Weeknotes 207

The yearly pilgrimage to Brighton for Brighton Ruby is happening next week. I’m not particularly interested in the content (despite knowing how much works goes into organising an event like this, for which I’m grateful). As usual it’s an excuse to spend time with Ruby friends instead.

I’m glad that many of the usual gang are making it this year, but I need to set my expectations to avoid disappointment. People move on, jobs change, groups shift. Everything changes.

I’ve been watching Black Summer this week. If you like zombies and shooting with very little in the way of discernible story, you’ll love this.

A couple of weeks ago, after talking about my side project with Harry, I set myself an arbitrary deadline in the hope of spurring on development. The deadline was Brighton Ruby. Two weeks is enough time to get something done, but not so much that it feels never ending.

If anything, this arbitrary deadline had the complete opposite effect; I’ve done nothing. I need pills or something. It’s very frustrating.

The other builder didn’t turn up. The first one sent through a specification missing most of the work we’d discussed. A third seemed completely overwhelmed by a basic extension and later said he didn’t have time. Good start.

We went to see Matt Forde on tour this week. I was very much not up for it but I thoroughly enjoyed the show.

I was reading How I program with Agents and this tangential point stood out.

Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both. Let’s not extrapolate from the experiences of engineers who only take jobs maintaining large existing products to the entire industry.

And yet we spend a lot of our time copying the tools, frameworks, and “best practices” of massive tech companies. “Just don’t use it if you don’t like it” – unfortunately few have the option, if you want to work you need to have the buzzword on your CV.

I installed the LiveDebugger Chrome extension which adds the LiveDebugger UI into Chrome’s Developer Tools panel. It makes it far more convenient to use. Alas I haven’t use the debugger much due to my lack of programming.

Introducing Sky, natural computing for the Macintosh.

Computers are incredible. But to make them do exactly what you want, you have to think like a computer. And that’s hard.

Now, with AI, you can chat with computers the same way you talk to people: natural language. We’re on a journey to bring that capability to everything you can do on your computer.

macOS Tahoe – oh my. Hopefully they switch to being actual designers instead of just making things pretty by the time it gets released.

“Phoenix contexts are simpler than you think”

I think this is true, contexts are weirdly misunderstood or and thought complicated when they’re anything but. I wondered it’s likely because they provoke you into thinking about design, and design is hard.

I’ve decided to allow all cookies – I have a lot of sympathy for this.