Weeknotes 183

The move to lazy.nvim is complete. I’m mostly happy I’ve done this but there are a few small things to work out. I decided to move ahead with the merge anyway and sort them later/never.

I did re-install the POWKIDDY v10 and installed some games. It was a fairly painless process.

For some reason it doesn’t seem to want to charge past 75% battery capacity. I’m not sure if I care enough to do anything about it yet. I will keep playing with it and see what happens. The whole product is a fairly ramshackle affair, but that is part of the appeal with these sort of things.

TRMNL

TRMNL is an e-ink companion that helps you stay focused.

Must. Not. Buy.

Amongst the many projects I’ve added to my “whilst I’m taking a break” list is to finally build the keyboard I bought in 2020. In fact, I bought enough parts for two almost identical keyboards. “Two?” It doesn’t make sense to me either, but here we are.

To that end, I’ve been practicing soldering with some cheap kits I bought for the task. I procrastinated for ages, but enjoyed it once I got into it. So far the kits have been through-hole component, which I think are generally considered easier to deal with. The keyboard parts are surface mount instead, so that is the next thing to try.

The long awaited Ghostty terminal emulator has been released after a long private beta period. I’ve installed it, but I have no immediate plans to move away from iTerm 2. Mitchell Hashimoto wrote about the experience of building it.

swup

Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites

I was initially pretty interested in this library. View Transitions are a really important part of moving away from the cancer that is the SPA, but when playing with the demo it acted in a few strange broken ways which took the off shine pretty quickly.

I’ll keep it in-mind to try again should the need arise.

I managed to catch a cold whilst holiday. It peaked on Christmas Day – good times. Thankfully it was overall fairly mild, and Christmas was a quiet one anyway so it wasn’t too bad.

I don’t know how to build software and you don’t either.

The longer I work in tech, the less confident I get about any of these big questions. I’ve seen enough things work that I thought were terrible ideas, and vice versa. In fact, I’m not convinced it’s even possible to be justifiably confident that there’s a right answer to these questions. Nobody knows!

This really resonated with me.

As we become more experienced we understand that there are no correct answers. Only trade-offs. This makes dealing with less experienced colleagues difficult as they are absolutely sure of their correctness. And to make it worse, they seem to be highly productive to their non-technical bosses due to their over abundance of confidence and Pull Requests containing hundreds of changes.

I know it’s a cliché, but the amount of space taken up by old node_modules/ (and to be fair, Rails log files) is crazy. I freed up ~20GB just by casually browsing the filesystem and deleting.