Weeknotes 36

Feature flags are great. They enable you to roll out features slowly, or test in production, but they are not free.

They add complexity. They require extra work. They add tech debt. Worth remembering.

I’ve been looking for a good note taking system for a long time. At the moment my “work notes” consists of a massive TODO.md, which has been surprisingly effective. The area were is really falls down is quick notes. I often want to note down how I did a thing, or things to remember for these weeknotes. But there is a lot of friction involved in that at the moment.

I heard about Zettelkasten a while ago, and like the idea, but have failed to integrate it into my life in anyway. So this week I’ve been playing with zk which is a notetaking cli app with Vim integration via zk-nvim. I’m very hopeful that this can work for me, but I’m still setting it up and experimenting.

I felt really let down this week. A decision was made, but it wasn’t the outcome that bothered me, although disappointing, it was the way in which it was handled.

Turns out some people are only nice to you when they need you.

I tried out Cron (no, not that cron) this week. I’m not a heavy calendar user, but I do want quick access to my Zoom meetings and Cron happens to do a great job of that. It has a neat menubar widget that shows all upcoming meetings, and when a meeting is about to start it pops up a button to join. No more “open a web browser in a random tab to start the meeting” mess.

However, Cron uses nearly a gig of memory on my computer 😮 This seems like a lot to just sit there and notify me of meetings? Of course, Cron is an Electron app.

Evaluating Cron reminded of Fantasical on desktop though. I’ve been an iOS user of Fantasical for years and love it, but I’ve never tried the desktop version. It has a similar meeting widget and only uses ~320MB so there is a nice saving there.

I finally wrote a /uses page. I’ve had this on my TODO list for a while now, but a conversation with my friend prompted me to finish it off. Please delight in just how old skool the web page is.

👆 I used a neat little tool called gm to build the page. I considered just going FULL HTML MODE, but there are absolutely tons of links on the page and it gets boring really quickly manually linking them all up. Markdown excels at this.

Hugo has been doing a great job for this website but it requires setup, and I didn’t want that for a quick and dirty page. gm is a thin wrapper around the Goldmark Markdown library that Hugo uses, which is ideal as I’ve been very happy with it in that context.

Why Russia is Invading Ukraine – I found this video really helpful in understanding what is currently going on.