Matthew Lang

When I was freelancing, one of the things I did regularly was read the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. It’s a snapshot of the different technologies that ThoughtWorks is considering and using. As a freelancer, I found it a good read as it provided a glimpse of what was happening in the web development industry. Once I started working full-time again, I stopped reading it and didn’t revisit it for a few years.

My current role is senior software engineer, but I am working towards the next role up from this one. This involves expanding my role in several ways, including learning and adopting new technologies and processes. One way I thought I could do this was to set up my own technology radar. ThoughtWorks does offer a means to run your own technology radar, but I wanted my own technology radar to be more straightforward.

Armed with my new knowledge of using SVG over the last couple of years, I decided to start building a technology radar of my own.

My technology radar comprises two layers of quadrants, the smaller quadrants on top of the bigger ones, to achieve the effect of having an outer trial quadrant and an inner adopt quadrant. I used the path element to do this.

<path d="M 10 45 A 40 40 0 0 1 45 10 L 45 25 A 30 30 0 0 0 25 45 Z" fill="#e3f2fd" stroke="#2196f3" stroke-width="0.5"/>
<path d="M 20 45 A 25 25 0 0 1 45 20 L 45 45 Z" fill="#e8f5e9" stroke="#4caf50" stroke-width="0.5"/>

The tokens representing the different individual items are simply circles and text elements nested under a group tag so that I can group all the items together.

<g transform="translate(40, 35)">
  <title>TDD</title>
  <circle cx="0" cy="0" r="2" fill="#4caf50"/>
  <text font-weight="bold" x="0" y="0.5" font-size="1.5" text-anchor="middle" fill="#fff" font-family="Arial, sans-serif">2</text>
</g>

I added a title tag to each token to achieve a hover effect with a text description of the token.

Finally, I added labels to the middle of the quadrant to indicate the two sections and each corner to indicate the type of technologies grouped in that quadrant.

I haven’t figured out how to programmatically group tokens in each quadrant with code, so for the moment, I am using SVG Viewer to place tokens in each quadrant by hand.

I have published a GitHub Gist of the technology radar with blank tokens filled in for one of the quadrants. Feel free to fork this technology radar for your own needs.

You can find my own technology radar here. I’ll be updating it as the year progresses.

It’s day 2 of no Wi-Fi in the house after a complication occurred yesterday when a new fibre line was being installed. In the meantime, I’m using my mobile phone data to connect to work, and the big yin is using his mobile phone data to finish his college work.

Don’t get me wrong—last night was great. With no Wi-Fi, everyone had to resort to alternative forms of entertainment, but it was a rather relaxing night. A few things were a nuisance to overcome, but at the end of the day, that’s what they were. A nuisance.

I’d be pretty happy to have more days like yesterday.

Sadly, Reeder no longer supports other RSS feed clients like Feedbin and Feedly.

Why doesn’t this version of Reeder support third-party sync services?

With the new Reeder, tracking what you’ve read is based on your scroll position rather than traditional read/unread states. This design makes integration with most third-party sync services non-trivial, so support for these services is not currently planned.

— Reeder Help

This change away from unread/read states on posts is probably my biggest concern with the new Reeder app. Scroll positions have been used in similar applications to determine how much you read. From my memory, I didn’t use this feature in the applications that implemented it. I was happy to start scrolling from the latest posts and scan back as far as I wanted. It’s early days, though, and I haven’t even added any significant number of feeds to Reeder to see how effective this will work.

That is the beauty of unread/read states, though. Minimal thinking is required to determine what’s left to read. I know from a glance what I need to catch up on. Scroll positions require me to scroll to catch up to the point where there’s nothing left in my timeline to see. I would much rather click through collections of feeds and see precisely what’s left to read.

For now, though, I’ll keep Reeder Classic on my iPhone, but I can see myself using Feedbin’s iOS app instead of Reeder Classic over time. I imagine there will come a time when Reeder Classic won’t be supported. When that time comes, I would prefer to use an alternative to Reeder Classic daily rather than be forced to make the change away from it.

Procreate’s stand on AI​ should be applauded.

We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.​ ​

​I’m glad to see that companies like Procreate still recognise the danger of AI in their products. AI has it’s uses, but it doesn’t need to be everywhere. ​

Spurred by this post on digital minimalism, I’ve decided to do a little clearing of the decks on my iPhone.

Gone are some Twitter clients, a few news apps and a 2FA app.

I’ve replaced the Twitter clients with the web interface on Safari, and I’m glad to see that I can now log into multiple Twitter accounts. I’m still not a big fan of Twitter, but accessing it on Safari is handy.

The news apps were never really used, and I can also read the news on Safari.

I’ve been meaning to move to 1Password’s two-factor authentication for accounts for some time, but I’ve been simply putting it off.

The home screen is starting to look a little more sane again.

For a while, there has been a nagging question in the back of my mind: Am I really getting the full use out of my to-do list? Two people have made me question this in the last couple of weeks.

The first was by Patrick Rhone after re-reading a post from a while back:

You see, when the things you hope to do are on some long wish list of things you hope to do, they are telling you a lie. They are telling you that you that every single thing on there is of equal importance.

— Better Things by Patrick Rhone

The second was CJ Chilvers on the idea of killing your to-do list:

I’ve slowly become a convert to the idea that we need to concentrate on our calendars a whole lot more to achieve what we want in work and life. If you want it done, it must be scheduled. If it’s not scheduled, it’s just another item on your wishlist that will never be completed.

— Kill Your To-do List by CJ Chilvers

I work from my calendar throughout the day for high-level things like client work and more significant projects. I use Trello and schedule cards, which I’m working on in my calendar for this. For low-level stuff like errands and such, I use Todoist. Lately, though, I’ve found that Todoist has been holding nothing more than smaller tasks, which has led me to question my value in using it.

So, I’ll stick with Trello for more significant projects and schedule work for the next few weeks into my calendar. With Todoist dropping, I’m going to look for an alternative. It might be Trello, a pocket notebook, or an index card. I haven’t decided yet.