Matthew Lang

I finished reading The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey. Not quite what I was expecting from the authors of The Expanse novels. Certainly a unique story, but it wasn’t much of a page turner for me. 📚

A minor update to the Bothy theme this morning. I’m not going to lie, this is a pretty selfish update. I fixed the theme’s layout to allow additional CSS tweaks. Now I can put up Christmas lights again!

We watched Superman tonight. It’s been a while since we really enjoyed a superhero movie. I hope there are more movies to come from DC.🍿

We put the Christmas tree up this weekend, as next weekend was going to be a bit busy. Outdoor lights go up tomorrow.

I caved and bought Marked 2 to preview my Markdown files as I write them in my text editor. It feels like 2015 again.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using Mike Rohde’s daily plan bar for my work notebook.

Initially, I started using a weekly plan bar over a year ago. Still, in the last few weeks, I’ve needed to tie my notes to that same day, so I’ve started using the daily plan bar again.

Nothing fancy, just a bar representing my day, split into 15-minute segments going from my usual hours of 8 to 5. If I am starting earlier in the day, it can go from 7 to 4 instead.

My daily plan bar is always on the left-hand side of the left-hand page of my notebook. The rest of the two-page spread is for notes and anything else that comes up that day.

It’s been a good change moving to the daily plan bar. Scoping out my day is much easier, and adding last-minute meetings and changes is easy.

In the future, I may reduce the bar to just eight hours and use the extra space for a single goal for the day.

A good range session tonight for Drew. The driver is still looking good despite not playing much golf. Hopefully the weather stays dry enough for some golf at the weekend.

Jen and I finished season 3 of The Diplomat last night. Seasons 1 and 2 were great, but it definitely tailed off for us in season 3.

After my recent decision to scale back on GitHub issues and pull requests, I’ve found some traction again with plain-text files.

In a couple of Rails applications, I have a docs folder where I store several Markdown documents that serve as guides for some of the code. To this, I have added three files, FEATURES.md, BUGS.md and PLANNING.md. The features and bug files are self-explanatory, but the planning file might need some explanation.

GitHub has a feature called milestones that lets you set an end date for a milestone. You can also add issues to a milestone. I always thought it was a nice feature that mimicked a sprint from agile methodologies like Scrum.

The planning file contains the sprints I have set out for the next six months, with each sprint listing the planned features and bugs I will work on. It gives a nice top-level view of what’s ahead and is easy to update.

I’m still in the early days of this plain-text switch from GitHub’s own features, but I’m already seeing benefits. The files live in the application’s codebase, so updating them is easy in a text editor. Having these files in the code base reduces the amount of context switching I need to do. Features and bugs can be planned in one pane, with any related code being open in a neighbouring pane, side by side.

Finally, the files are plain text, so they can be manipulated by any scripts. I am considering an auto-generated HTML file that provides an overview of the project’s status. It would include the number of open issues, a roadmap for the next few sprints, and any open bugs.

The planning tools that cloud-based products like GitHub and GitLab provide are fine, but are definitely overkill for what I need. Making do with plain text files isn’t a step down; it’s just an easier way for me to manage these projects with minimal overhead.

All too often, I would start a new project on GitHub, only for it to gather dust. It’s one of the reasons I moved my personal projects to SourceHut: I don’t need the social interactions GitHub provides. I still have a couple of larger Rails applications that I host on GitHub, using a separate account.

A minor revelation struck me last night when I was trying to merge another pull request for one of these Rails applications. I probably don’t need to merge this pull request or any other pull request. Since I’m the only one with access to the repository, I can skip creating, monitoring, and merging pull requests and simply use git merge when I am ready to merge the branch into the main Git branch.

Why am I even using issues, projects and milestones in GitHub? Again, it’s just me on the repository, and I don’t need to collaborate in the sense that GitHub allows.

The only reason I am left with using GitHub is that the hosting provider my Rails application runs on uses Git to track changes and automatically deploys them to the server when changes are detected. I have it set up to use GitHub.

Suppose I can handle deploys on another Git service or even from my local laptop. In that case, I can switch away from GitHub for this account.

Still, when it’s just you and the repository, you probably don’t need several of GitHub’s features or even GitHub itself. Just a remote Git repo, and there’s plenty of other options out there.

When it comes to AI, I found myself late to becoming a regular user of it. Hesitance has always been one of my traits, and when ChatGPT became a daily buzzword in my RSS feeds, I wondered if I should start exploring its use. I put it off for a few months, and eventually, I found myself with a ChatGPT account. The initial hype surrounding these tools has definitely fizzled out for me, and now I find myself still divided on whether they are helpful or not.

As a software engineer, I find AI tools really helpful. I’m pretty familiar with the various coding tools available from Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and I use at least two of these tools daily; in fact, we’re encouraged to utilise these tools. I use them to explain code that I am unfamiliar with, diagnose issues and help with complex problems that my current skill set does not cover.

Outside of my day job as a senior software engineer, though, using AI becomes more of a crutch than a benefit. I have used AI tools outside of my career for several trivial tasks. But over time, I have found myself falling away from these tools and only reaching for them when I absolutely need them. There’s definitely a downside to these tools when you start to depend on them for everything, and it’s for this reason that I try to limit my time with them.

I think it boils down to that old adage, “everything in moderation”. And yes, this even applies to AI for me.

I had no idea there was a standard for webhooks. Definitely a helpful resource for a web application I am building for aggregating webhooks from different sources.

I ordered two of the new Archaeology notebooks from Atoms to Astronauts and they arrived in the post today.

Nice to have a different colour from my usual collection of blue and green notebooks.

I improved the summary preview on the Bothy theme last night. I’m not sure there’s much else that needs to be added to my theme, but I can park it for a few weeks now until something else comes up.

A good day off work today.

Slept in until 10-ish, ran a few errands in town, tried the Arkleston Farm Shop for lunch (it wasn’t great), back home for a couple of episodes of The Diplomat and then a nap. Taking Drew to his martial arts class now and then back home to hunker down for the night.

The Discovery page on the Bear blogging platform is a great way to discover new and popular content. I would love to see a similar feature on Micro.blog.

I’m not big on measuring posts by likes or whatever you want to call it, but it is one of the few ways to measure popular content.

Another Sunday afternoon golfing with the wee guy. He absolutely thumped me at match play over 13 holes. Doubt I’ll ever be able to beat him again!

Despite most of the trees having lost most of their leaves, the view from the home office is still great at this time of year.

Giving the Zen browser a try instead of managing two different profiles on Firefox. The new profile tool on Firefox is nice, but I don’t find it exactly smooth.

Slow Horses season ending was fantastic. Looking forward to seasons 6 & 7.

The Denver Broncos 1977 throwback uniforms are absolute class.

Watched A House of Dynamite tonight. Edge-of-your-seat stuff with a change in storytelling from the usual single start-to-end format, but it definitely carried a strong message at the end. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Just saying, Micro.blog’s photo challenge should be in October. Such a great time of year for photos. Well it is, from my back yard.

I haven’t posted a single photo in October so far, which is unusual since it’s usually my favourite month for sharing many things.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had created a Slack account just to send webhooks to and that perhaps there was a better way of doing this. After a few hours, I have managed to put together a tool for consuming and monitoring webhooks.

Hooknook (working title) allows me to create channels and send webhooks to different channels. I’ve still got some details to sort out, but the basic application works. Users and channels are made through the Rails console at the moment, and a single endpoint accepts all webhooks coming in. It’s the absolute minimum I could do to get it to work, and now it’s happily accepting webhooks from my Hatchbox deploys.

I used Anthropic’s Claude to flesh out the structure of the application to begin with, and once I had it working, I used Claude again to add some TailwindCSS styling to the screens. These screens are definitely going to get a once-over again, as the purple is a bit garish, but my wife seems to like it, so it might stay, but be a bit more subtle.

It’s been a welcome change of pace to be able to build something in a short space of time, and even better to be able to use it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to explore adding more functionality for Hooknook and being able to handle more webhooks from different sources, including GitHub.