Weeknotes 69

Very good point by Chris Kottom.

Anytime you introduce a network boundary anywhere in your stack, you raise complexity 3x. They’re harder to develop, harder to test, harder to deploy, and harder to support.

When someone in a meeting says “we’ll just make a request to the API” increase your time estimate.

Dogmatic YAGNI is bad. Some things are worth doing before you need them, and Luke Plant has a good list in “YAGNI exceptions”.

I’ve been pillow shopping. I bought three of various types to try them out, knowing that I could lean on the supplier’s 30-day refund policy to return the ones I didn’t like.

Then the supplier went into administration.

So now I have three pillows.

Want to generate a CSS gradient? Try Mesher by CSS Hero.

DHH might have a point.

When WhatsApp was sold to Facebook in 2014, it had almost half a billion monthly users, but a team of just 50 people running everything. Compare this to Twitter, which today has a staff of 7,500 to manage half the number of users. Yet Musk is the crazy one here for suggesting that maybe Twitter could operate with a mere TWO THOUSAND employees? Please.

Regular reminder.

Work relationships can be cordial! Your peers are in the same boat, you owe them solidarity. Your manager can like you, and you can like them, connect as humans. But at no point should you lose sight that the second having you in is no longer profitable, you’re out.

https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1581650396002783234

Recently I setup a Neovim key mapping to grep for the word under the cursor using Telescope grep_string.

vim.keymap.set('n', '<Leader>fw', '<cmd>Telescope grep_string<cr>', { noremap = true })

<leader>fw will grep for the word, show the results, and allow filtering.

With the recent change in Neovim 0.8 to allow using * with visual selections (as I wrote about last week) I thought it would be nice to allow visual selections with Telescope grep_string too.

This is easily accomplished by mapping the same command in Visual mode.

vim.keymap.set('v', '<Leader>fw', '<cmd>Telescope grep_string<cr>', { noremap = true })

“When life gives you lemons, write better error messages” from Wix is a great reminder of how important error messages are, and they provide some great examples of “good” and “bad” messages.

Dylan Smith from GitHub is looking to fix the wonky yellow progress spinner you see in the GitHub UI. I wish I’d never noticed this because now I can’t unsee it.

Who’s the expert I should talk to about browser rendering, SVG, and CSS animation? I’m weeks and weeks down the rabbit hole on a visual bug in @GitHub and I’m dying to know why it happens.

There are some interesting replies in the Twitter thread and the comparisons CodePen is worth a look. It seems like it was fixed by breaking the single SVG into pieces and only animating one of them.

Web browsers are weird.

Gotta catch ‘em all – Be scared of the CSS.