Matthew Lang

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.

As I picked up our New Year’s Day order from the butchers this morning, I was reminded of how little I have used my local butchers and other local stores since I started working in an office.

When I worked from home, I shopped locally every week. Very rarely did we have to do our grocery shopping online. I was able to pick up most things from local stores during my lunch break. It was a good time to get away from my desk and get some air. Now that I commute to an office though, I don’t have the time in the day to continue to shop locally, and the stores where I work aren’t convenient too within my lunch break.

My thoughts on this are still a bit incoherent despite having tried to write this for close to an hour now, but here’s what I have in raw form.

1. More people should be allowed to work remotely. Working from home gives you more time to run a few errands as well as shop locally and support local businesses.
2. More people should be allowed to work fewer hours. Is a 40 hour work week really necessary anymore? Working fewer hours would allow us the time shop locally as opposed to just feeding more and more orders into the Internet retail giants.

I’m not an economist, and I’m sure there are holes in these thoughts, but if I could have seen the damage that internet shopping has caused to my local town, then I would have been a bit more selective about my spending habits over the years.

I’m usually the first person to defend the march of technology, but it’s come to a point where even I’m not sure that the change has been for good.