Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

First hit of the year

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!

Don't forget that text is everything

Graydon Hoare suggests we always bet on text.
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
I wholeheartedly agree. You can keep video clips, online meetings, voice memos and all the stuff. Text is the ultimate form of communication.

In a change from my regular Leuchttrum notebooks that I use, I wanted to try something different. Last week I ordered a Dingbats Wildlife notebook.

It’s a bit bigger than the Leuchttrum notebook which I don’t mind. It also includes a single bookmark as opposed to the Leuchttrum’s three. Hardly a deal-breaker as I can add my own bookmarks.

Aside from being eco-friendly, the notebooks come in many colours. 

It's been a code and coffee morning

I'm trying to build a bit more flexibility into a Rails application by adding the ability to have multiple widgets on the one page.

From a presentation perspective, the problem looks easy. Any number of widgets for a page can be modelled to be presented as a complete web page. It doesn't matter how the data is put together, e.g. flat files, canned models, hard-coded HTML.

What complicates the problem is how the user creates and manipulates these widgets to their needs. I've seen enough back-end interfaces for various products to know it can be done. The Mailbrew interface, which has similar functionality, is how I want this feature to work.

Instead of sitting at the text editor and blindly coding my way out of this, I've been using my iPad to sketch out a few ideas of how widgets of different shapes will relate to the page, and how a page will assemble these widgets. The problem is starting to unravel now.

Might be time for another coffee.

First paragraph: Troy

Troy. The most marvellous kingdom in all the world. The Jewel of the Aegean. Glittering Ilium, the city that rose and fell not once but twice. Gatekeeper of traffic in and out of the barbarous east. Kingdom of gold and horses. Fierce nurse of prophets, princes, heroes, warriors and poets. Under the protection of ARES, ARTERMIS, APOLLO and APHRODITE she stood for years as the paragon of all that can be achieved in the arts of war and peace, trade and treaty, love and art, statecraft, piety and civil harmony. When she fell, a hole opened in the human world that may neve be filled, save in memory. Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lost a part of ourselves.

— Troy by Stephen Fry

Can SAAS build a better vaccination system?

Deloitte's system to manage the management of vaccination has come under fire for being unusable and in some cases, even abandoned for paper-based solutions.
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?
This isn't great for any system that is rolled out for the public to use. But the staggering thing for me is that they were awarded the contract on a no-bid basis as they were the only responsible source to build the system. Also, $44 million should get you a website that doesn't get trumped by a paper-based solution.

Imagine for a second if GitHub had the resources to build this, or even Basecamp or Shopify. Not only do they have the experience of websites that are heavily used every day by millions of users, but they also have the knowledge of building for the public. Their websites are used by millions of people every day, and they have to ensure that design changes need to be clear to the people using it.

Could these companies build a better vaccination system?