The wee yin had a good lesson today working on his short game. I hope he remembers it all for tomorrow when he plays his winter knockout tie.
First Paragraph - Dust
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled. And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun dangerously.
‐ Dust by Hugh Howey
I’m loving this series of books.
Last year, I relocated my office to the back of our home with a south-facing window. I now use light themes more frequently when the sun is bright during the day. The Noctis set of themes for VS Code is ideal if you’re looking for light and dark themes in a single extension. Recommended.
Less-than estimation
Chris Done’s estimation method is brilliant because it allows for flexibility and grows with the complexity of what you are estimating.
I call it “less than estimation” because if a given piece of work is obviously under an hour, your estimate is <hour. If it’s not obvious, you bump it up to <day. If it doesn’t obviously fit within a day, bump it up to a <week. If you’re not sure it’ll fit into a week, my experience says that it could take even three weeks, so bump it up to <month.
This should also work well with your preferred task manager if it allows you to use tags to add meta-data to tasks.
Trying to stop making daily trips between VS Code and GitHub and handle pull request work within VS Code when I can.
I’m ending the week on a high with my wife’s birthday today. My wife is off to yoga this morning, and then we’ll spend a couple of hours in the garden, preparing it for the good weather. Finally, I’ll be cooking the birthday girl’s requested dinner, which is one of her favourites, chicken pie.
The wee guy wanted nachos for dinner. Combine that with some salsa and guacamole, and that’s a pretty good dinner. Definitely one of my favourites.
I didn’t think they would follow Jurassic World Dominion with another movie in the franchise, but hey, dinosaurs! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in seeing this.
I see Paper Apps at the top of Hacker News (snapshot courtesy of the HN snapshot tool). I’m sure this has been posted to Hacker News before, but I’m glad to see it surface again.
As much as I love paper and pen, web versions of these apps would be good, but I can see the appeal of the notepads.
Building my own technology radar with SVG
When I was freelancing, one of the things I did regularly was read the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. It’s a snapshot of the different technologies that ThoughtWorks is considering and using. As a freelancer, I found it a good read as it provided a glimpse of what was happening in the web development industry. Once I started working full-time again, I stopped reading it and didn’t revisit it for a few years.
My current role is senior software engineer, but I am working towards the next role up from this one. This involves expanding my role in several ways, including learning and adopting new technologies and processes. One way I thought I could do this was to set up my own technology radar. ThoughtWorks does offer a means to run your own technology radar, but I wanted my own technology radar to be more straightforward.
Armed with my new knowledge of using SVG over the last couple of years, I decided to start building a technology radar of my own.
My technology radar comprises two layers of quadrants, the smaller quadrants on top of the bigger ones, to achieve the effect of having an outer trial quadrant and an inner adopt quadrant. I used the path element to do this.
<path d="M 10 45 A 40 40 0 0 1 45 10 L 45 25 A 30 30 0 0 0 25 45 Z" fill="#e3f2fd" stroke="#2196f3" stroke-width="0.5"/>
<path d="M 20 45 A 25 25 0 0 1 45 20 L 45 45 Z" fill="#e8f5e9" stroke="#4caf50" stroke-width="0.5"/>
The tokens representing the different individual items are simply circles and text elements nested under a group tag so that I can group all the items together.
<g transform="translate(40, 35)">
<title>TDD</title>
<circle cx="0" cy="0" r="2" fill="#4caf50"/>
<text font-weight="bold" x="0" y="0.5" font-size="1.5" text-anchor="middle" fill="#fff" font-family="Arial, sans-serif">2</text>
</g>
I added a title tag to each token to achieve a hover effect with a text description of the token.
Finally, I added labels to the middle of the quadrant to indicate the two sections and each corner to indicate the type of technologies grouped in that quadrant.
I haven’t figured out how to programmatically group tokens in each quadrant with code, so for the moment, I am using SVG Viewer to place tokens in each quadrant by hand.
I have published a GitHub Gist of the technology radar with blank tokens filled in for one of the quadrants. Feel free to fork this technology radar for your own needs.
You can find my own technology radar here. I’ll be updating it as the year progresses.
First Paragraph - 12 Rules for Life
If you are like most people, you don’t often think about lobsters—unless you’re eating one. However, these interesting and delicious crustaceans are very much worth considering. Their nervous systems are comparatively simple, with large, easily observable neurons, the magic cells of the brain. Because of this, scientists have been able to map the neural circuitry of lobsters very accurately. This has helped us understand the structure and function of the brain and behaviour of more complex animals, including human beings. Lobsters have more in common with you than you might think (particularly when you are feeling crabby—ha ha).
— 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
First non-fiction book of the year. Just reading a chapter a month.
Joan Westenberg’s post on going viral has this little gem that could be considered a mantra for those who want a more sustainable path to building something.
Build for the minimum viable audience. Create work that matters for people who care. Focus on depth over distribution. Let your ideas spread through trust networks instead of trending algorithms.
I love that Bookshop.org still supports local bookstores with their new ebook sales. However, why can you only read these ebooks with the Bookshop.org Ebooks app? I would have liked the option to read my purchased ebooks in other ebook readers. Still, I’ll be checking it out.
My now page is updated. Projects haven’t moved much since the start of the month, but I am glad to have finished two books.
I finished reading Shift by Hugh Howey. It’s not the way I thought the series was going to go. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 📚
I’m beginning to wonder if people should talk more—face-to-face, in Teams, on WhatsApp, or really anything that promotes a discussion rather than back-and-forth over the interwebs. Just a thought.
Cracked my laptop cover so put the replacement cover I have on.
On the downside I lose all the stickers I had on the old one. On the upside I get to sticker up the new one!
I’m turning on my Amazon Prime subscription for a couple of months so that me and my family can watch a few things over February and March. As soon as everyone in the family has watched everything, I’ll turn it back off again. I’m looking forward to catching up with The Rings of Power.
Index cards and leadership
I love this. I’m not a big Chiefs fan, but Andy Reid is a fantastic coach. I also love that this story starts from just a single index card.
Reid was a young coach, and he was always jotting down ideas, a lesson from Bill Walsh or Winston Churchill that would find its way onto a 3 x 5 card. Some of those cards went to McNabb. Others to coaches. But one card in particular ended up behind Reid’s desk. It featured just two words, and two decades later, it still offers the simplest understanding of Reid’s leadership.
“Don’t Judge.”
— Why a simple 3 x 5 notecard with two words explains Andy Reid’s leadership style
More open protocols please
This post at the MIT Technology Review emphasises what most of us already know. Still, it’s always worth reiterating the importance of having an open web with open protocols.
If we get this right, so much is possible. Not too long ago, the internet was full of builders and people working together: the open web. Email. Podcasts. Wikipedia is one of the best examples — a collaborative project to create one of the web’s best free, public resources. And the reason we still have it today is the infrastructure built up around it: the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation protects the project and insulates it from the pressures of capitalism. When’s the last time we collectively built anything as good?
It is still early days for Bluesky’s AT Protocol. Still, I’m hopeful that such a protocol will herald a more open web with more collaborative projects not dictated by ads and capitalism in the future.