Ross's Micro Blog

Has anyone yet solved the (first world) problem of getting my smartphone-app-based shopping list to join up with a self-scan-as-you-go supermarket device so scanning an item ticks it off the list and I can see the list on the scanner?!

Interesting to catch a potentially popular petition early stage. Will watch growth with interest: https://petition-track.uk/check-petition/222448

Kinda related: I came across an EXCELLENT podcast on gentleness and activism this week. In fact, both Sarah Corbett and Andy Mort use the term “Gentle” to great effect. Wondering if we need a “gentle developer’s manifesto” to remind us coders to be good to each other.

Huh. So Uncle Bob (not mine – the software engineer guy) got into some trouble with his opinions, huh? I wrote a post as a reaction on one of his posts ages back. It never made it out of draft because I thought “Who am I to criticise this super-experienced dude?”

🤔

Note to self: take a portable fan to your kid’s swimming lesson next week. 😥

Heard the last few mins of Korea/Germany on the radio. Incredible. Watching the replay: kudos to the Korean who set up the second goal. His long range pass was perfect!!

On screen-time: “if a kid is writing programs and creating things that is quite different things happening in their minds than if they are sitting there watching stuff and playing”.

https://rosswintle.uk/2018/06/on-balance-of-creativity-and-passivity-with-kids-and-screentime/

Came across the brilliant-looking CS Unplugged – “Computer science without a computer” resources for teaching kids of all ages the basics of data and computing. All via the brilliant @changelog

https://csunplugged.org/en/

Must really start putting quotes from podcasts on my blog so they’re public rather than in my private notes app . These things are useful for everybody!

Well…this is a nice problem to have!

I’m cautious about asking this, but I’m both curious and in need: Do any graphic designers do open source or creative commons design work the same way developers do open source work for fun/learning/practice/public benefit and, yes, exposure?

And…even though I’m 💯% sure that the Fathom (analytics) guys have an infinitely superior product, Kownter has lots of benefits (for me!) over it right now.

It’s super simple, ugly and pre-Alpha really, but if anyone wants to try it on a low volume site do let me know!

Somehow, in the last few days, I’ve chilled out and wound down by making some incremental improvements to my Kownter analytics. There’s now a 24-hour top pages view AND it does some user-agent lookups to get browser/not names. Should pave the way for excluding bots.

And by teaching programming I don’t mean “writing code that does cool stuff”, I mean “helping people understand how their code that does cool stuff works and does what it does”

Teaching programming principles has been a thing I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ve tried making some short videos on the topic. But listening back I realise this: teaching programming is HARD!

Today in #learnToLoveJS, I explore getting data from PHP into JS, how objects don’t make a good substitute for arrays, and why I still hate “this” and scoping. https://rosswintle.uk/2018/06/more-struggling-with-js-how-the-php-js-interface-is-broken-and-why-this-is-painful/

And, thinking about this…as a PHP dev the interface between PHP’s associative arrays and JS’s arrays and objects tends to be JSON, with somewhat inconsistent results as JSON arrays have no specific indices. This is a major pain point.

Like: How do I iterate over this thing in JS? Oh, it’s an object. I can get the keys, but surely there’s an easier way? Isn’t there a for…in? Or for…of or something? But don’t they include properties that I don’t care about? Maybe loadash helps? Yes, but method naming 🙄

In my “Spare” time today I tried to #learnToLoveJS by writing some Vue and Axios

It was a pretty spectacular failure.

JS seems to just want to trip me up at every step.

The APIs for arrays and objects are inconsistent.

this is different with arrow functions.

Just….ARGH!!!!

OK, so, this seems to be the thing. If you’re using Vue components, go all-in. Mixing reactive JS frameworks with standard page-reloading back-ends doesn’t work well.

I’m not sure I like that. I’d like adopting JS frameworks to be more incremental. But hey. #learnToLoveJS