Weeknotes 212

Am I Becoming Irrelevant?

I bought a second-hand armchair for my office on eBay. We pick it up tomorrow, and it borderline won’t fit in my car, so that should be fun. I’ve acquired some bungie cords which will hopefully help me bend the laws of physics.

Tailwind is the worst form of CSS, except for all the others

I’m happy to report that my Monstera cuttings are doing unexpectedly well having all started to grow very nice roots.

Searls of Wisdom for June 2025

We all live in prisons of our own design, and it’s worth pondering whether being liberated from all constraints would result in true freedom or in the installation of new constraints.

Christopher MacArthur Boyd | Scary Times

I’ve been enjoying Here Comes The Guillotine podcast for some time, and one of it’s hosts, Christopher MacArthur Boyd (whom I’d never heard of before the podcast) released his standup special on YouTube recently. I enjoyed it very much.

Did you know that you can gasp use Linux as your OS if like it better than macOS. You don’t even need to have any ulterior motives.

Stop concatenating URLs with strings — Use proper tools instead

Your code will be more reliable, easier to maintain and less prone to URL formatting errors.

Some good advice and tips here. People love concatenating strings though.

tickety-tick

A browser extension that helps you name branches and write better commit messages

An interesting idea, but I think I’d prefer to do this from the command line rather than the browser. You might not.

The 60-Second Wait: How I Spent Months Solving the Ruby’s Most Annoying Gem Installation Problem

Sounds simple, right? It wasn’t.

I’ve wondered why more people don’t ship statically compiled binaries and now I know why - bit of a nightmare.

A lot of work has gone into this ✅

We finally gave in and bought a new mattress after unhappily living with the one we bought just over a year ago. If we’d been more organised we could’ve returned the current mattress within 100 days, but we were not, so we didn’t.

Hopefully the new one will be better.

NIH Is Far Cheaper Than The Wrong Dependency – this is something that I’ve noticed in the Elixir community – far more willingness to write things from scratch which someone in the Ruby community would definitely rely on a gem for.

Why Most Feedback Shouldn’t Exist

If you can’t point to a specific, concrete impact, then what you have isn’t feedback — it’s a preference. And preferences aren’t performance issues.

This is the case with a lot of technical feedback too. “Best Practices” are just “the way I want to do it” under a different name to make it sound legitimate.

I tried Tim Tams this week. They’re absolutely fine, but would recommend you p-p-p-Pickup a Penguin instead.