Ross's Micro Blog

🖥️ With PHP 8.3. out tomorrow (can you believe it?!), "Can I PHP" is a great reference of the important new features, and allows you to see at a glance what is new and deprecated in each version:

https://caniphp.com/?version=8.3

Eventually the Mondex trials ceased.

I wonder how much it informed our current payment technology and if the banks considered it a waste.

It’s a fun bit of geeky history to have been involved in though. And the relics remain on a shelf to occasionally be rediscovered.

EV bore (with regen braking stats)

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One of the things that amazes me about our EV is the regenerative braking.

In the last 30 days it says we used 104kWh.

But we recouperated 63kWh!

We get back 60% of what we put in.

And in petrol cars this is just wasted to heat.

It’s extraordinary!!

Is it just cos I’m old that I want things to be simple.

Simple code.

Simple (or no) dependencies and build processes.

Simple user interfaces with good error messages.

Simple tech with actual buttons and switches.

Simple retail experiences.

Everything is so damn complicated!!

I don’t talk a lot about work here because I’m employed by a big corporate and have to be careful what I say but…

My team ABSOLUTELY SMASHED IT this week. We punched way above our weight. Collaborated amazingly. Brought tons of energy. And, I think, had fun too?

I love working with them all.

Though I did realise my complaint about React needing loads of boilerplate applies to PHP too.

The difference is that PHP boilerplate is all in scaffolding data.

Once that’s done the actual code you have to write is minimal.

A trade-off I’m willing to make.

So nice to be back in sort-of-greenfield PHP!

Scaffolded two data structures to enhance an existing feature and started the logic too.

Did about an hour of work before even looking in a browser.

Most errors were detected by the IDE before I even tested any thing!!!

I just. Wrote. Code!

My comfort zone. 😁

Further to learning “malicious compliance”, I’d like to coin “educational stupidity”:

Acting dumb to get you to operate as if I am, because I might be. (Or I may just not know what you know!)

Am I allowed to celebrate Diwali? Light over darkness? Good over evil?

I’m in. Let’s celebrate that.

Might put some lights up.

🙏🪔

I guess this is a step in the right direction though…

Or is it?

https://hassuellabravermanbeensacked.yet.fyi/

There’s enough actual war and battle in the world where people are dying.

We don’t need to be making up fake reasons to have “battles” of any sort.

Don’t take the bait.

Feeling this morning is: I struggle enough with negative self-talk. Let alone seeing negative everyone-else talk.

Just a firehose of awfulness this morning.

I want to weep.

The third (and – still can't believe it only lasted so long) last edition of my Beyond WP newsletter on “Tinkering Tools" is now in the archive covering Tinkerwell, Playgrounds and “REPL’s”. All great tools in a PHP developer's toolbox:

https://beyond-wp.com/archive/beyond-wp-3-tinkering-tools

What do you think? Should I do more writing like this? Maybe scale down my ambitions/standards?

😎 Well today I learned that my parent’s EV charger that we borrow show a weird error when you first plug in…

… because it does a random pause of between 1 and 10 minutes before starting to avoid everyone starting a charge at the same time and overloading the grid! 😎

https://www.myenergi.com/guides/smart-charge-point-regulations-explained/

Tried to get back into Turbo Admin dev yesterday. I want to get keyboard navigation for list tables finished.

Honestly: this is such a good feature and should just be part of the UX.

I’m sure it has big accessibility pros if I can build it right.

Had someone else already done this?

I love the clever humour here. Very Twitter circa 2008. I’m sure this exists elsewhere. But I like that it’s here and it makes it into my timeline.

Hot take: Corporate laptops should come with text-expansion for in-house abbreviations and acronyms by default.