Ross's Micro Blog

I consider it a win that I'm entirely oblivious to any TypeScript drama that may be happening. I keep seeing references to it. But have not seen any of it first-hand.

Mute/block/follow wisely. It's good for you!

I will gladly accept your corporate party survival tips!! 🙏

This week, this introvert (actually ambivert), remote-working, nerdy software developer is being made to attend the London office with all the other UK employees. Which will, as far as I can tell, be mostly sales people.

This includes happy hour at a cocktail bar (“let’s have some fun!”) and a posh “Summer Rooftop Party”.

It’s a great company to work for. But you have to make _some_ sacrifices, right?

(Could I sneak in some small nerdy card games perhaps? 🤔)

I really want to spend my afternoon hacking on a little JavaScript game.

I wonder if family circumstances will let me. 🙏

BBQ tonight then.

You would not believe where the electric cables are in our house!!

POP!!!!

🙄

It's also really verbose. Very keen to tell me what is DOES know while getting the actual answers incorrect.

I reckon a teacher could easily smell this out.

I know ChatGPT explicitly does not do facts. But even so, with so much easily findable information about this topic, I consider this a big fail.

Kids: Don't ChatGPT your homework.
Teachers: It's good, but it's not that good. Keep an eye out for rambling but incorrect answers!

An example…

Q: What is the link between Shakespeare and Tottenham football club?

Chat GPT says:

"There is no direct historical link between William Shakespeare and Tottenham football club.”

Google says (top, snippetted result):

"The name Hotspur was picked to pay homage to Sir Henry Percy, better known as 'Harry Hotspur' from Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part 1”

ChatGPT also doesn't know the link with the Teletubbies. It’s too literal and not at all smart.

Interesting. My kid gets his first piece of high-school homework. An 11-question quiz about Shakespeare.

He HAS done the homework. But I wondered: what would ChatGPT make of this?

By my reckoning, 4 of the 11 answers it gave were incorrect. And this is because some element of “interpretation” was required to answer the question.

The AI's aren't coming for us just yet!

Examples…

As of this week I’m the parent of a secondary/high school student! Eek!

A tech observation: would be great if phones had a “school mode” where they are effectively off, but can still be geolocated. For parental tracking but also for finding lost devices.

Is that a thing?

I really want to be working on side projects, but I’m burning so much mental energy on being executive function for other people right now that I just need to chill once kids are in bed.

And this… this is literally FINE. 👍 It’s better than fine. It’s GOOD!!

🚗 If there’s one thing electric vehicles are really missing it’s an under-car animal detector.

Ending this short thread with some wisdom:

Just because a programming language has weird, ambiguous syntax doesn’t mean you have to use it!

Also, and f*** this:

You can optional-call an undefined function:

let undefinedFunc
undefinedFunc?.()

is fine.

But you can’t optional-call an undeclared one:

undeclaredFunc?.()
-> “undeclaredFunc is not defined”

Even though:

typeof undefinedFunc
-> “undefined”

typeof undeclaredFunc
-> “undefined”

🤬

New JS/TS syntax that I’m learning and that I don’t like:

1) Optionally chained function calls. This is just weird:

someFunction?.( params )

2) Ambiguous short function syntax that does not return an object:

const f = () => {
‘name’: ‘Ross’
}

😎 Tooting my own horn again, but today, I – complete React and NextJS noob (kinda) – reviewed a small-but-mighty NextJS middleware change, found a bug, improved it, and then went and wrote tests for it too!

Go me!!!

(Actually very proud of myself today)

😎 I revisited my “10 things I learned in 10 years of freelancing” posts today.

I’m pretty proud of them. Some great advice and wisdom, even if I do say so myself!

Start here!

https://rosswintle.uk/2021/08/10-things-i-learned-about-freelancing-in-ten-years-with-ten-days-to-go-part-1/