Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

With current trends towards front end frameworks and micro-services, it's refreshing to see advice that goes against these trends in software development. Applies to more than just software development as well you know.

When starting an application your goal should be to ship a MVP (minimum viable product) as fast as reasonably possible while still maintaining quality. To help make that successful you need to be minimal. Evaluate if you really need to start with a front-end framework or if you can get by with static HTML and JavaScript where needed. Build a monolith instead of starting with microservices to avoid the unnecessary overhead that affects development, infrastructure, and team productivity. In every situation you encounter, ask yourself if what you’re trying to do is really necessary.

— Start Simple by Thoughtbot

More Raspberry Pi Goodies

The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 3 and now Western Digital's new dedicated PiDrive makes the argument for buying a couple of Pi 3s even more compelling.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

— Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi by arstechnica

A fantastic write up of your average day being tracked.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than mine). Each of those stores of course assigned trackers to me as well and soon enough I was followed by my own personal veritable posse of non-descript guys with little black books making notes.

— Trackers by Jacques Mattheij

These are the actions that could change your world.

Forget the bold gesture. Don't bank on the big project. Focus instead on the little daily actions, the ones that are so small and routine that they are barely noticed.

Those are the actions that are more likely to shape, for good or ill, your future.

— Little Things by Michael Wade

The Concentration of Power in Journalism

A great post about how the concentration of power in journalism now lies with technology providers and social media platforms.

Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.

— Facebook is eating the world by Columbia Journalism Review

Reviewed: On Writing Well

I finally finished William Zinsser's On Writing Well last night.

Cover of On Writing Well

I've been making slow progress through it due to the fact I read it last thing at night and only managed a few pages at a time.

I've been chewing through a number of books on writing ever since I read Stephen King's book, On Writing. Educating myself on writing is just as important as my continual learning of software development, which is why I spend the time I do reading books like this.

I didn't take as many notes as I probably should have done, but I've queued the book up again on my reading list so that I do take notes on it the second time around. The main reason I enjoyed the book is that it doesn't focus on non-fiction writing.

I was glad to see there was even a section on writing about science and technology including this gem of advice:

Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.

— On Writing Well by William Zinsser

I recommend this book for anyone interested in improving their writing regardless of the form it takes. This book won't make you a successful published author but it will make look at your writing in a more critical way and that's not a bad thing if you want to improve.

Ulysses for iPhone

Ulysses is now out for the iPhone. Having used it on my MacBook for a couple of weeks, I might still be swayed by the shininess of a new tool, although it is one of the best writing tools I've used.

I'm still on the fence about using my phone for writing though, but if it writing on your iPhone is your thing, it may be worth checking out.

I call Ulysses a writing environment, though not really a publishing environment (more on that in a bit), because you're surrounded with a rich set of writing tools. Put another way, it's one of the very few apps that feels relatively complete. That doesn't mean it isn't finished or there's nothing left to fix or add. It's more that Ulysses leaves me with the fewest questions, frustrations, and frictions of any writing app I've used.

— Review: Ulysses 2.5 for iPad and, now, iPhone by MacStories