Matthew Lang

As a relatively late adopter of AI tools, well, amongst software developers anyway, I am slowly coming round to the benefits of AI. Like most people, I started with the big-name AI tool, ChatGPT, but it didn’t take me long to discover Anthropic and their Claude and Claude Code tools.

Over the last six months, I’ve been a heavy user of Claude Code. It definitely provides serious productivity gains. Here are a few examples of where I have used Claude Code in the past few weeks.

• Upgrading a couple of Rails applications from 7.0 through to the latest 8.1 - The Rails upgrade process is fairly straightforward, and I’ve done quite a few upgrades over the years, but the process has been
• Re-starting development on Dailymuse - work on this has been slow over the last couple of years, but the last few months have seen some big changes in my micro-product.
• Exploring Hugo and Jekyll themes - I had been working on a Hugo theme I planned to use on Micro.blog, but since moving to self-hosting, I have migrated this over to Jekyll.
• Built supporting tools for my blog - Self-hosting with Jekyll is easy, but I wanted to still have the option of hosting images and posting on the go as I used to with Micro.blog. I managed to build a number of these features to support my Jekyll blog over the course of a week.

The accelerated pace of development is probably the first thing software developers notice when using AI tools like Claude Code. You can build features and even applications at such a rapid pace, which is good, but it’s also been a red flag for me since I started using these tools.

With increased production rates, I am concerned about retaining the knowledge of what I am building. Will I know enough about the code base to support it in the future? When my code breaks, how will I know how to fix it?

I am exploring a few ways of ensuring that I know the code that I am shipping, including:

• Taking notes on code changes, especially in areas of the code base that are important and application or business-critical.
• Adding more comments to my code - this might serve the AI tools more than me, but having comments throughout the code does give me a quicker understanding of the code I am adding and where I am adding it to.
• Spending more time reviewing code — especially AI-generated code. What is this code doing? Do I understand it? Can I make this code better? Is this code even suitable?

There are other ways I can improve my retention of the codebase, and yes, AI tools can help with that. However, as good as the AI tools are, there still needs to be human understanding of the codebase to make the right decisions about future changes, and that begins with understanding the code and ensuring I retain enough knowledge about it.

After a few years of being on the Micro.blog platform, it’s time to host my own blog again. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed hosting my blog on Micro.blog, but I want to have more control over what my blog does for me.

Having my blog on Jekyll wasn’t enough, though. I needed to be able to blog from my phone if needed. So, over the last couple of days, I have been building a Rails app that helps me to do what Micro.blog offers. I’ve tried to do this in the past and failed miserably, but this time I’ve added enough knowledge to know what I need.

The Rails application handles two important steps that I need to continue blogging about when I have my phone.

Uploading and hosting images

The first is the uploading and hosting of images. I previously included all images in the blog itself when I last ran my blog using Jekyll. As expected, it led to some seriously long build times for Jekyll.

The new application allows me to upload and serve all the images for my blog. Each image is saved in different sizes, and I’m using an LLM to generate alt text as it’s uploaded.

This allows me to manage uploads separately from the blog itself and keeps the blog’s build time fast.

Posting on the go

The second is creating posts on the go. I previously did this using GitHub’s web interface, pasting the post directly into my repo. Not exactly straightforward, and it worked to an extent, but it became more of a chore than anything else.

The new application allows me to compose posts on a much friendlier web page. I can save the post as a draft and come back to it later. When it is ready to publish, it commits the post directly to my blog’s repository on SourceHut, where I have a build script to deploy the code to my server after each commit.

What I’ll miss

Yes, features are missing from my setup, like cross-posting, bookmarks, and bookshelves, and over time, I might replace them with my own take on these features. For the moment, though, I’m quite happy knowing that my blog is back to being something I have full control over, and I have more of a say in how it’s built and displayed.

And yes, this means I have parked the three-column theme I was building for Micro.blog. I doubt I will finish it. Apologies if you have been looking forward to it.

I will still be keeping my blog pointed at the Micro.blog community and I wish nothing but success for the platform. It’s a great community, and I hope it continues to grow.

I’ve been messing about with builds on SourceHut for the last couple of days.

Yesterday, I got a build script working that triggers a deploy for a Rails application over at Hatchbox. It’s the last part of a release script I have put together that automates deployments for me. I can see myself using this in other Rails applications as well.

This morning, I got a build script working to build and deploy a Bridgetown site using SourceHut’s built-in static hosting. I could have had a Jekyll site running probably in half the time, but I was curious to see what Bridgetown offers for static sites. It involved a bit more in the build script, but the site is working now. No idea yet, what I will do with the site, but it’s good to know I can use Bridgetown.

Most importantly, I feel I have rediscovered an interest in my side projects over the past week. Between using Zed, Claude Code and SourceHut, I have been hacking away at various little scripts and ideas just to automate a few things and broaden my programming knowledge a bit and dare I say it, thoroughly enjoying it.

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.

I’ve been a bit of a die-hard Anker fan for the last few years. I’ve spent my fair share on chargers from them over the previous few years, and I can’t fault them one bit. The earliest ones we bought are still working and are used to power the LEDs for a few of our Lego Star Wars dioramas.

The same goes for their headphones. I got a pair of Anker Soundcore Life 2 headphones for my 40th birthday. It was only this summer that I finally had to retire them. I replaced the ear pads for them only once during the entire time I owned them. I couldn’t fault them. The long battery life, quick charging, and noise-cancelling feature were beneficial for my daily influx of calls and meetings at work.

With my headphones on the blip during the summer, I started borrowing my youngest’s headphones, Anker Q20i headphones, but I knew the day would come when I would need to get a set for myself.

Last week I purchased a pair of Sony WH-CH520 headphones. All the usual stuff. Bluetooth, multi-device function and over-the-ear style. I can’t wear an in-ear set like AirPods all day. It’s too uncomfortable.

Sound quality is good, and they’re easy to connect to different devices. The multi-device function was a bit finicky and required installing the app, but once set up, it was easy to switch between devices. I have noticed the audio stutters upon initial connection and for a few minutes after it.

I have reservations about the physical side of the headphones. They are very light and don’t feel as solid as my Soundcore headphones or even the Q20i headphones. Also, the ear pads are a lot smaller than Anker’s ear pads, which means they sit on my ears as opposed to over my ears like the Anker ones do. After a couple of hours of use, they are very uncomfortable to wear.

I’ve got mixed impressions about the headphones, so I have decided to return them. The stuttering audio is the main issue with the uncomfortable feeling when wearing them being the other. Yes, the Sony headphones were at the cheaper side of the scale and I do believe you get what you pay for, but the Anker headphones are on a similar price and I do find them more comfortable and the audio has always been faultless.

Just need to wait for the refund and then re-order the Anker ones, so for the moment, I’ll still be borrowing my youngest’s headphones.

As part of my plan to learn React, I’ve been building single-page HTML applications that use local storage to persist any information between sessions. As a start, I built a roulette wheel for our team at work to determine who goes first during stand-up each morning.

I have since moved on and created applications for a technical log, a start page, and I have a few other ideas brewing. The persistence to local storage in the browser is common between all the applications, but I’m trying to build different ways to interact with these applications so that I can learn more about React.

Next week, I hope to develop a replacement for the Excel spreadsheet we use to track our OKR goals at work. The Excel spreadsheet is functional and certainly doesn’t win any prizes for looks. I thought this would be a good learning project to tackle in React, as the formulas we use would enable the page to be more dynamic.

I’m pretty happy with the Hugo copy of my own Micro.blog theme I’ve been working on for the last couple of days. It will have a few customisation options for colour scheme and fonts.

I’ve been trying to clone the blank theme when creating this new theme in Micro.blog, but it appears to be using the Sumo theme from my current blog instead of pulling the blank theme from GitHub.

Hopefully by the weekend, I’ll have a working version for others to use.

In my foolish quest to build my own Micro.blog theme, I spent some of the evening learning about Hugo and how its theming works. It is not dissimilar to Jekyll in many respects, and I think I have enough to start working on my own theme.

Initially, I’m going with a really basic theme—no colours, frameworks, or complex layouts—just a single column with basic text elements. This will allow me to see what the minimum I can get away with for my theme is. That’s the easy part.

The hard part—it’s definitely not one of my strengths—is putting together a design for a second theme. Web design is not my strong point.

I want to make something that isn’t wildly unique, but has enough to stand out from the rest of the Micro.blog themes. I might let this one simmer away for a few days and check out a few other blogs I like and see what can be done.

This weekend though, the plan is just to have a basic working theme.

Today, during a major debugging session with a Rails application, I wanted to condense what was in the logs between two consecutive requests to understand what was happening. It was too much to read through everything. I just needed to scan through all these requests and flag whether they were successful or not.

So today, rather than scribbling down another Ruby script, which would have been easy, I started a log analyser using Rust. It’s early days for the script, but it already compiles a list of endpoints, which is a good start.

It’s a reminder to myself that there are plenty of development tools and aids I can build using a variety of languages and frameworks. And if I only use that tool a few times, that’s okay, too. At least I will have learned something.

I am in favour of Simon Willison’s “no build frontend” web development approach.

If you’ve found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here’s something that has worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system (so no npm / React / TypeScript / JSX / Babel / Vite / Tailwind etc) and code in HTML and JavaScript like it’s 2009.

I’ve been building Writeabout in Sinatra, and I’ve reached the point where I need to add a bit of JavaScript to allow the changing of the light, dark, and system themes. I already have these implemented in the original Rails code as Stimulus controllers, but I’m sure it won’t be too much work to rewrite them as plain old JavaScript.

I don’t have a favourable opinion of frontend web development. I’ve always found it unnecessarily complicated and constantly changing, but rarely for the better. For the last few years, I’ve used TailwindCSS because its build step in Rails applications is minimal—the productivity gains outweigh the added complexity. Beyond small learning projects, I’ve resisted adopting anything like React or TypeScript.

I migrated one of my two GitHub accounts to GitLab a few weeks ago. The move itself had nothing to do with missing features or pricing. It was primarily to try out something else that wasn’t GitHub.

At my job, I spend most of my days on GitHub. When working on my little projects, stepping back into GitHub feels like I am back at work again. With the lines blurring between work and personal coding, I started to think that when I spent time coding on my projects, it still felt like “work”.

So, for one GitHub account, I migrated that account to GitLab. It’s been a great move, and despite being on GitLab’s free tier, I can still match feature for feature what I was paying GitHub for. And when it comes to working with that account, I don’t feel like I am back at my desk.

After the move, I considered moving my other private repositories to GitLab, but GitLab would be more than I needed. It has many great tools for maintaining code bases, but I don’t need them for smaller projects.

I needed something other than GitHub or GitLab.

Enter SourceHut, created by Drew DeVault. SourceHut is a collection of open-source development tools that are a good alternative to GitHub and GitLab.

I’ve been considering using SourceHut for a while, but I have only started seriously considering it in the last couple of weeks.

Today, I created my account and initialised a single repository to get me started. A much more straightforward and basic user interface is strange, but it works. I have become accustomed to the feature-rich user interfaces of GitHub and GitLab. While SourceHut lacks many of the features found in the two bigger platforms, the simplicity of the SourceHut user interface makes it refreshing to use, with just the essentials.

Over the next few weeks, I will migrate more repositories, and then I can demote my GitHub account to be used only for work.

Over the weekend, I spent time getting my GitLab account, working with a single repository, and migrating the CI script from GitHub to GitLab.

The biggest issue was the CI script, and why shouldn’t it be? There’s rarely a “one script fits all” regarding CI scripts. When I started this project, I had issues getting the CI script working in GitHub. After a few pushes on the one branch, I eventually got there. Migrating this script to GitLab’s CI ways was more straightforward than I thought, but I still had a few issues I managed to resolve.

In addition to all the usual source code management goodies that GitLab offers, a few stood out.

Private repositories are available on GitLab’s free tier. Having used GitLab in the past, I already knew this, but it’s refreshing to see that GitLab is sticking with offering this feature on a free tier.

Feature flags are available on GitLab’s free tier. They are a means of configuring how your code behaves by using toggles and checks to ensure that it only carries out certain functionality. I have a number of feature flags in my application, but they are all based on a YML file in the source code. I will be migrating these to GitLab, though, so that I can toggle them without having to deploy any changes to the YML file that controls them.

Error tracking is available on GitLab’s free tier. Previously, I used Sentry for this, but GitLab also uses Sentry under the hood for their own error tracking feature. Yes, I can probably get more information by having a dedicated Sentry account, but at the moment, I am just checking to see if users raise any errors in the application.

For developers building on the side, these features on GitLab’s free tier are of great value and definitely swing my vote from GitHub to GitLab. Over the next few weeks, I hope to migrate the feature flags over, use more of GitLab’s platform, and see what it can help me with.

I’ve been juggling several app changes over the past few weeks.

Gone are the GitHub and Copilot accounts and subscriptions I used to build a product. I’ve replaced them with a GitLab account on the free tier. The GitLab free tier offers quite a lot compared to GitHub, but there are downsides, like no security alerts. However, I can manage for the moment. I’m still not sold on the GitLab Duo subscription, but I’ve covered that with the following subscription change.

I upgraded my ChatGPT account to the Plus plan over the last month, and I think I will keep it for the immediate future. It’s not quite as integrated as Copilot when it comes to assisting with coding, but it works well for diagnosing issues in my code when needed. I also use it more when searching the web for something specific. I still use DuckDuckGo for general searches that I can filter by the most relevant results, but I use ChatGPT for more targeted searches.

Finally, after a few months with Ulysses, I’m just not using it how I thought I would, so I downloaded Bear again and started moving some of my notes over to that to start using it again. Bear feels less formal than Ulysses, which is why I don’t think Ulysses is sticking for me.

We’ll see how the change goes over the next few weeks.

For the last weeks, I’ve been back to using bullet journaling. It works well, especially for my day job, for which I use a separate notebook. For everything else outside of work, though, it’s been working okay, but I feel I still need something digital-based for long-running projects.

Keeping a long list of tasks in a notebook is fine if you have one or two long-running projects, but I have a couple of web applications to keep track of and a growing project that now requires multiple lists.

I’ve tried almost every known task manager, and none of them has worked. Every task manager is different, so they usually don’t work out for me for various reasons. One task manager I haven’t tried though is TickTick.

First impressions are good. Tasks can be put into lists and even folders. They can also be tagged so that they can be filtered. A couple of extras I didn’t expect to see are the baked-in Pomodoro timer, an excellent addition to a task manager, and the ability to track habits.

It’s still early days, but it’s clear to me now that I need a digital task manager to keep track of these long-running projects. We’ll see how TickTick works out in the long term.

This week, I spent most of my free time adding an NPC character to my ThreeJS game and have them walk towards me each time I move my own character.

I’m using the A* algorithm. Each time I move my own character, the NPC finds the shortest path to my character using this algorithm and then moves one step to my character.

As I’m already using a two-dimensional array to represent the game’s board, using the algorithm on this array helped me get it working. What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of code needed to implement the algorithm and move the NPC across the board. Still, I managed to learn a thing or two more about TypeScript.

What’s next for my game? I’m not sure yet. There are so many things that I could be doing, such as adding attributes for my characters, both PC and NPC characters, and adding more elements for the map, like ancient ruins. My youngest is also designing skins for the playing character and the NPC, so they’re more than just coloured rectangles on the board.

Now that the golf season is down to me and the boys only getting out at the weekend, I can start spending more time on a few side projects. There are so many things I would like to learn, but I figure just limiting myself to a couple won’t take up too much of my time.

So, from now to March, I’ll spend a few hours each week on the following.

• Learning more about Rails 8 and Kamal — Dailymuse and Writeabout will each get a bump to Rails 8. Only Writeabout, though, will get the Kamal) treatment to begin with. When I have gained enough knowledge about Kamal, I’ll also look to deploy Dailymuse with Kamal.
• Learn TypeScript and ThreeJS — A work colleague showed me a hobby project he is working on using ThreeJS. It’s the perfect excuse to learn TypeScript and build something for the web that isn’t just another web application.

Over the last few days, I’ve been writing more JavaScript than usual. The reason? I am using Stimulus a lot more in one of my Rails projects.

Enhancing the functionality of my Rails application with some HTML markup and a JavaScript controller is good, as Stimulus has a small learning curve and integrates well with Rails.

As I add more Stimulus to the application, though, I am learning some of its best practices the hard way. One criticism I have of my own controllers is that they are very page-specific. That’s fine for now, as the application is relatively small. Still, I plan to break these controllers into more generic behaviours that can be re-used more easily across the application in the future.

A Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you have a wonderful day!

Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

The boys pitched in this afternoon and tidied up the back garden. Leaves were raked away, patio furniture cleaned down and stored away, golf nets and mats put away, and we topped up the bird feeder.

We then got the Christmas tree and decorations out and put them up all around the house. It’s nice having to look forward to over the next few weeks.

The Lang household is ready for winter.

There is a lot of online chat about why losing Twitter might be okay.

I’ve read a few threads on Reddit, Micro.blog and Twitter itself that we would be better off without Twitter. It’s a convincing argument.

Twitter has become different from its early days of tweeting by text with 140 characters. The platform has grown into a platform for the world. It broadcasts news updates, provides coverage of sporting events and scores, updates on critical political events, and acts as a marketing platform for thousands of organisations and millions of people.

In the last few years, though, Twitter has become something else. A battleground. A place where discussions can often fall into threads of trading insults at each other. A place where people, governments and organisations can pedal lies with minimal accountability. A place where people can hide behind their avatars and threaten others without being held accountable. Twitter has tried to deal with these negative experiences over the years with content moderation and enforcing the platform’s rules, but it still happens.

I might be painting Twitter as a terrible place, but there are positives to Twitter. Although I’m not a frequent tweeter, the content from the people I follow on Twitter is of value.

I’m under no doubt that many others are happy with their Twitter experience. They follow the accounts they want to, scroll through their timelines and share and interact with others on the platform as they want to. If the world is better off without Twitter, will these people be better off without it too?

Regular bloggers and those who know their way about the web will largely agree that the world is better off without Twitter. They can continue writing and posting from the platforms they enjoy using. What about the people who genuinely want the ease of Twitter and what it brings to them?

If Twitter were to disappear, I’m sure I would find alternative means of following others through different platforms and means. What about those who are not so Internet savvy? They might need help finding an alternative means of following others, which leads me to think that we’re not better off without Twitter. Well, not at the moment. The web is still an excellent platform, and this could change.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been migrating several Rails applications to Hatchbox. I’ve still got a couple of applications to go. Still, one last thing I wanted to do was migrate my blog over to DigitalOcean’s Apps platform.

I’ve been using Render to host my blog for the last few months. While it’s free, and I have been okay with using it, I’ve wanted to minimize my digital footprint of the services I use. Over the weekend, I spent almost eight hours trying to get my blog to compile and run on DigitalOcean.

Sadly, my blog wouldn’t compile due to the Tailwind integration I am using. An error with the Jekyll PostCSS gem kept breaking the building of the website. I’m still digging into the actual issue, but it is getting parked until I have more time to look into it.

A couple of weeks ago Drew bought this Lego Marvel Venom set. We decided to try out the additional light kit for it from Light My Bricks.

I have to say, the final result looks pretty good. The LEDs and wires fitted into the build nicely, although the green LEDs that go in behind the Venom’s teeth were a bit of a pain to fit and to stay in place.

Unbeknownst to Drew, he’s got a another light kit heading his way for Christmas which will be for the Lego DC Batman head we’ve bought him. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one turns out.

I’m a sucker for all things space, even more so when it comes to anything that allows us to see what’s in space. Hence the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is something I look forward to every year.

The Andromeda galaxy captured by Yang Hanwen and Zhou Zezhen which won Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year, is one of my favourites of this year’s winners.

The overall winner though was Gerlad Rhemann’s image of Comet Leonard which was taken on Christmas Day of last year. It captures the point when a piece of the comet’s tail becomes seperated due to high velocity solar particles.

Tonight, I’ve been building HTML templates with Tailwind to integrate them into a CMS of sorts using Rails. Is it a product? No, it’s just me hacking about on a wee Rails app and trying to brush up my skills once more. The last time I genuinely enjoyed doing this was a good couple of years ago.

So what prompted this change?

Well, the main reason is that I’m enjoying my job now. It’s full-time, but I’m also fully remote, so cutting out the commute has been a big win. There’s something to be said about working from home. It definitely suits me better than being in an office. I don’t mind being in an office environment, but the distractions can put your focus off a bit, depending on where you work. Working from home means, I can get my head down and get on with the work.

I’m using Ruby on Rails again. It’s not the most recent version, but I’ll take working with any version of Rails over working with just about anything else at the moment.

While working remotely, I am in a close-knit team that regularly checks with each other throughout the day. Although being remote has its benefits, you do need some contact with others throughout the day. Although Slack isn’t the ideal medium for this as it is pretty distracting, being able to meet and discuss with your team members regularly throughout the day breaks up the day nicely.

As a result, I’m finding myself reaching for the laptop more at night and hacking on Rails or Laravel apps. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to finish this little bit of code before turning in for the night.

A final trip to Rockchapel today for nine holes before our flight back to the UK tomorrow. Papa making up the fourball for today.

All of us headed down to Niagara Falls for the day to enjoy some of the sights down there. The first thing we all did was the boat trip to see the falls up close. We haven’t done this since Drew was born so it was nice for him to experience this with all of us. After a wander round Clifton Hill, we grabbed some pizza and did the Sky Wheel to take in some great views of the falls.

Me and Ethan played Hidden Lake again today. We stuck with what we liked and played the new course. We also got paired with a couple of locals who kept us right and gave us a few pointers to deals on local courses. Nice to see that the food is still great at Hidden Lake as well. Highly recommend the smash burgers!

First visit to our favourite nine hole course in the Oakville area, and that’s the Rockchapel course just past Waterdown. Nice being able to play in the sunshine with a good short course for Drew.

A great afternoon range session for the boys before the rain started rolling in.

My in-laws have a new home in Canada, so a few changes to the sleeping arrangements. They still have a great spot outside for a quiet coffee though.

The wee guy channeling his inner artist in the corner of the garden this afternoon.

Walking round the peripheral of the Trump Turnberry course while Ethan plays his county match. Such a beautiful part of the world.

This morning I finally resovled an issue with a Rails application of mine.

After a couple of weeks, of getting an hour every other night to resovle this, I finally understood what the problem was and how it could be fixed. A bug? Not necessarily, it was more of a lack of understanding on my part. The issue is fixed now and I can now crack on with other elements of the application.

There I was waiting on the final match tonight when I noticed a nice bit of light through the trees from the 11th tee. It wasn’t until I got home and I realised I captured a deer almost in the middle of the shot.

It’s always good to use good tools for the job. In my case, I’m back to using a Macbook Pro and macOS as my development machine and operating system. It’s also great that I am working with Ruby and Rails once again.

The downside to using the tools is that they are the same tools I use to write web applications in my spare time. I enjoy hacking on ideas for web applications and using them for my own use, but I’ve noticed that the lines have started to blur when I use other tools.

Take for instance, source code management. I’m now using the same source code management tool for both work and my own projects. With source code management being a big part of my workday, I don’t enjoy using it the same way now for my own projects.

If I’m to continue enjoying hacking on my code after then, I want it to be an enjoyable experience. While I have no complaints about my job, it’s not a part of the day I want reminded of when it’s the evening or the weekend. I’ve been exploring different options for source code management over the last couple of weeks. I have decided to try out Gitlab for this over the next few months. It’s free, has similar processes to my current source code management tool, and integrates well with the hosting company I use for my web apps.

I’m also looking into other ways of using different tools or using the same tools differently. iTerm and Visual Studio Code are two tools that I use both at work and at home but finding alternatives to these is tricky when I use these tools really well. So instead of changing these tools to something else, I’m just changing how these tools look.

For iTerm, I have different looking terminals for work and home. It’s not much of a change, but the look definitely changes the dynamic of being at work and being at home.

I’ve also done the same with Visual Studio Code. I’m not going to look for a new text editor when I already use this quite proficiently. Instead, I am using the toggle extension in Visual Studio Code to change the theme and font settings for when I am at work and when I am home. A simple keyboard shortcut is now all it takes for me to change my interface from work to home.

Setting these boundaries between these contexts is essential as it creates a space for both. While I use many of the same tools, I do like to feel that I am in the correct mindset at the right time. That means using the appropriate tools for each and being able to distinguish between each. If the same tool has to be used for both, then a simple change of how that tool looks is all it takes for me to determine which context I am in.

Anil Dash writes about the recent resurgence of the web. There are definitely many reasons why this is happening. Still, a key one for me is the growth of tools that make building websites easier for everyone.

While the core technology of the web is decades old, the tools that help make it and run have been quietly evolving into something extraordinary in the last few years, too. There’s a flourishing of powerful new frameworks that make it simpler than ever to build flexible, responsive, useful sites. New hosting platforms let those sites be deployed and delivered faster and more reliably than ever. And you can build one of these sites in literally under a minute, then collaborate with people anywhere in the world to iterate on making the site better.

— A Web Renaissance by Anil Dash

I might be pre-empting the return of the glory days of the web when blogs and RSS feeds were everywhere. As good as that would be, I don’t think we’ll ever return to those days. I do hope though, that we are seeing a return to the web as an open platform for people to build and share content.

Cracking night for 9 holes with Ethan.

That’s minilog 4 complete. Quite the stack I’m building.

Had a great nine holes with Drew today. He played fantastic today. So proud.

This morning I put the final touches on a Rails application that I planned to move from DigitalOcean to Render whilst upgrading it from Rails 6 to Rails 7. The actual change of platforms wasn’t too much of a problem, but the upgrade to Rails 7, and the third one that I have done, still presented me with a few issues. These problems were not too difficult to fix, and after an hour or minor tweaks, I managed to get the application up and running on Rails 7.

With this being the third Rails 7 upgrade I have done, I’m gradually building up a checklist that uses the Rails document as a base and includes a few other steps when it comes to moving away from Webpacker as well. This checklist will prove invaluable for another couple of Rails 7 upgrades that I plan to do over the next couple of weeks.

With a checklist, you know where you are and the steps you need to take. It allows me to do these upgrades in sections as well, so that I can do a few steps, take a break and then pick up where I left off, knowing what the last step was and what the next step will be. It’s a wonder I don’t use checklists a bit more. I know a few tasks are coming up over the next few months where a couple of checklists will be invaluable once again.

More checklists, please.

I’ve been trying to get more out of my Todoist setup recently by using labels to tag more of the tasks that I have there. It’s similar to the previous setup when I used Todoist a few years ago. I have labels for the duration of the task, labels for the context of the task, and some GitHub style labels that provide some further context to tasks related to building web applications.

It’s working well so far, and now the next step is to use Todoist’s filters to pull together some tasks from various projects. It’s at this point where I fell away from Todoist last time. I ended up with far too many filters that split all my tasks into multiple lists that were too hard to maintain.

This time I have vowed that things will be different. This time I am starting with just a single filter of minor tasks that I can pick off through the week.Most of my tasks are scheduled throughout the week. So there’s no need to apply additional filters to these tasks. It will get done on the scheduled date and time. For those minor tasks that can take me up to 15 minutes, I’ve decided to allow them to sit in Todoist and get done when I need to do them. With them spread over several projects, the new filter will bring them together under one view.

I’ve been intentionally slow on my uptake with Todoist this time. It can become overwhelming to try and use everything from the get-go. However, this time, I decided to pace myself and try out different parts of Todoist when I needed to. It is working well so far.

At the start of the year, I chose “build” as my word for the year. The single word strategy is the idea that you choose a word that will direct what you do for the year. Having not done this for a couple of years I wanted to go back to doing this so that I could at least focus on something for the year.

It’s mid-way through January and now seems as good as any to review what I’ve been building over the last two weeks and what I will be building in the near future.

My Twitter List Banner Maker (a mouthful I know) is now public on my GitHub profile. It’s far from complete but it’s working and with a few tweaks here and there can be used by others for their own lists. While building this I did learn a couple of things. Mainly, authentication with the new Twitter API, and also I improved my knowledge of RMagick by learning how to merge images together to change how they look.

In the background, there’s also a number of other things I’ve been building up.

• I am continuing to post to my blog during the weekdays to build an audience up again. I’m not looking to build an audience of thousands, just more people that like what I am writing.
• I am building a single document that will act as my playbook if you like for the day. A template for the day if you like. It’s been working well for me but it still needs some refining.

Looking ahead, over the next few weeks I am going to start building an application using the Blitz.js framework. A fellow developer from Glasgow put me onto this framework a week ago and I’m intrigued by the comparison to Rails but also that it’s a JavaScript framework and that’s one language that I am keen to build up my knowledge of in 2022.

The application won’t be too complex, a single-page application with a form that does validation and uses an external resource to look up information based on the data provided by the form. It was the simplest idea I could think of at the time and could be done within the next few weeks.

I’ll also continue to tweak the Twitter List Banner Maker so that it formats avatar images into a layout that is determined by the number of members on the list.

That’s enough for this month’s update. The next one will drop in mid-February.

I’ve been looking at my GitHub profile over the last couple of days. It seems like a graveyard of half-finished or throwaway projects that do not show my best work.

While I’m not in the freelance market and not looking for any roles soon, I would like my GitHub profile to reflect some of my better work. There are a few things I am going to do from now on to achieve this.

I have a backlog of projects that I’ve used for exploring different parts of Ruby, Rails and JavaScript. These primarily reside on my laptop and be shared for others to use with a bit of a polish. These projects are not, by any means, world-changing ideas. They are just projects that I used to try something out.

What I plan to do, is publish one project/application a month on my GitHub account. I will provide some instructions on running the application and any updates that I may do on it in the future.

I also have several other repositories on GitHub that are quite frankly just sitting there doing nothing, and they’re not worth much, so I’ll delete these from my account. There’s not much sense in having on my account if they’re not doing anything.

This month I’ll be wrapping up and publishing a ruby script that generates an image for your Twitter lists. I’ve been trying to get my head around the Twitter API over the last week and the different authentication methods needed to access other endpoints. After working this out on Wednesday night, I’m now making good progress with this script. I may try this out as a web application later in the year. I’m not sure yet.

That’s the plan anyway for my GitHub profile. 

I’ve been trying to re-organise my Twitter following into a few different lists, but I wanted to see at a glance who’s on that list, so I put together a Ruby script that gets the profile pic for each user on a list and creates an image from it.

I finally got something working that offers a little bit of flexibility when putting the profile pics on the image. It looks pretty good, but it could still do with some improvements. At the moment, I have to pass in an array of the list member’s usernames for it to work.

Ideally, you would supply the list id on Twitter, and the script would look up the list members on its own. Still, I’m happy with the end result from tonight’s coding session.

You can see the end result on my All things analog Twitter list.

Keeping things simple and action-oriented is difficult and yet if that orientation is not present from the start, it may be too late. Territory may already have been seized and boundaries drawn.

— The Sidewalk Rule 

The tech company has been accused of deliberately shutting out the competition in the store and forcing people to use its own payment processing system, generating “excessive” profits for itself in the process.

The claim, which is being brought on behalf of potentially millions of Apple users in the UK, has been filed in the competition appeal tribunal and calls for Apple to repay UK customers it says have been overcharged because of the company’s practices, with damages of up to £1.5bn being sought.

It says as many as 19.6 million UK users could be eligible for compensation.

— Apple accused of breaking UK competition law by overcharging for apps

First hit of the year for me and Drew at Paisley Golf Club today!

A glorious afternoon of weather and a welcome change to the snow and rain we’ve had the last few weeks. I was a bit rusty but Drew has managed to find some extra yardage to his drives over the winter. I’ve got some catching up to do!

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

— Always bet on text

Clinic workers in Connecticut, Virginia, and other states say the system is notorious for randomly canceled appointments, unreliable registration, and problems that lock staff out of the dashboard they’re supposed to use to log records. The CDC acknowledges there are multiple flaws it’s working to fix, although it attributes some of the problems to user error.

— What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

Sad to see that Mike Gunderloy is bowing out from software development and the Internet. He was one of the first Ruby developers that I followed on Twitter and through there I subscribed to his blog, A Fresh Cup, where he posted his Double Shot posts.

Looking back, I’m also not super-happy with how the industry has evolved. There was a time when I could believe and hope that software was making the world a better place. Looking around, I’m not so sure any more. Money and power have seized pretty much everything related to software, and the rising tide of surveillance, manipulation, and generally rapacious behavior appears to be getting worse all the time. It’s become harder and harder to find any industry niche that I feel comfortable in working any longer. My sincere blessings to those of you who are still fighting the good fight, but as I said, I’m tired.

— End of the road

I can understand his reasons for bowing out from the world of software development. I’ve been feeling the itch to leave as well, but I still think I have a few years left before I completely think about trying something else for a career.

Oh look. The big tech companies are now all just passing on the new digital services tax straight to their customers. Who could have predicted that? All in a sarcastic tone of course.

Many small businesses and entrepreneurs will have received an email the other day from Google which informed them that from the 1st November 2020 Google will be passing the UK’s new 2% digital services tax straight onto their customers.

They are even adding a line item on their invoices for DST (Digital Services Tax) alongside VAT.

That means they are joining the likes of Amazon and others who are simply passing this tax straight onto small and medium businesses and consumers in the UK. Exactly what every online business owner knew they would do.

— UK scores an own goal with its Digital Services Tax

Two things I’m taking from this.

1. The UK goverment are fools if they thought that the big tech companies weren’t going to do this. It’s decisions like this that make me wonder if I should change my vote. I didn’t vote for an independent Scotland the first time, but I’m considering it now.
2. I’m of the mind that the big tech companies exist now only to serve themselves. And yes, I’m including Apple in this one. The big tech companies face no competition and can call the shots in most countries. Of course they’ll just pass a tax onto their customers. With the amounts of money they are commanding, they can afford to do so.

Nicholas Bate gives us a productivity system so simple it can fit on a single index card.

A fresh 3 by 5 card taken from the stack. One side is work. One side is home. Each side is divided in half with a vertical line. On the LHS side are things you need/have to do. E.g. at work return a client’s call; at home buy some pasta. On the RHS are things you don’t have to do but you will do because they will make your future life easier by reducing the things you have to do on the LHS.

— The Tools of Excellence for a Brave New World, 8: The 3 x 5 card

In a post-Covid world, maybe the time has come to go out on your own. Keep it simple initially: just you, no start-up capital and a desire to be beholden to nobody. Except you, of course.

— Agility Is The Big New Differentiator

Since the lockdown started, it’s clear to me that striking out on my own again is the best way to go.

I have a pull request that’s been sitting in Github for about two weeks now. It’s for a Rails app and the pull request includes some breaking changes. I’ve done my best to limit these breaking changes but there are some parts of the application that I need to update after the deploy.

I haven’t scheduled this into my day as I know it’s going to take a chunk out of my day so I’ve just let it lie there for the last two weeks.

I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve scheduled it in for this afternoon. I just need to get it done.

After a few weeks of not posting to my dev blog, I’ve decided that over the weekend I will delete this blog.

I don’t see the long term value in having this resource on a seperate domain or in collating the links for this blog. Instead of posting to a blog, I’m going to start collecting web development and Rails guides and resources on a number of pages on my personal website.

Don’t worry folks, I’ll keep posting here and any major changes in this web development content will be shared here as well.

It was announced yesterday that Apple has acquired the weather app Dark Sky. As part of the acquisition, the iOS app will continue to function as it is. In contrast, the Android app will no longer be available for download. Like many others, I use the Dark Sky app daily. The API service that provides forecast and historical data for other apps and services will continue to function until the end of 2021.

Like so many other people, Dark Sky was one of those apps that have been on my phone for years. In my opinion, there was no contender. Now though, it looks like we’ll hopefully get a revamped iOS weather app with many of the features of Dark Sky in it. I hope. This is still the early days of the acquisition. Like so many software takeovers in the past, I’m sceptical of what lies ahead for both parties.

The bad news.

It’s another excellent service swallowed up by big tech. The Dark Sky team finished their update on this by saying they are looking forward to building great products. When a smaller independent company gets bought over by big tech though, there’s usually no light at the end of the tunnel.

With no app available for download, Android users not only need to find an alternative to Dark Sky, but also a weather app that doesn’t use the Dark Sky API. The Dark Sky API has been seen for a long time as the best and most accessible API for weather information. With the API closing down, developers will need to find an alternative.

I’ve been using the Dark Sky API for a product of my own. I’ll now need to spend some time finding an alternative to the Dark Sky API and make the necessary changes for my product. I have the time to do this, but it’s time that I would have earmarked for other prioritised work. I’ll need to re-jig things in the meantime.

The good news.

There is good news about this. Apple will finally get a better weather app. I’ve not been a fan of the weather app for a few years, and when Apple allowed their core apps to be deleted, it was one of the first ones to go from my home screens.

With Dark Sky closing their doors, there is space in the market now for an alternative to Dark Sky. A developer-friendly forecasting API that also provides alerts for changing weather conditions. I’m not saying that it will be easy to do, but there will be many app developers looking for such an alternative. It could be an opportunity.

Is Apple going to do the same for weather data as they did for maps? Apple’s MapKit JS service is a good alternative to Google’s own map service. It would be nice to see a WeatherKit service for both native and web applications. Like maps, weather information can be included in all manner of apps. Having a reliable source of weather information would likely attract more developers to building apps for the iOS platform.

It’s always good to have an alternative

At the end of the day, Apple’s acquisition of Dark Sky should be a cautious reminder. No matter how excellent the service is, there’s always a chance that it can be pulled. The best way to plan for such disruptions is to have at least one other alternative in place.

With another service already earmarked, you can make the switch from one service to the other easily. This doesn’t just go for the apps you use, it goes for your personal data as well. It’s also should be considered if a service is fundamental to your business.

I’ve been trying to find a way to reboot my writing habit for a couple of years now. The trouble is, most things I have written are on too wide a range of topics. When you’re covering a wide range of topics, it feels like you’re jumping from one subject to the next. I need to narrow these topics down.

Paul Graham’s latest essay on how to write usefully got me thinking about this again.

If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something you’re an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only have ten readers who care, that’s fine. You’re helping them, and you’re writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write about.

— How to Write Usefully

I need to focus on one or two topics and start from there.

There was much debate this week about Fantastical’s move to a subscription app and subscriptions in general. Now, I’m not against developer’s adding subscriptions to their apps, they have to make a living somehow from the software that they produce.

My concern with Fantastical is the price. I find the subscription price quite high in terms of how much I use the app and what Fantastical are offering in their premium subscription.

Is Fantastical worth it?

Just as a comparison, I decided to look at the apps on my home screen and their subscription amounts. In total, I have 12 apps on my first home screen. Given these are the apps that I use daily, then it’s apparent that I do place a lot of value on these I have subscriptions for apps on other screens, but these are used less regularly.

Here are the apps that I pay an annual subscription for that are on this first home screen:

• Micro.blog ($50)
• 1Password (~$60)
• Todoist ($35.99)
• Bear ($14.99)
• Day One ($31.99)
• Feedbin ($24.99)
• Instapaper ($29.99)

Now taking these annual subscriptions into account, there is one that I can’t do without and that’s 1Password. Being able to save my logins securely and across multiple devices is such a time-saver. I’m not saying that price isn’t an issue on this one, but this app is essential.

The rest of the apps that I pay annual subscriptions for aren’t essential, but I do use them daily and usually on multiple devices. There, I do find them valuable. At the top end of the scale in terms of price are Micro.blog, Todoist, Day One, Instapaper and Feedbin. At the bottom end of the scale is Bear.

If I were to pay for Fantastical’s pricing, it would put it at the top end of the subscriptions that I have. It’s not going to break the bank, but I do find it a bit steep. And that’s why I’m not 100% convinced that Fantastical’s new subscription app is for me. Despite using Fantastical most days to manage my schedule, I would not consider it to be worth its subscription price.

It isn’t straightforward to compare apps and their usefulness as there are used differently by everyone. For example, I use Bear and Feedbin daily, and I find them both very useful, but over the year the price difference in the annual subscription is $10. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you consider that you might have other app subscriptions, they can quickly rack up. So while I accept that it’s hard to compare apps and their subscriptions, I still think that the price for the Fantastical subscription is quite high.

The Fantastical alternatives

Right, so we’ve established that I find the Fantastical price a bit high, so what are the alternatives?

As for alternatives, I tried Apple’s own Calendar app this week and found it sadly lacking in features. I didn’t expect a whole lot from the app as I know it’s free, but it doesn’t appear to have been updated very often.

There are other calendar apps on the App Store, but some that I have seen are free and have ads in them. You then have to pay to remove the ads. This style of pricing isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a calendar app or any app for that matter, but I’m personally not a fan of this style of pricing. I would instead prefer developers to charge a price for their apps or be free with an option to unlock features with a reasonably-priced subscription. For me, ads have no places in apps, so anything that has ads is out.

I also gave Calendars 5 a try from the app store. Sticking to the pricing argument I made earlier, I bought the app for full-price, which is $6.99. It does everything that a calendar app should do. Natural language input, different views and light and dark themes are all there. You can sync your iCloud calendars across multiple devices, and there’s an iPad version of the app too. I didn’t install this though, as I find that having a calendar app on my phone and my desktop is enough for me.

I’m also giving Timepage a run again, but the lack of calendar views does limit it a bit, and there is no equivalent app for macOS. There are however a number of things going for it that I do like. It includes weather forecasts for events, travel times and a daily briefing notification to see what’s coming up for the day. It’s also very customisable and includes several options to adjust the app including themes, font size calendar and timeline. It’s also significantly cheaper than Fantastical at just $11.99.

Making a decision

Having tried these apps out this week, I’m going to ditch Calendars 5. It’s okay as a scheduling app. However, I do like the extra effort that has gone into the user interfaces of both Fantastical and Timepage.

I’m still torn between Timepage and Fantastical though. Fantastical’s calendar group syncing is a feature I would like to have, but it’s not essential. To be able to have calendar groups sync between phones would be great, but it’s not a deal-breaker and certainly not worth the price of the app subscription as it stands at the moment. It’s more of a nice to have.

I haven’t deleted Fantastical from my phone yet. I can still use it without the annual subscription, but I know I’m going to get frustrated with the number of features that are locked out. It’s at this point where I will either cave and go for the subscription or I will delete the app. Fantastical hasn’t been too aggressive in reminding me to upgrade. Still, it feels like over time I might be nagged into upgrading.

There’s also the question of changing my subscription. If I take the Timepage subscription now, I could still change my mind and then use Fantastical. However, it will always feel like I wasted some money on a subscription that I’m not going to use. Sure, I bought the Calendars 5 app, I’m prepared to do that to find the right app to use. What I don’t want to do though is take a subscription for an app that I won’t fully use.

I can see me sticking with Fantastical in the short term. It will be interesting to see if Flexibits make any changes in the short-term based on user feedback of the jump from 2.0 to 3.0. Still, I suspect that they will leave the app subscription price as is. Most users will come round to paying the subscription. For me, though, it’s still too high a price to pay at the moment.

Following on my Fantastical 3 post, I’m considering moving to Calendar for iOS as it’s free and does the job. You might also want to consider Timepage, the calendar app by Moleskine. Like Fantastical 3, it’s a subscription app, but it’s much cheaper than Fantastical. I haven’t done a like for like comparison yet, but I do remember it also includes weather and travel times.

Over the holidays I mentioned that I was writing a blog post that I would publish this week. Well, after a delay thanks to the flu, I finally hit the publish button on my return to using my main domain. My first post, about my focus for 2020, is a return to building up some long form content that I want to reside on that domain.

Is this the end of my time on Micro.blog?

Definitely not. Micro.blog is a wonderful blogging platform that I will keep on using. This blog on Micro.blog will be my social feed to the net. It’s the one place that I will post to daily. Short posts, photos and links will continue to pour out from here.

So what’s the point of the new site?

For a while I’ve been trying to find a way of supporting short and long content. I’ve tried mixing these two lengths of posts over the years and it’s never sat well with me each time I have tried it.

Now that Micro.blog is my daily social feed, I can now focus on pushing longer posts through my main site again.

It’s been a while since I last did any mind mapping—a few years, in fact. I’ve probably doodled a few smaller mind maps in that time, but this is the first time that I have done anything more than a doodle.

The two-page spread of my notebook works quite well for it, and the paper is thick enough to cope with most of my markers, so there’s little chance of it bleeding through.

I can see myself doing more of this in the months ahead.

Well, Christmas Day is almost over in the Lang household. My parents have just left for the night, and I have to say they loved their Christmas lunch and the evening’s entertainment.

It’s not over, so I can still send season greetings to my little blog’s readers.

So, Merry Christmas to you all, and I wish you all a great day.

A thank you note from fellow blogger, Nicholas Bate.

I forget how I came across Nicholas Bate’s blog. I discovered him, and a few other great blogs, while I was a heavy user of Google Reader.

Today, I’m still a daily reader of his blog and a select number of other blogs that I find are essential to my daily reading.

I’ve been a bit quiet this year in terms of blogging, but it’s starting to pick up again. Without the daily posts from Nicholas, Michael, Kurt and Curtis, I’m sure I would have packed in blogging years ago. So, thank you guys for your time.

It’s these fine blogs and many more that keep me writing and ultimately posting to the Internet. Long may it continue.

David Heinemeier Hansson breaks down the cost of the operations at Basecamp with a spotlight on the cost of running a Ruby on Rails product.

Working with Ruby and Rails is a luxury, yes. Not every company pay their developers as well as we do at Basecamp, so maybe the rates would look a little different there. Maybe some companies are far more compute intensive to run their apps. But for most SaaS companies, they’re in exactly the same ballpark as we are. The slice of the total operations budget spent running the programming language and web framework that powers the app is a small minority of the overall cost.

Only 15% of the Basecamp operations budget is spent on Ruby

For years I’ve heard arguments that Ruby on Rails is too expensive to run, but I’ve never seen costs for anything as big as this. And to be honest, I was surprised that this was all it was.

Sure, every SAAS product is different in what it does, how it’s built and how it’s run. But, the fact is that Ruby on Rails is an ideal web framework for most SAAS products and has been for years.

I’ve watched the JavaScript hype train trundle on now for a couple of years and I can’t see any clear advantage of it over Ruby on Rails or any other non-JavaScript framework for that fact. And I think developers are starting to realise this.

Given the choice between Rails and any other framework for an application, I will keep going with Rails. It doesn’t have the big hype around it that it did ten years ago, but it’s still proving to be a developer-friendly and therefore business-friendly framework to build your SAAS product with.

A look at the different techniques used to make the lightsaber work on screen through the different Star Wars movies.

Enter the sequel trilogies, which would achieve the pinnacle of lightsaber effects by merging the various techniques from over the years. Like the prequels, the blades of the lightsabers on-screen would be added digitally, with the on-camera fights taking place with plastic prop stand-ins. Also like the original trilogy, the battles were still fought on actual sets as part of the Star Wars sequels’ commitment to trying to embrace more practical effects.

The Star Wars sequels finally got lightsabers right

Of course, you’re bound to hit on the right combination after numerous attempts. The sequel trilogy does get it right though with the lighting effect from the lightsabers.

It’s just a shame though, that we haven’t yet seen any other colour of lightsaber than the blue and red done with this effect.

Standing on the platform waiting for the train this morning l, I opened up my Kindle app and started reading through another chapter of James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

In the chapter that I was reading James clarifies the difference in behaviour that leads to habits. There’s motion which is a behaviour that doesn’t yield a result and an action that does produce a result.

Outlining a handful of articles I want to write is motion but writing a single piece is an action. Actions are steps towards a defined outcome. Not only did I find this insightful for building habits but also how I categorise tasks.

Much of the coding work I am doing just now can be put in the action category. I implement a feature or a bug fix, and I deploy it. Deploying the change is the result of the action.

Then there’s the marketing work that I am preparing. I say preparing because that is all I seem to be doing right now, preparing. This is motion. While I am planning out something, I’m not getting any closer to the desired outcome.

The difference between the two is clear now, and it sheds new light on what I need to do to move forward.

The decision by GitHub to renew their contract with the Immigration and Customers Enforcement agency is still a significant point amongst developers. Despite several GitHub staff who have quit over the decision, it still looks like the company will not back down.

There is now an open letter and petition from many of the open-source contributors and maintainers who chose to host their projects on GitHub. In it, they are asking GitHub to cancel the contract and commit to a higher standard when it comes to making business decisions that have an ethical impact.

I think it’s excellent that organisations are being called into question about their business dealings. However, what happens if a company doesn’t change its position on an ethical stance.

If GitHub doesn’t cancel the contract, will we see a mass migration of projects away from GitHub? That’s an option. That is until the next source code hosting is called into question about a business deal.

With the help of Claire Barlow from the University of Cambridge and John Durrell, a specialist in superconductor engineering, The Verge’s Lewis Gordon goes through the components and materials that go into the Playstation 4 and go over their impact on the environment.

They start with the console’s top lid, which is made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). This is, in fact, virgin plastic and isn’t made from already recycled plastic. From the lid alone, there is a huge cost in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced from only manufacturing the lid of the console alone.

Let’s hypothesize that the 511 grams of ABS spread throughout the machine are actually virgin plastic. How might it have been produced? This is where things get trippy. Like almost every form of plastic on the planet, ABS is made from petrochemicals that are derived from petroleum, the fossil fuel we commonly refer to as crude oil. The substance materialized over millions of years as fossilized organisms like zooplankton and algae were covered by stagnant water and further layers of these dead animals and plants. Try to imagine not only how slow that process is (geologists call this “deep time”) but also the near-instantaneous speed at which the oil was extracted from the earth. Now consider its carbon residue just sitting in the atmosphere, slowly helping make the planet hotter. As I stared at the plastic, these head-spinning thoughts flashed through my mind.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

Materials such as gold and tin are used on the circuit board of the console. While only a small amount of of these materials are used, the mining process means that vast amounts of water are needed to mine the gold as well as the use of chemicals to make the gold easier to mine. If you think your console only contains a small amount of these materials, then consider the fact that Sony has sold over 100 millions units of the PS4 since it’s launch. Now you start to realize just how much goes into mining the gold for these consoles.

Low-cost thinking extends to the limited use of more expensive metals. Occasional pieces of gold materialize on the main circuit board where various components are held in place by a tin-based solder. When it comes to the open pit and hard rock mining, the extraction methods responsible for some of the world’s gold (as well as the copper and neodymium found in the machine), there’s the actual blowing up of the earth. But enormous quantities of water are also required for mineral processing, dust suppression, slurry pipelines (to transport minerals in remote areas), and, last but by no means least, employees’ needs. Another extraction process called cyanide leaching sprays the toxic chemical over mined ore to dissolve the gold, thereby making it easier to extract. This comes with its own ecological and health risks if the cyanide leaks into the local area. Each method is grim for the environment where metals are often scattered diffusely throughout the rock.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

Finally, there’s the lithium-ion battery in the console’s controllers. It too has a damaging impact on the environment.

The PlayStation 4’s 8.9 billion kilogram carbon footprint leaves out other environmental impacts like pollutants that don’t end up in our carbon-soaked atmosphere. Take the controller’s lithium-ion battery, the same kind of chargeable technology powering electric cars. Lithium is produced by drilling holes into salt flats — usually found in massive crater-like lakes — and pumping brine to the surface. The important bit, lithium carbonate, is subsequently extracted through a chemical process. In recent years, pollution from the extraction process has led to the death of animals and crops, severely impacting local communities in countries like Argentina and China. The lithium that makes our controllers wireless is just another material that scars not only the landscape but the lives of those who call it home.

— The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4

This piece by Lewis Gordon really hits home the cost of technology on the environment. The manufacturing impact of technology devices isn’t going to change overnight. With such a huge market, I wonder if it would take pressure from consumers to make any kind of difference. I certainly would consider other environmentally friendly options if they become available.

As for running costs, we have two PS4s at home. I play for a few hours a week, and my eldest son probably plays for longer, but my wife and I encourage him to take breaks. We have a smart meter at home where we can monitor just how much energy we are using, and we always try to reduce our demand for energy, but it’s not easy. Especially during the darker months of the year where we don’t really go out that often.

Can we ever get to a point where we can balance the demands for technology so that they don’t impact on the environment?

It’s a question posed by the tech team behind the seach engine Cliqz. Sure, they might have a vested interest in seeing more traffic going to their own search engine, but I think they’re onto something.

We need more search engines.

Google has a huge share of the search market but it has hardly lived up to it’s long running ethos of don’t be evil. What started as a great search engine with a range of good products around it, has turned into an ad platform that hoovers up data on every Google service you use.

I’m starting to wonder though if it’s not so much more generalist search engines we need, but more specialist search engines instead.

We’re at the point where we have billions of web pages, but depending on the search we want to do, even filtering through the search results can be difficult. We will always need generalist search engines, but what about search engines that focus on a particular type of search or information?

We already have a number of these specialist search engines. I’ve used job search engines over the last few month to look for specific roles in the contract market. I’ve had some success with my results on these specialist search engines but not much more than using a generalist search engine like DuckDuckgo. That’s only one example though.

There has to be more examples and matching specialist search engines to match them. And if they don’t exist, why can’t we build them?

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a New York Times subscription. I find myself on their website quite a lot, so I thought it would be worth removing the limit on the number of free articles that I can read.

At £10 per month though, I’m not sure it’s something that I really need. There’s also the annual subscription that I can find through their iOS app but not on the website. If I take this, then I find myself taking a bigger initial hit of £99, but I end up saving over the 12 months.

I think what’s putting me off is the fact that the monthly subscription is double digits. It’s £10. I usually don’t hesitate are subscribing to services under the £10 mark as they are only a few quid for the first few months and then I can decide if it’s worth the cost.

The New York Times subscription though starts above that single-digit level. And that’s got me thinking that I would rather not have it at all, instead of giving it a try for a few months.

I get why subscriptions are great for journalists and news sites. I’d rather pay a subscription for a high-quality source of news and be able to read it while not being hit with adverts everywhere, but I find both the monthly and annual options just a little bit too high.

It seems we now need naps at work.

A recently published study from Indiana’s Ball State University, which examined self-reported sleep duration of 150,000 people, found the numbers of respondents who got seven hours of sleep per night or less rose to 35.6% in 2018 from 30.9% in 2010. About half of the respondents who were police officers and healthcare workers reported not getting enough sleep.

— Should workers be allowed to nap at work?

Is there more to this story?

Are there any other causes of sleep deprivation? Perhaps mobile phone use? The rise in sleep deprivation since 2010 is eerily close to the rise in mobile phone use, especially with the increased use of social media.

How many times do you find yourself surfing on your phone in bed?

It’s a terrible habit that I’ve been trying to break to give myself more sleep. Not only that, but I’m trying to set a good example for my kids. They need their sleep even more than I do.

Even so, if sleep deprivation is not related to this, there’s another argument. If you are allowed to nap at work, then why not offer employees a small reduction in hours so that they can get the right amount of sleep?

We all have to take responsibility for getting the right amount of sleep. However, in this age of always on technology, there has to be a way in which we can get the work-life balance right so that people shouldn’t need to nap at work.

A while back, I started a little Rails app that would generate random writing prompts. After a few months, I decided to kill it. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I killed it. I just remember one day deciding that it wasn’t gaining any traction, so I decided to pull the plug on it. Now though I’m not so sure that killing it was such a good idea.

If I was making the application all over again, then there are a few things that I would do differently.

I would open-source it

The main reason I would be open-sourcing the application is so that I can provide a working Rails application on my Github profile. That old chestnut about your Github being your profile isn’t something that I put a lot of stock into. Still, it would be helpful if I have something on there that is working, live and provides a small sample of my work.

I would enforce some constraints

The last time I did PenMuse it ran away from me. I got hung up about too many things about the application that I ended up overthinking what should be a simple application. This time I would keep it simple.

There won’t be an admin section for it, and I would simply connect directly to the database to add new prompts. I would keep the application as minimal as possible, to begin with. One model, one controller, one page. At least I’ll do it this way, to start with.

I would track interest in it

I’m not a big fan of using analytics, but that was back in the day when Google Analytics was the only real option. Now though, there are plenty of great options out there, and a few are even GDPR friendly.

One such analytics service that I have been wanting to try is Fathom. I have earmarked for another application, but I thought PenMuse would be a good starting point to get myself familiar with Fathom.

So there we have it. PenMuse is back! Although not right now, I still need to build it! And it’s not going to have the same name, but more on that later.

Last week I finished my first book in a long time. It felt good to get to the last page and actually enjoy the book for a change.

For a long time, I have struggled with books to read. As books have piled up, the want to read them hasn’t been there. And in some cases, when I do read them, I don’t end up enjoying the book and give up on it.

Here are a few more books that I am hoping to read over the next few months:

• Shiang: Empire of Salt by C. F. Iggulden
• The Falcon of Sparta by Conn Iggulden
• The Book of Dust volume I by Phillip Pullman
• Spitfire by John Nichol
• Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

I’ve been collecting a few ideas for Ruby and Rails apps to try a few things out.

In the past I’ve ended up simply building some form of task manager or blog engine. In order to explore some of the other parts of Rails though, I’m need to try and build something a bit different.

Here’s what I have so far.

• A live updating leaderboard for an event. The idea behind this is to explore ActionCable again. I haven’t used this in a project for a couple of years. It would be good to get familiar with it again.
• A command line tool for generating images with text. I had a template I used last year for creating images for the golf club’s junior section for competition announcements. Rather than using the existing template I have with Pixelmator, it would be good if I could generate the same image using the command line. A nice way of exploring what Ruby can do with a good image library.
• A Microblogging client. This would simply be a client for posting message instead of being able to read posts. The idea here is to see if I can deploy a Rails app with something like Vue.js or React built in.

The idea is to build out each of these over the next few months to understand a bit more about the different parts of Ruby, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript frameworks that I can use with them.

Nicholas Bate reminds us of the purpose of a list.

The purpose of the list is to filter and focus. The list is that to which you give attention. If it’s not on the list you say no, politely. The list drives you the proactive wolf rather than the hang-back sheep.

— Productivity Reminder 27

It seems that every once in a while I need to do a personal reboot. A chance to start over again with a few things and correct the mistakes I’ve made in the past.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to start over on a few projects and try to build up some good habits again.

This morning started well with some early morning exercises, making a list of tasks for the day and reading a new book on the train to work.

I’ve got a half-hour set aside tonight for a spot of coding and writing as well.

A good start.

In my development work I usually find that the simple way works best and is also easier to maintain. However, the web development industry is still insistent on progress and not always for the better.

This comparison between AirPods and the headphone jack by Bastian Allgeier is a great way to describe the issue.

Modern web dev tools and services are like AirPods. It’s fantastic to get rid of the cable. The experience is far better 95% of the times. But they also have connection issues from time to time, they are massively over-engineered, expensive and you can easily loose them.

Bluetooth headphones are likely the future. But I still have more love for a set of standard headphone with a regular cable and headphone jack that has been working reliably for decades.

— Simplicity (II) by Bastian Allgeier

It’s why I use Rails as my go to framework for new projects. Sure it’s not as simple as editing files on a server but it’s as simple as a tool you can get for building web apps.

As part of a side-project I’m working on, I’ve been trying to build an informative weather widget that gives current and forecasted stats for the next few hours.

I’m using the card component from Bootstrap to structure the widget. The card component is excellent for this, as it allows me to structure the widget but will enable it to have different styles for different websites. I’m surprised by just how much I’ve been using the card component, as it’s quite versatile.

Dark Sky provides all the weather stats that I need. I have a background worker that fetches the stats from the Dark Sky API and saves it to the database. I can then query the database for the stats as well as cache the widget for a short period.

The Dark Sky API is excellent as the forecast request gives you minute by minute forecasted weather for the hour, as well as hourly and daily forecasts for the next seven days.

The Dark Sky API also includes descriptions for icons that you can use. These standard descriptions can then be used to map to whatever icon you want. I’m using Font Awesome for my weather widget’s icons. I have a helper method in my application that maps the icon description from the Dark Sky API to the correct Font Awesome icon.

So far I’m pretty happy with the results.

This weekend the Roman Catholic church celebrates World Communications Day. This is a day that the church uses to identify how it’s message is distributed across the world and how the media impacts on the world.

During today’s sermon our parish priest touched on a number of points in the Archbishop’s letter to the diocese. However, it was one particular paragraph that really stuck out for me.

The positive use of the internet and social media depends on respectful communication. Respectful communication speaks the truth in charity. If every user of social media spoke the truth in charity, many people, including young people and children, would be happier, safer and better informed.

— 53rd World Communications Day Message

In a time when we’re frequently reminded that social media has so much going against it, we should also note that it’s not social media that is the problem, it’s just how we use it. Using it in a more positive and respectful way would certainly be a good way to start improve online communities.

Feedbin was down again this morning, but thankfully it’s back up and running now. This is the first time that I remember Feedbin having a prolonged service outage ever since I started using it when it was first launched.

The thing about service outages though, is that despite their interruption to your day, they can be an indicator of how effective the service provider is at dealing with it. For a service like Feedbin, it shouldn’t cause too much of an impact on a person’s day. It’s a consumer product, but what if you are a service provider for other businesses and organisations?

I remember Gitlab’s database outage a couple of years ago. They had a severe disruption to their service, but they dealt with it in the best way possible. By being transparent with the world and letting everyone know what went wrong, what they’re doing to fix it and finally a retrospective of what they have learnt from it.

Basecamp also had a severe outage not that long ago. Again, they handled it in the same way Gitlab did. By being transparent and learning from the disruption so that it doesn’t happen again. If you really want a deep dive in Basecamp’s service interruption they did a whole podcast episode on it.

Platform interruptions are mostly just a nuisance. As a consumer of both free and paid for platforms, I know that these outages are not that important and eventually, the platform in question will be up and running again. But for the service provider, they’re a great indicator of how good they are at getting back on their feet, and more importantly, how informed they’ll keep everyone during the process.

So even if a service provider does have a significant outage, it’s how they handle it that will be a factor on whether I sign up for it or not.

Scott Hanselman nails it with his advice for a young university student attending the Microsoft BUILD conference.

For the young person I spoke to, yes .NET Core may be a little different from .NET Framework, and they might both be different from Ruby or JavaScript, but strings are strings, loops are loops, memory is memory, disk I/O is what it is, and we all share the same networks. Processes and threads, ports, TCP/IP, and DNS - understanding the basic building blocks are important.

— Systems Thinking as important as ever for new coders

It’s all just building blocks. Whatever the language or framework is, the building blocks are still the same. Great advice for those just starting their careers in software development, but also a reminder for the older or more experienced software developers who are struggling with the ever changing landscape of programming.

American government officials have finally taken their shot at video game lootboxes. Specifically, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced his intention to introduce the “The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act” to the US Senate.

This is the culmination of slow-burning anti-lootbox sentiment that’s bubbled up from the gaming community over the course of the last year-and-a-half. Ever since games like Battlefront II and Middle Earth: Shadow of War took lootboxes and in-game purchases from just “occasionally-overpriced bling” to “pay-to-win garbage,” those who regulate fair trade have begun to sit up and take notice.

— American senator pleads for children’s protection in anti-lootbox bill

Pay to win games on games consoles received a massive backlash from gamers and I think that games developers have taken notice of this.

Overwatch gets it right, with its loot boxes that can only reward you with cosmetic changes. I hope games like Overwatch can get to keep their lootbox system.

Pay to win games on mobile devices is an entirely different beast though. Games on mobile devices frequently use pay-to-win tactics through in-app purchases as a way of making money on free games. It’s these games that I hope to get targeted through this bill.

There’s one other consideration as well. Games are sold with ratings on them which indicates the age with which the content of the game is aimed at. If you decide that your kids are okay to play games that have a much higher age rating on them, then, in my eyes, you are also responsible for ensuring that your kids know the do’s and don’ts of that games lootbox system.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly getting back into using Vim as my default text editor.

Even though VS Code is really popular with developers at the moment, I’m not a big fan of using Electron-based apps. Also, VS Code’s popularity has been killing off some packages that I use on Sublime Text, which effectively kills that off as well. I did try to move back to Sublime Text, but I’m not finding it anymore productive than VS Code. Which brings me to Vim.

After many attempts at moving to Vim, I can still remember the keyboard shortcuts for many commands on Vim, so I haven’t been at a total loss in getting started again.

Essential advice from Michael Wade about the benefits of slowing down as a strategy.

The counter-intuitive strategy of slowing down will save time in the long run by preventing possible mistakes and by improving the overall quality of the resolution.

— Fast is Slow. Slow is Fast

An advantage of a monolith code base that can go overlooked is the minimal entry barrier to getting up and running for junior developers or new members of the team.

Setting up a basic database and my application with a background process was a pretty defined process. I’d have the readme on Github, and often in an hour or maybe a few I’d be up and running when I started on a new project. Onboarding a new engineering, at least for an initial environment would be done in the first day. As we ventured into micro-services onboarding time skyrocketed. Yes, we have docker and orchestration such as K8s these days to help, but the time from start to up and running a K8s cluster just to onboard a new engineer is orders of magnitude larger than we saw a few years ago. For many junior engineers this is a burden that really is unnecessary complexity.

— Give me back my monolith by Craig Kerstiens

Even those in senior roles may struggle to hold in their head an entire stack composed of micro-services. Sure it becomes familiar over time, but it’s another learning curve that can be unnecessary. It’s why I love working in monoliths.

They are a one-stop stack that contains everything or at least most of the components that we need to know about. An engineer can get up and running in a matter of hours. Why make it more difficult to onboard engineers?

Maybe the hype-cycle for micro-services is finally passing.

As the World Wide Web celebrates it’s 30th birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that a better web for all can be achieved.

The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time. Today, half of the world is online. It is more urgent than ever to ensure the other half are not left behind offline, and that everyone contributes to a web that drives equality, opportunity and creativity.

The Contract for the Web must not be a list of quick fixes but a process that signals a shift in how we understand our relationship with our online community. It must be clear enough to act as a guiding star for the way forward but flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology. It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.

— 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?

I’ve been working on a little side-project for the last few weeks, and now I’m ready to reveal it in a soft opening kind of way. Say hi to my bookmarking app, Markcase.

I’ve been an ardent user of bookmarking apps right from the early days of Delicious. Since then I’ve been back and forward to Pinboard a few times and tried Pocket a couple of times. They’re all excellent apps for bookmarking, and they all have their pros and cons.

Delicious is now under the control of Pinboard, and Pinboard itself has been very quiet on the development front. It does what it promises, but after I struggled for a few weeks with bundle issues, I decided to close my account.

I like Pocket for its visual appearance, and it negates the need for a read-it-later service as well, but the last time I tried it, I found it challenging to organise all 1800 of my bookmarks.

I decided to roll my own bookmarking app. After a few weeks, I had a single-user version of Markcase up and running. A few weeks on and now I have Markcase running as a multi-user service. It’s still very early days for it, but I’m definitely keen to take it forward. There’s still lots of work to do, but it’s ready to go as a service for saving bookmarks and organising them.

It’s still in a state of beta though, but I would be interested in hearing from anyone who wants to give it a try. While in this beta phase, accounts will be given out as free, but once we leave the beta stage, accounts will be charged an annual fee for using Markcase. If you don’t feel like using Markcase beyond this point, then you can delete your account.

At the moment, you can log in, change some of your account details, save bookmarks with tags, organise them with tag bundles and use a private RSS feed for your bookmarks. I expect to add many features over the coming months including importing and exporting of bookmarks and integration with other apps and services.

As for native applications, Markcase is a web app first. It will work on mobile devices, without having to install an app. I will be providing an API in the future for those who want to build their own native app for Markcase, but it’s not something that I will be interested in doing for at least a year, maybe longer.

If you’re interested in taking Markcase for a spin, then please reply to this post on Micro.blog or email me at matthew [at] matthewlang [dot] net. I’ll be setting up account requests as and when they come in. It might not be right away as this step is manual at the moment. I will be adding a sign-up page after the beta has finished.

Markcase was previously called Commonmarks, but that was far too similar to Markdown specification of a same name. A name change was definitely needed.

A few thoughts from Michael Wade on crisis management.

You’ll need a “deep bench” to handle a major crisis because the first team will soon be exhausted.

— Thoughts on Crises

Reminds me of the recent Rework podcast episode that I listened to that covered Basecamp’s significant product outage and how they handled the situation.

I can think of a few people who would appreciate these little books of bookmarks.

Hat-tip to swissmiss.

Chrome’s continued dominance of the web now puts it in the same position as Internet Explorer all those years ago. “It works on Chrome” is the new “It work on IE”. I’d like to think though that most web developers out there don’t just build for the one browser.

Reda Lemeden’s post, “We Need Chrome No More”, sums up this change.

The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web.

— We need Chrome no more

While I can see Reda’s point, I don’t think that the developer’s building for the one browser is as big a problem. I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I visited a website that only worked in Chrome.

For me, the problem isn’t so much that Chrome is the most popular browser, it’s the organisation behind the browser and how they integrate features into that browser that support how they use data and ads to make profits.

Switching to another browser is one answer to this problem, but perhaps there’s also another answer.

For Google to change as an organisation.

That sounds like a pipedream, and even looking back at that sentence, it just seems ridiculous. I’ll leave it though because even the most ridiculous of ideas can still happen.

Even though we have bigger screens with more pixels available to use to view, Nick Janetakis makes a strong point for sticking to 80 characters per line when coding. And he even supported his argument up with a few screenshots as well.

1080p is still one of the most popular resolutions for monitors and it just so happens that with most code editors you can comfortably fit 2 code windows at 80 characters side by side, and even have room for a sidebar if you like that sort of thing.

— 80 Characters per Line Is a Standard Worth Sticking to Even Today

Well worth a read if coding is your thing.

I mostly stick to 80 characters per line when programming. I say mostly as it’s more a guideline than a rule for me. I find it easy to adhere to this guideline when working with Ruby and other programming languages, but where it falls apart for me is when I am writing HTML. In some cases, I just can’t get a line under the 80 characters.

There are things I can do get around this. I can extract segments of HTML into partials (I am using Rails anyway), but is this valid reason for doing so?

I’m not sure, but in most cases, separating out this HTML would definitely help project organisation, allowing me to work in a more component-based way with my HTML. I might just have to give this a try tonight.

When it comes to building ideas for applications, I will always choose the web first. It’s what I can I do best and it is where I can ship those ideas more efficiently. I can go from that first line of code to a shippable idea in hours. After that, I can just iterate on that idea when I want to.

There’s another benefit to building for the web though. You have access to a bigger market.

At a startup, engineering resources are scarce. It’s expensive to spread your engineering expertise across different platforms, so it’s better to focus on one in the beginning. Building for the web means that users on mobile, desktop, Chromebooks (which have become the most popular EDU hardware in the US), and any other internet-connected device can use your service, whereas a native app is specific to iOS or Android.

— Considering App vs. Website? It’s 2019: Build a Website.

I’ve toyed with learning Apple’s programming language, Swift. My goal is to learn how to build iOS apps. It’s not that I have some Candy Crush busting idea that will net me millions, it’s just something I would like to learn.

Even if I had the knowledge to build a native app in the same time that it would take build a web app, I think I would still go with making a web app. Native apps serve their purpose, but I think we’re seeing more viable alternatives through web apps.

After years of using Solarized Dark as my preferred colour theme for coding, I’m starting to find that I’m now preferring a lighter themes for when I’m writing code. Solarized Light for Sublime Text and Bluloco Light for VS Code.

Solarized Dark is still my preferred color theme for the terminal though.

The debate about the use of Javascript in the web industry and the role of the front-end developer continues after Chris Coyier’s post, The Great Divide and now a follow-up from Rachel Andrews.

There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. We don’t need to talk about tools or frameworks, learn how to make a pull request or drag vast amounts of code onto our computer via npm to make that start. We just need a text editor and a few hours. This is how we make things show up on a webpage.

— HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points by Rachel Andrews

Rachel’s post reminds us though that while Javascript frameworks might be all the rage at the moment, we’re neglecting the foundations of the web, HTML and CSS. And how they can still be used to educate those new to the process of creating websites.

Maybe as an industry, we should still be focusing on these fundamentals. Not just for those new to the industry, but for everyone in the industry.

Over the last couple of days, I put the finishing touches to the Commonmarks application so that others can deploy it easily to Heroku. The reason I went down this route is that self-hosting Commonmarks is a something I want people to be able to do, but I’m not at the stage yet where Commonmarks can be quickly deployed to any SAAS platform or even your own server. Going down the Heroku route was a short term solution.

If you take a look at the top of the README file on the Commonmarks Github repository you’ll see a Deploy To Heroku button that you can use to deploy. You’ll need a Heroku account to do this. The add-ons needed for the application to run are free including the dynos required to run the application. I’ve been running Commonmarks on a free dyno for over a month now without any problem.

This brings me to the next step. I’m now working on Commonmarks as a hosted bookmarking product that anyone can sign up for if they don’t want to run their own version of Commonmarks. I appreciate there are people on both sides of the fences, but there are probably more people who want to go with the hosted option than the self-hosted option. I’m not looking to have this running for another couple of weeks, and I’ll be initially opening up with a small beta to get feedback.

Updates will follow.

Just a little Commonmarks update for those interested. I’m working on the password reset over the next few days. By then I should have a working single-account version that people can deploy with a Heroku button.

After that I am going to then focus on a multi-account option for those who don’t want to host it themselves. The timeline for this is a couple of weeks, but I will have a limited set of invites for those interested. I’ll make the announcement on Micro.blog first.

With my day job taking me down the JavaScript route on a daily basis, it’s good to break out the text editor at night and write some Ruby code for Commonmarks. It might just be a simple Ruby on Rails bookmarking app but hopefully in time I can build a few more interesting features for it.

Write it says our man in Arizona.

Over the last few days there has been some interest in my bookmarking web app that I’ve been working on.

Why another bookmarking solution though?

I used Pinboard and Pocket for a while, but I was never comfortable with either of them. Pinboard hasn’t seen much change in the last two years and Pocket is more akin to Instapaper (which I already use) than it is to Pinboard. I also wanted to work on something that I could pin to my GitHub repo as an example of work.

Features are light at the moment, with just the ability to add, edit and delete bookmarks as well as the ability to group tags into bundles. A basic web application, but it works. I’m using it on a subdomain of my own site .

I’ve had replies from people who are interested in a hosted solution rather than having to roll their own. I initially pushed back against the idea of starting a SAAS product. There’s a lot to do to make this happen as the open source version is for a single account only. There’s also all the other parts of a SAAS product to consider such as billing and privacy now that GDPR is a requirement. Also, my first attempt at a SAAS product is still ticking over but hardly a success in terms of revenue.

However, with growing interest, I am going to entertain the idea of making Commonmarks into a SAAS product. I won’t be abandoning the open source version, but the way ahead might lie in using the same model as Feedbin. They are an RSS reader service, but the source code is open source. I’m wondering if this would work for Commonmarks as a product as well?

There is a lot of other things to consider as well for this such as hosting, pricing and support. I won’t be entirely excluding the idea though until I can at least gauge some interest in the product.

The next step looks like it might be to set up a page to allow people to register their interest.

There’s no denying that JavaScript is an excellent language for the web, especially the front-end of any web application. Without it, we can’t enjoy a user experience that challenges native applications.

However, I am not convinced that JavaScript is a language that is suitable for all parts of an application’s stack, all the time. There are benefits to using JavaScript depending on the requirements, but it feels like JavaScript is becoming the go-to language for everything.

Heydon Pickering’s post is an excellent read about this issue and full stack development and how this role is changing with the larger set of JavaScript tools and frameworks available, but it’s his point about separation of concerns that resonated with me:

We need to revisit the separation of concerns principle. We simple can’t afford for people to have to know everything just to do something. It’s good that we conceptualize designs in terms of self-contained components now, but that can be a mental model without being a technology-specific land-grab.

— Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack by Heydon Pickering

It wasn’t that long ago when front-end developers and designers worked with back-end developers on applications. There was a separation of the two roles and their focus, and each side had the knowledge to carry out their role. Front-end developers would work on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, crafting functional yet beautiful user-interfaces. Back-end developers would work on business logic and background processing.

With the rise of JavaScript though, we’re seeing a convergence of tooling onto a single language, and the roles of front-end, back-end and full stack developers becoming less about knowing the respective field and more about knowing JavaScript.

The new world of web applications is moving to JavaScript, and that’s great for the web as a platform. We can now build applications that rival that of native apps using a single language.

However, when faced with programming language choices in the stack, should developers be quick to default to JavaScript?

My own bookmarking app is up and running.

It’s nothing fancy in terms of how bookmarking apps usually work, but I wanted this to look and act more like a blog than a collection of bookmarks. I opted for paginating results on the right with a sidebar on the left. In time the sidebar will include more filtering options.

I’ve had a couple of stabs at my own bookmarking apps over the years, but this one feels more right than wrong. The code is still rough around the edges, but I’m happy to open source it now on Github.

And the name? Well, think of it as a commonplace book for your bookmarks.

Update: Commonmarks has been renamed to Markcase and is still under active development. I’m hoping to open it up for registrations in spring 2020. Source code is available on Github.

Dan Abromov’s Things I don’t know as of 2018, is a refreshing take on the knowledge gaps of software developers. Even though Dan is the creator and maintainer of a widely used package used with React, his list of knowledge gaps in web development is quite an eye-opener. And he made them public too!

I’ve worked alongside a lot of great developers, and I’ve been amazed at both their spread of knowledge on web development but also their gaps. I rarely pay attention to the knowledge gaps though. It’s easy to be amazed at the breadth of one person’s knowledge and not focus on a person’s knowledge gaps. Perhaps they just didn’t get round to that gap, and focusing on their knowledge gaps feels wrong, but should that be the case?

As I’m approaching 20 years working in software development, I’m starting to know the excellent job descriptions from the bad ones. Merely listing a long list of tech experience that you would like in a candidate is a poor way of getting the right one. In my view, the best candidate can come in and use their soft skills to learn and get up to speed in a few months regardless of their experience. I think it comes down to the fact that more organisations want their candidates to hit the ground running from day one. No training or onboarding, just another cog in the big development machine.

Given the number of languages, frameworks and other techs in web development, it’s a near impossible task to keep up with everything, but I’m taking two things away from Dan’s post.

1. There’s no harm in not being up to speed with everything that a full stack web developer should do. Sure, I can deploy an app using Cloud66, Heroku and Dokku, but I can’t say the same for Docker and Kubernetes. I can deploy web applications, but only on the technology that I have chosen to learn.
2. I’m considering changing my job description to be more specific. Sure I can be a jack of all trades, and know a bit of everything in the web development stack, but I’m sure I would be better off describing myself as a backend web developer instead and focusing on the technologies around that.

With these points in mind, I’m renewing my focus on Ruby on Rails as well as adding to this the knowledge that I need for the gaps around it.

It’s good to know though that I am not alone in not understanding a few topics that have been popular in the last couple of years.

Trying to keep pace with most of the topics in the web development world is a task in itself, but there’s enough work to keep me marketable as a backend web developer even if I do focus on a single core skill.

I read today that Microsoft is reportedly throwing in the towel with their EdgeHTML browser engine and starting work on a new browser based on the Chromium engine.

My immediate thought was down-heartened. Another Google-backed browser to reinforce the popularity of Google’s own Chrome browser, but the problem may actually be worse than that (depending on your point of view of course).

Andre Alves Garzia explains more in his post:

We already lost the mobile world for a duopoly of Apple and Google, now we’re losing the desktop most used application, the Web Browser, to a monopoly from Google again, how much control do you want that company to have over the future of the Web? All this not counting the many Electron based apps we use in our daily lives such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc, which are all Chrome engine again.

— While we Blink, we lose the Web by Andre Alves Garzia

Even though I’m against any one company having too much control over any part of the technology stack, I’m supporting the use of Google, by using some tools that include the Chrome engine. I use VS Code daily as a web developer and of course the company I work for uses Slack as a communication tool between teams. Is there any getting away from the Chrome engine? Perhaps not at work, but I can make a concise decision to use other applications when I’m not at work.

I’ve been using Firefox and Safari as my preferred browsers for the last few years. In fact, I haven’t looked at Chrome since I decided to go Google-free a few years ago. As for the Chrome-based tools, I don’t use Slack outside of work, but I do use VS Code as my preferred text editor.

Perhaps it’s time to look at Vim again?

Bloody typical.

I just spent a couple of hours adding a new field to a Rails application, built up the logic to use the new application, did a refactoring to clean it up and now realise that I don’t need the new field. I just need a small change in the application with an already existing field.

I don’t know whether to be happy that I don’t need the new field or annoyed in that I didn’t see how I could have done this without having to add the new field.

Either way, it’s a win, right?

One of my big downfalls, when I start work on something, is wondering if I am going in the right direction with it technically.

Web development is always changing. It is getting better though. Javascript frameworks are starting to settle down, and fall in line with the regular releases of non-Javascript frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading about Javascript frameworks like Vue and React and what they can offer for web applications. I’ll be honest and say that I’m still not sold on the idea of creating single-page applications with these frameworks, but I can see where they become a benefit for complex web pages.

Then there are things like CSS frameworks, deployment options, containers and a whole ream of other things to consider for the right stack for the application. It’s then that I find myself in a state of “decision limbo”.

Ideally, I would use Rails and a CSS framework and start from there, however, I’m always questioning what should be considered as an alternative.

While reading Nick Janetakis’ article on growing into microservices, I happened across this little nugget of wisdom.

You get better by writing a lot of code with absolute and total intent to replace almost everything you write with better code once you start experiencing real problems first hand.

Microservices Are Something You Grow Into, Not Begin With by Nick Janetakis

I needn’t worry about the implications of my technical decisions until I come across some real technical problems. When I do come across those problems, I should only look at the options available to me then.

In other words, just write damn code Matthew.

On a final note, Nick Janetakis’ article is an excellent guide to those starting new development projects and looking to use microservices. In a nutshell, don’t.

With a new full-time role, I’m in the process of getting my head around some of the technology choices I’ll be working with and the benefits and drawbacks of each option.

One of those choices is building single-page applications (SPA) with a JavaScript framework for the front-end. I can see why this choice was made, but I’m now weighing up whether it is worth considering for my own projects. With that in mind, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about single-page applications.

I liked Jim Newbury’s article on single-page applications and his point about understanding what you are building.

We ask “What framework should we use for this whole app?” for new products up front, when we don’t even understand what we’re building yet. It’s far less wasteful to ask “What technical approach best supports this user need?” on a case-by-case basis as we learn more about those user needs during incremental product design and development.

— Create your own dysfunctional single-page app in five easy steps by Jim Newbury

Sure your team might be well versed in building single-page applications, but it’s not the best fit for all types of applications. It’s all about finding the right tool for the job.

Ruby on Rails is a good starting point for most of the projects that I work on, but I know it’s not a good fit for other types of projects. For other projects I know I would need to use another set of development tools.

I understand the benefits of using single-page applications, but it’s not a style of application that will yield immediate benefits in my own, smaller projects. I’ll stick with the tried and tested multiple-page application monoliths for now.

Is it just me or has the Apple product update become something of a formality now when it comes to the tech sites that report on it?

Apple unvelied a number of updated products yesterday. The tech sites, as always, responded with a range of predictable posts. Insert an Apple product for x where you can.

• What a maxed out x will cost you
• Why the x blows away its predecessors
• Which x should you buy
• What Apple didn’t announce

Despite rising prices of Apple products and now steady release cycles of products, the tech sites are always favourable to Apple when they do a product update or launch.

Don’t get me wrong, I like using Apple products and I will continue to buy them as they are dependable and last. However, I’m still using a MacBook Pro from 2013 and my iPhone 5S continues to just work. I don’t see me replacing my MBP until at least next year.

As for my iPhone though, I am considering an upgrade to an XR. I’m not a huge fan of the 5S camera and I don’t use a seperate camera, so an upgraded phone serves a dual-purpose. A bigger screen and a better camera.

Maybe can Apple can do no wrong, but it would be nice if the tech sites didn’t just roll over when it comes to an Apple event.

Six years ago I wrote a snippet about a portfolio career. This is still the end goal for my career.

Splitting my time into smaller part-time roles would be a great way of still keeping my programming skills but also being able to explore other roles in different industries. I have an idea for that other role, but it requires a few other things to be done before I can realistically make it happen.

Ruby is falling again on the TIOBE index.

It’s not a cause for alarm, but I will continue to look at alternatives to Ruby for the long term. Microsoft’s .NET is still something I would like to come back to and there are more opportunities for it as well.

While not directly related, I also did notice that Thoughtbot have made their learning platform, Upcase, free for all. An attempt to get more developers to use Ruby?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using the lire app on iOS for reading through my RSS subscriptions.

There’s a number of great little features in lire, but the pull to a different RSS client didn’t last long. In the last few days, I’ve deleted the app and started using Feedbin again on iOS. As a client, Feedbin has everything I need and it doesn’t need to have space on my home screen in order to access it. Just a bookmark in my browser is enough to find it.

In the last couple of days I also noticed an article that was doing the rounds about the state of RSS apps on the macOS platform. Before I was using the lire app, I was still using Feedbin in my browser to read my RSS subscriptions when working through the day. A pinned tab in the browser is enough for my needs.

There’s only two cases where I’ll use a native app.

1. When the app’s core functionality isn’t available on the web like a text editor or source code control.
2. When I prefer to use a native app over a web based app for cases like email and chat.

Native apps do offer a number of great benefits over web based apps, but in most cases I prefer the flexibility of web based apps. Easy to access for users on multiple platforms and easy for the app’s developers to maintain.

So it’s back to using Feedbin on the web again, but more importantly back to using another web app again.

Did I miss the heated and crazy developer debate that the new accepted line length is 120 characters?

Joking aside, I’d like to know if anyone else has changed their coding standards to allow for a bigger line length because of changes in source code management tools.

For a long time I’ve used 80 characters as a guideline as opposed to a set rule. Sometimes I’ll go over this but most of the time I don’t.

With bigger displays everywhere though, it appears that developers are switching to a larger line length when it comes to their coding standards.

It’s been a frustrating couple of days getting my laptop into some kind of order. I can’t get the following things to work:

• Connect the new Tower v3 app to my GitLab or GitHub accounts
• Connect my Fastmail account to Spark
• Sign in to Micro.blog desktop client

The list was longer yesterday but I managed to resolve a bunch of issues with a single action. These remaining items have been vexing me since.

The Micro.blog issue is out of my hands and has been reported, but the Tower and Spark issues are things I expect to just work, but I can’t explain why they don’t.

It begs the question, have I lost my tech touch?

Update: Turns out I had a keychain issue that required me to reboot my laptop to get everything working again. Thanks to @manton and Tower support for pointing me in the right direction. 👍

I think I’m getting to that stage now where I am all in with Micro.blog.

I’ve been bouncing between platforms over the last few years. Posterous, Square, Jekyll and Ghost. I’ve had issues with them all. Some have a lack of or bad native clients to post from. Others suffer from bad integration with social media platforms. And finally some have hosting issues or just too high hosting costs.

Then Micro.blog came along and made things easier. It’s easy to create an account there, it’s easy to run a blog, it’s easy to share posts with Twitter and Facebook. It’s easy.

The one thing that really sets Micro.blog apart from the restof the blogging solutions I have tried though is the ability to have both a blogging platform and a social media platform rolled into one. I can write short social posts or longer titled posts, and in both cases, I can get replies back to those posts from fellow Micro.bloggers.

It’s taken a while for to get to this stage, but the reality is that I don’t want to maintain multiple blogs for myself. I want to simply write to my blog and Micro.blog allows me to do that.

For the last few years, I’ve been using Day One as a digital journal. However, over the previous few months, I’ve been using it less and less. To the point really where I want to stop using it altogether.

Too much meta

The thing about Day One is that while it is a great journaling app, I’ve noticed that I am becoming more and more distracted with the meta-data for each post. Weather, tags, location, starred. It’s all just a little bit too much.

All I want to do write an entry, attach a picture or two and then move on. Day One does let you do this but it’s the meta-data that I find to be too distracting.

The alternatives

Bear is a great note-taking app. I love it.

I use it for many different things, but the one thing that I would like to do is use it more as a digital journal.

I’ve tried to do this before however, I ended up importing all of Day One’s tags when I did this, so I ended up with more tags than I needed. This time I hope to opt out of importing the tags (or try and remove them before the import) and then start from there.

Sunlit is also on the cards as a digital journal, but I would use this for day trips, weekends away and holidays. I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t tried this yet with Sunlit so it might not meet my expectations.

We’ll see over the next few weeks as I gradually move my journal entries out from Day One.

I missed the Apple education themed announcement yesterday. The time difference means that I’m always in the middle of something else when these things are announced.

A few observations.

A cheaper iPad?

Judging from the reviews on various tech sites though, it seems people were expecting a much cheaper iPad to be released. Something that competes with Google and Chrome OS.

Well they released a cheaper iPad, at least here in the UK they did, however I’m sure it’s not what the tech sites and consumers were hoping for.

It’s not the first time that Apple haven’t met expectations. In fact, they rarely meet perceived expectations, especially when it comes to price.

I’m always amazed at how well Apple does with a range of products that are always priced much higher than their competitors.

I think the day that Apple drops their prices to that of their competitors is the day that Apple is in real trouble.

Schoolwork app

The biggest benefit I seen from yesterday was Apple’s Schoolwork app. A step in the right direction when it comes to digitising education.

However, given the time it takes for school’s to adapt to new digital practices, I don’t see my oldest son, who starts high school this year, being able to take advantage of this for at least a couple of years.

Space gray accessories

One thing that caught my eye was the new space gray accessories that are now available. Sure it doesn’t go with the silver MacBookPro but the black and gray accessories do look nice. I’m not saying I’ll be buying them anytime soon, but if I’m in the market for a replacement keyboard or mouse then I may give them a look.

I wonder if a space gray iMac is on the cards?

The automated delivery of daily writing prompts from my PenMuse website is stable enough now that I want to consider expanding on it.

Cross-posting to Twitter

I’d like to start cross-posting now from PenMuse’s Micro.blog account to a PenMuse Twitter account.

Cross-posting from Micro.blog to Twitter is the most straightforward and easy way of doing it. It’s nothing more than another way for people to get a daily writing prompt.

The drawback to this is that I’m not exactly the greatest Twitter fan although I do think it’s the lesser evil of the social media platforms.

While I am moving away from Twitter, it doesn’t seem right to set up an account there when I won’t be really using.

The benefit though is that I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it for others. Others who don’t use RSS feeds, Micro.blog or visit websites that often. Maybe they just want to use Twitter.

A random afternoon prompt

Each morning the newest writing prompt is published through the site’s main RSS and JSON feeds. I’d like to add another feed that publishes a random feed for the afternoon.

There is one problem with this though. Some of the writing prompts in the collection are seasonal, so I would need to exclude these off until at some point they could be considered based on the time of year.

Staying within the constraints

PenMuse is just a playground app. It’s place where I can experiment with a few coding ideas and techniques and see them working in a product environment. I also don’t spend more than a couple of hours a week on such a app.

To do this the playground app has a few constraints on it.

1. It needs to be free.
2. It needs to be something people will use.
3. It needs to only take up a couple of hours of my time a week.

These constraints take out of my hands decisions that would stop me using PenMuse what it is for. A place to experiment with some Rails code.

These two new features aren’t going to give me any problems coding wise, but it’s going to put PenMuse in more places.

Also these features are still small enough that I can do them within the confines of a couple of hours a week.

I’ve been re-reading this post on how to build an ERP sytem from scratch.

I’ll be honest and say that a 250 word post on the topic doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Such a topic is worthy of at least 5,000 words in order for the reader to actually takeaway something of substance about building their own ERP system from nothing.

Off the top of my head there’s the following:

• Methodology - Do you go with agile or a big upfront design? You might think I would advocate an agile approach but there are benefits and drawbacks to both.
• Architecture - How should the application be laid out? A brief outline of the system can save months of moving code about later on down the line.
• Application and database hosting - Should we host the application ourselves or use IAAS or PAAS? Self-hosting is big cost but IAAS and PAAS mean you have to sacrifice some control of the application.
• Performance - How do we scale such an application from a handful of customers to hundreds of customers? Performance is critical in an ERP application. Handling vast amounts of data between transactions mean you have to ensure that users aren’t kept waiting.
• Error handling - How do we handle errors to allow support staff to diagnose bugs efficiently? It’s not enough to report the errors, support staff of the system need tools to replicate and report errors.
• Code libraries - Should we use external code libraries or write our own? I’ve learned the hard way that some features are better implemented without an external code dependency.
• User-interface - Do we use a pre-built theme for the application or build our own? A pre-built theme will add the final polish but there will be constraints in what you can do with it.

This is just an outline but I think even just one of these items is a post in itself. Looking at this list, there could be at least 10,000 words here across seven different posts.

I may outline more of these over the course of the next few weeks.

I think I have gathered enough knowledge on this topic to put at least a few posts together.

I used to work for a company that specialised in installation and configuration of Microsoft’s own ERP software, Dynamics NAV and I’m currently working with a client to build a cash management and stock control system.

With this experience I think there’s definitely more to say on the topic of ERP systems and modern technology stacks, especially when it comes to how they can be built with Ruby on Rails.

At the moment I’m just thinking out loud about this but my micro-blog seemed like a good place to put this down / out.

Following a raft of measures to cool off the property market, sales have plunged, down 35% overall in Feb 2017 relative to Feb 2016; prices are down an average of CAD110,000, and listings are up (which will drive the prices down further).

— Toronto’s real estate market is imploding via Boing Boing

Imploding might be a strong word in this case as it’s only based on one month’s sales, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the start of a decline in house prices in Toronto and the surrounding areas.

With my in-laws in Ontario and annual trips out there with the family, we’ve see vast amounts of land swallowed up by builders over the last two decades. The rate of building and development has been staggering.

In the last ten years though house prices have sky rocketed.

My wife and I have toyed with emigrating to Canada in the past few years. The always increasing house prices mean that we would have to look at smaller properties near Toronto or larger properties away from Toronto for the move to be worth it.

With a dip in house prices though, maybe a move is still possible?

I’m wondering if this is something that might interest the users of Micro.blog.

I want to ask a question to Micro.blog users, but I don’t want the question to appear on my blog. Much like my replies don’t appear on my hosted blog, I would like to ask a question to the community and for everyone to see it on their timeline. Just not on my blog.

I know there are Slack groups for this type of thing, but perhaps Micro.blog is just as great a place for this type of thing.

Does that make sense?

Nicholas Bate has the steps you need to start that novel.

I’m not surprised it’s being suggested by Trump that they need to arm teachers in schools.

Rather than making schools safe areas to learn, aren’t they just going to be turned into places where kids fear for their lives? Arming teachers is one thing, but in the heat of the moment, can armed teachers react in the same way that the police should?

John Gruber also linked to an article describing the devasting effect of AR-15 bullets on the organs.

More guns is not the answer.

It’s been a while since I dabbled in a bit of JavaScript. It’s not that I don’t like programming in JavaScript, it is growing on me, it’s just I’ve never found a real use case for it in a web application. The thing about JavaScript though is that there are so many great frameworks available that mean you often don’t have to write any of the curly bracket stuff.

Vue.js has been on my radar for a while but what has really grabbed my interest has been the release of Stimulus.

For a lot of web applications I work on, I don’t want to re-write a whole view for a particular framework, I just want to enhance a part of that view. Both the above mentioned frameworks do this, but I decided to try and use Stimulus with a web application of my own just for fun.

The copy to clipboard is a nice example to start from in the Stimulus handbook and so I started with this basic example by adding a copy to clipboard button when displaying a writing prompt in PenMuse. Not only was it good to broaden my reach beyond the Rails code that I am used to writing, I also got to experiment with WebPacker as well.

The final results are good and there was a few hiccups along the way in trying to copy the prompt from an input element that didn’t interfere with the user interface.

I did at one point create an input elemement on the fly to copy the prompt from when the button was pressed, but it jerked the screen up and down on tablet devices as it was copying the prompt. Horrible.

I decided to settle on using an input group so that you can partially see the prompt being copied. It’s not ideal, but it’s working and it doesn’t mess with the screen in anyway on different devices.

I’ve still got some adjustments to make for smaller devices like stacking the buttons on the home page so that they appear as a column but that will come later in the week.

Nicholas Bate with a run down on being happy. Writing daily is just one simple part of it.

Write daily about what is working so that you observe, notice and appreciate it.

— Basics 7: How to Be Happy by Nicholas Bate

The subscribe button used to be everywhere on the Internet. It’s about time it made a return

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don’t have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

— Scripting news

Michael Wade provides another gem of being productive.

One important thing today, that will put this day far ahead of days when you hoped to achieve much but scattered your focus on trivial matters.

— If You Do … by Michael Wade

Me? I’m just looking to complete that one important thing a day.

Micro.blog has been getting some great updates over the last couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing more improvements to come. In using Micro.blog to migrate some content from another blog, I’ve been compiling a list of features I would like to see added.

Optional cross-posting to social media

One thing that puts me off post to Micro.blog more frequently is that I have my account linked to Twitter so that it syndicates my posts to Twitter. Lately though I’ve felt that I don’t want everything to be published to Twitter, but at the same time I don’t want to turn off the cross-posting to Twitter as every dollar helps keep Micro.blog going.

In the interests of being able to comfortably post more often though, I’ve disabled cross-posting to my Twitter account. If I want something to show on Twitter, I’ll post it there myself.

All this though leads to one thing I would love to see in Micro.blog and that’s the ability to opt-out (or in) to cross-posting with each post that I write. This is perhaps the biggest feature request of the three as it involves changes on the web client and the two native clients.

Posts searching

A couple of weeks I decided to import over 1700 posts from my Ghost blog to Micro.blog. The import went fine and after seeing the posts on my blog I was quite happy for everything to sit there. The only problem though is that the archive is difficult to navigate with such a large volume of posts. Most people might not have this amount of posts, but it would be nice to have a search feature on the posts page in the web client to allow people to find specific posts that they want to update.

Post length separation

Micro.blog allows two types of posts. Short posts that are 280 characters or less and longer posts that can have an optional title.

It would be great if these types of posts could be separated in the generated micro-blog site with class names in the CSS for each type of post. These same class names could be used in the custom CSS section of Micro.blog to to override the styling of posts depending on their length.

You don’t ask, you don’t get

Maybe these things are already being considered and maybe they’re not. I know Manton is always chiming in on his timeline and is very active on Micro.blog’s Slack channels as well. So this is me asking. So how about it @manton?

A refreshing thought from Nicholas Bate.

We feel we need to add. In fact so often we need to simplify, to reduce, to let go of. We actually need to subtract.

— Jagged Thoughts for Jagged Time, 272

I’m considering a few changes in the way I blog.

Micro.blog for personal stuff, quotes, snippets, links and the like.

Ghost for longer posts on working, ideas, products and writing.

It should be noted that Micro.blog was the trigger for this whole thing. A streamlined way of publishing small or large updates and then syndicating them through to other social networks and blogs. Damn it’s good at that.

I’ve started to think that my Ghost blog should be more of a professional site than anything else. I think that’s what it’s lacking. Longer posts that I’ve taken the time to write.

Curtis McHale’s blog is a great example of a professional site used for such a purpose.

My blogging habits have changed. From posts that are a mix of personal and work on the one blog, to using two blogs for a mix of both. Now I’m seeing that one blog is more for personal stuff and the other is for things I’m working on and working towards. The work stuff, the professional stuff. The boundaries aren’t clear on this at the moment though, but I think they should be.

@patrickrhone has a similar setup. A professional site and a personal micro-blog.

I’m 90% sold on the idea. The thought of moving more content around isn’t appealing though. It would be worth it in the end though. Right?

Nicholas Bate picks one word, Mike Vardy picks three words.

Whatever number of words you choose for 2018, work with them, live them, breathe them. Even just a few words can advocate powerful change for the better.

Tom Critchlow is re-discovering the glory days of blogging. The tags, the blogrolls and much more. The simpleness of it all.

There’s something about the humble hyperlink that gets subsumed by hyperfeeds. The archive. The curation of tags and categories. Blog series.

— A few notes on blogging and independent feeds by Tom Critchlow

This is why I’m doting on Micro.blog so much. It’s blogging and syndication made simple. And RSS is much easier to follow than any hyperfeed.

Curtis McHale breaks down the process of getting work done in a world of distractions. I particularly like his argument for analog task managers over digital ones.

One of the big principles of Bullet Journalling, is that paper creates friction and this is a good thing. If it feels like a significant pain to move your tasks forward, then they likely weren’t worth doing anyway. You didn’t get to them the first time, so apparently, they weren’t important.

Just drop them.

Digital task managers make it far too easy to move things forward that we’re never going to do. You push the date forward and make the task a problem for future you. Maybe you take the date off and then continually have to decide during your review if the task is worth doing.

— How Do I get Deep Work Done in the Midst of Random Priority Distractions by Curtis McHale

A week running Hyper as my terminal has been mostly without incident, but I’ll be switching back to Terminal.

Hyper is a good replacement for Terminal or iTerm but it’s not a great replacement and doesn’t bring anything extra that I didn’t already have.

Also, I would rather rely on scripts and dot files for my terminal configuration rather than relying on Hyper’s plugins.

There’s value to be had in silence you know.

Late at night. A quiet office. No phone calls. No interruptions. The work can be broken down into small tasks and each task approached with an attention that respects its value. The big picture can be pushed into the distance and scrutinized later. This is the time for craftsmanship.

— The Quiet Times by Michael Wade

The Trinet (Amazon, Facebook, Google) is a depressing prospect for the future of the web.

The War for Net Neutrality in the USA won a battle in 2014, but in 2017 we are seeing a second battle which is more likely to be lost. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans with full internet access.

— The web begain dying in 2014, here’s how by André Staltz

There’s still one thing that the web has in it’s favour. People are still willing to make it the best open platform it can be.

Google might have shut down their RSS reader but there’s been a number of replacements sprung up that people are willing to pay for like Feedbin.

Facebook might have the social internet sewn up just now, but people are continually challenging that with alternatives like Mastodon and Micro.blog.

Amazon might have the shopping internet market share, but how long can they continue that success? Retail is a never-ending cycle of new companies and stores trying to sell products. Can Amazon remain on top?

I’m optimistic that the web can still be and open platform for all. It comes from educating people about the sacrifices they’re making in using the Trinet’s applications and services and what the trade-off is. I suspect most people are not too bothered though, but there are people who are willing to support and work towards an open web.

One of many nuggets of advice for programmers who feel they are lagging behind.

The goal is become aware of the range of technologies available, and get a superficial understanding of theirs strengths (“React has a bigger community, but skimming the Vue tutorial was easier”, for example). This process can therefore be done over the course of a few hours, at most a day or two, during your work day in-between scheduled tasks.

— Your technical skills are obsolete: now what? by Itamar Turner-Trauring

Gregory Brown is closing his Twitter account (@practicingdev).

In 24 hours I’ll be shutting down this Twitter account for good. I am OK, and will resume blogging at practicingdeveloper.com. A few months ago I tried to take a break from Twitter and (once again) failed. I don’t like that feeling, so need to take stronger action.

I’ve been following Gregory for a few years now. I like what he writes about and subscribe to his blog.

I have mixed reactions on his decision to leave Twitter. I’m sad for others that follow Gregory on Twitter but happy that he’s taken this step and will continue blogging.

I’ve often thought about deleting my Twitter account but I’m not quite ready to do it. I’m quite happy to let Micro.blog cross post what I need from here to Twitter for the time being. I think the time is coming though. The day when I say goodbye to Twitter.

One again I’ve made Kurt’s list and he now he’s planning a surprise visit!

Family guy and freelance web developer, Matthew Lang publishes regularly from Paisley, Scotland on apps, life, and business.  Some day, I plan to meet him in person.  I just don’t plan on telling him when.  Want it to be a surprise.

— 25 Blogs Guaranteed to Make you Smarter

It would be great to meet up with Kurt. One of those few blogs I have followed for years.

Michael Wade with the essential list for instructors.

Different ways to explain the subject and how to incorporate those ways into the class so if a student doesn’t grasp one approach then the next one or two should hit home.

— 12 Items an Instructor Should Consider by Michael Wade

Bonus points to Michael as well for using a picture with a Field Notes notebook in his post. Nice!