Ross's Micro Blog

Loving being back in PHPStorm. Static analysis saving me from errors before I even run a test.

This is truly brilliant. Council stop fly posting by sticking “cancelled” stickers over everything. 👏 https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/thinking-fly/1484597

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 🙄