Matthew Lang

Friday night fun.

Pizzas from our favourite local Italian restaurant, a couple of cocktails for me and Jen, and a few board games, including the family favourite, King of Tokyo.

A great way to start the weekend.

Despite switching to TailwindCSS, I still style components similar to Bootstrap. I’m still starting out on the journey of TailwindCSS, though, and I think in time, I’ll start to find ways to get away from this styling.

I’m sold on Hey email.

In the last six days that I have been using it, I’ve been getting my head around its features and workflows that make Hey different from most other email services.

The screener is a nice feature. When you receive an email from someone from the first time, Hey asks you if you want to continue to receive email from that person. Instead of you trying to determine if you have received an email from someone, Hey lets you know. Nice touch!

What I like best about Hey though is that it doesn’t look or act like a typical email client. There are some similarities sure, but instead of going down the same route as every other email client and using the same view for each collection of email, Hey goes a step further to make different groups of email more comfortable to read. The Paper Trail allows to scan recently received receipts, but The Feed page shows recently received newsletters and also makes them easy to browse through much like you might scroll through RSS feeds.

One advantage I’ve found from signing up to Hey is that I can stop using an email address tied to my domain name. Sure, it’s nice to own your domain name as well as use it for your email address, but I often wondered if tying these two together was a bit of a hindrance. Over the years my email address has been used for all manner of accounts and is probably on quite a few mailing lists that I would rather it wasn’t on.

In signing up for a Hey email address, it felt like I had a clean slate to start over with again. When Hey adds the ability to use custom domains, I might not transfer over my domain right away. I think I’ll keep going with Hey’s email address for as long as I can.

I’m going to pull the trigger on the subscription tomorrow at some point. Sure, it’s early days for Hey, and there are lots of things that are missing, but for a product in its first few weeks of launch, it’s got more than enough new features to make me switch over.

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.

Great night for a few holes.

An apology from the NFL’s commissioner, Roger Goodell:

We, the NFL, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black People. We, the NFL, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter.

— We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter

This apology from the NFL’s commissioner Roger Goodell, is a move in the right direction. Some might say it’s too late though. It’s been four years since Colin Kaepernick started protesting by kneeling during the US national anthem. His action’s are now being replicated at protests all across the US. Sure, the NFL have admitted that they are wrong, but the real test in their words will be during the upcoming season. Will players be allowed to peacefully protest during the national anthem?

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.

I hate to play down the benefits of blogging, but I think the author here has a point. There used to be so many blogging platforms. Google even had a filter on their search engine for blogs. Now though, it feels like there are fewer blogs out there.

But they would be the one thing I’d bring back to the internet if I could bring one thing back. They’re the thing I miss the most and the most often. They were the most valuable thing on here, besides freer availability of news, free although low quality video content on YouTube, and I guess some kinds of social media. But blogs are something you can sit down and read and get really into to the point you forget where you even are, and think about how you want to try those things maybe in your life, or just enjoy their writing, and you can read deeper into them into past blog posts, and tune back in later and see what they’ve posted since the last things you read about them.

— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

I think this is a bit ironic me pointing this out. I’ve definitely not been blogging as much as I have in the past. I’ve been struggling with blogging frequently again for the last two years, but the want to publish just isn’t there as much as it has been in the past.

The Last of Us Part II is finally getting a release date in June and the new trailer is just adding to the excitement.

After a lapse of reading, I’m back on track and finished Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo tonight. A good story and something a bit different from your usual fantasy books. 📚

Another wonderful evening stroll through the trees with Jennifer and the boys.

The Tantive IV set is complete! It took a wee bit longer than we planned, but it’s finally finished. Now, we just need to find a place to put it.

After some consideration, I’ve decided to kill my Atlassian account. I’m not using any of their products other than Trello. Despite Trello’s benefits though, it can be replaced by a number of tools that I already own.

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.

Progress on the Tantive IV build has been good. Almost there!

I’ve been trying to build a series of themes using the Tailwind CSS framework. Creating the different components of each theme is simple to do, but bring these components together has been more challenging. My design eye for these things isn’t great.

Nicholas Bate with some basics for your marketing strategy.

Mobile version of XCode coming to iOS? I hope so.

Kurt Harden is supporting local businesses. We all should do this and continue to do so when the pandemic ends.

In an effort to break the boredom, I opened a few Lego sets that we had initially put aside.

Drew’s been desperate to build the Tantive IV set, so we’re starting with this one and just doing a couple of bags a day. When it’s done, it’s definitely going to be quite big.

Great day for a walk, although the trees are still a little bare for my liking.

Sony has revealed their new DualSense controllers for the PlayStation 5. A familiar look for the controller with the button layout, but what stuck out for me was the two-toned design.

Now, let’s talk about the colors. Traditionally our base controllers have a single color. As you can see, we went a different direction this time around, and decided on a two-toned design. Additionally, we changed the position of the light bar that will give it an extra pop. On DualShock 4, it sat on the top of the controller; now it sits at each side of the touch pad, giving it a slightly larger look and feel.

— Introducing DualSense, the New Wireless Game Controller for PlayStation 5

I look forward to getting my hands on these when the PlayStation 5 is released.

Me and Jen watched Knives Out last night on Apple TV. We fancied it when we first seen the trailers for the cinema release, but we decided to just wait for it to appear on the small screen. We thoroughly enjoyed it and Daniel Craig’s southern accent wasn’t too shabby either! 🎬

The Twitter timeline is just completely unusable. Tweets are injected into your timeline by different signals and it makes it too confusing to follow. Trying to rectify this by using Nighthawk for iOS to keep my timeline simple and using Feedbin to follow lists.

A brand new editor is coming to the Bear app and it is available now if you want early access to it. Tables would be a welcome addition to my notes, but I think I’d rather wait for the official release though. I’d rather not risk screwing up my notes.