playing this gem.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1425590/HYPER_METEOR/

This is incredible. And funny. If you understand why.

“Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music”

https://dustri.org/b/horrible-edge-cases-to-consider-when-dealing-with-music.html

After this week's firehose, I’m back on my wanting-to-improve-school-comms train again. I'm utterly convinced that there's a relatively simple solution to 80% of most school comms issues. But I also know that schools are focussed on education and children's care, not comms, and would find process change hard.

As always, teachers and people who work in schools have my utmost respect.

All the other talks are up too. Go watch them!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLod7ww284cBGTxkmJqysez86KK_1vCYyB

Oh, yay! I didn’t think my LoopConf talk recording was going to be free to watch. But it’s out on YouTube.

This was an epic labour of love. I’m so glad I can share it with you.

My 25 Lessons from 25 years of software development in (a little over) 25 minutes.

https://youtu.be/cyxQ82L298Y

I think about code a lot. I've found myself thinking about “accessibility” of code. Code that has affordances for manipulating it, and annotations where it's not clear. Code with the equivalents of labels, alt text and captions. Code whose meaning is clear.

And I'm thinking about how accessibility is good, not just for the physically and/or mentally impaired, but for everyone.

Does thinking about the accessibility of code in that context help us code better?

I have that most fun of things… a swollen 20,000mAh Li-Ion power bank battery.

Putting that OUTSIDE the house until I can recycle it. 😬

This is an excellent little pop-up calendar app for MacOS. Free. Love it.

https://lowtechguys.com/grila/

I'm taking my kids to a thing in London tomorrow and I can only take in a bag that's A4 size or smaller.

WHAAAAT?!

We played a silly family car game just now. It has raised a very interesting question.

What would happen if you exposed a marshmallow to the vacuum of space?

We are now down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos titled “X in a vacuum chamber”

Can flies fly in a vacuum chamber?

Is this even ethical?

Hacktivate looks like a very interesting little game for MacOS/iOS.

Security and code-breaking challenges, that teaches text encodings, image processing, and command-line stuff.

You probably need to be at least a beginner computer nerd to not be totally confused (you will find out in the free tutorial). But this seems very clever.

https://www.hacktivate.app/

I love my iPhone 13 mini. It’s 3.5 years old and still 100% fine.

Today I replaced its battery.

Just about!

What an incredible faff!

At one point I was convinced I would not get the new battery connected.

But screw you, Apple! It’s is done!

Previous attempts to change batteries have failed to improve anything. Let’s see what happens.

I’ve become so interested in how to make change happen.

There are so many ideas about it and so much advice.

I’m definitely guilty of research/document/present the argument. Maybe that’s a UK-Corporate thing?

Today I watched @GeePawHill’s course intro (https://vimeo.com/823115313?fl=pl&fe=sh) and read @aurooba’s latest post (https://aurooba.blog/why-we-choose-what-we-build-with/)

And I’m also holding in mind what I know about neurodiversity.

And I think that all I can take away is that this is really hard, and everyone is different.

Yes, I'm aware of the irony of me writing this.

I've had several good conversations about AI/LLMs today.

After a few weeks of thinking I could see what they're useful for, I think I'm officially a skeptic now.

Every conversation has had:
– They’ll get better though!
– Yeah, sure they make mistakes, but you learn to deal with it

Or has been about a use case where a simpler, deterministic and far more efficient method would be better.

Mostly though: I'm just sick of talking about and hearing about it. It's just become word salad now.

So… I just found the SCP Foundation.

This seems like something I should have known about for years.

But I'm in now.

Let’s EXPLORE!!!

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/