Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been an interesting week, it’s just felt off for some reason. I think part of it is having our new pup — Cocoa — in the house and part of it is work.
Ever since our layoff things haven’t felt the same, because frankly, they’re not. Our company structure has changed and we’re still adapting and moving thing around. It feels way more corporate than ever but I suppose that happens when you get beyond a couple hundred people. We’re near one thousand, even after the layoff.
After the project I’m working on comes to a close at the end of July I’m hoping to get a little bench time to work on my SwiftUI (worst technology name ever) skills and shake the cobwebs out of the old programmer brain. 🧠
Ashur Cabrera
We’re giving ourselves the weekend to rest, then Phase 2 kicks off Monday when we start working on paperwork and logistics to pack a few bags, our pup, and try our luck at spending the next few years abroad. (More on this later in the summer ☺️)
Ashur is a friend, all around great fella, and very talented web developer. He’s even contributed his amazing web talent to Stream and I’m forever grateful for it.
Anywho, I’m so excited for him and this new adventure. Doing it while you’re young is the right call. Do it while your body can take it. Get out, explore!
I still hope to convince Kim we need to go all in on the RV lifestyle. Still not there yet. Maybe someday.
Enjoy this new adventure Ashur! 🧳
Joel Clay • blog.meldstudio.co
It is also what backs a number of the Swift concurrency primitives – with a cross platform, open source implementation of CoreFoundation released as the backing implementation. That source code is invaluable in gaining a better understanding of how CFRunLoop works. At just under 5k lines of quite readable C code, one could grok it at a high level in a few hours.
If you know me you know I love browsing C and C++ code. The thing I find extremely interesting about this code is how many OS’es it is targeted to run on; macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Makes me wonder who’s writing code against those platforms and how the new all Swift based frameworks work on those platforms.
This article takes a deep dive into CFRunLoop and it’s a good read if you’re into C code. 😃
NBC News
The Supreme Court issued a divided ruling on a pair of challenges to affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, with potential implications across higher education and beyond.
The Republican built court is doing its job dismantling years and years of progress. They’ve already set Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and now affirmative action back. What’s next?
Here’s hoping most institutions of higher education don’t change their policies. Just leave that to the rich white racist institutions that take in dumbass rich white kids whose parents buy their way in.
Speaking of dumbass rich white kids…
Daniel Golden • ProPublica
My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations.
Screw Harvard and the entire Ivy League. As a nation we need to get our belief that going to one of those schools magically makes you smarter or better than everyone else. They cater to the rich and powerful who can afford to buy their way in, like Jared Kishner’s dad did for him. It’s all about keeping the rich and powerful in power.
Sure, turn away the dark skinned people with great grades and SAT scores and let the idiots in.
I’m sure there are many other schools doing the same thing and they should all be shamed.
The question is how to stop it?
Doc Searles
For almost the whole time I wrote at the old blog, the URL doc.searls.com took you there as a redirect. Now that URL goes here, directly. Put another way, this was a Harvard blog until yesterday (and again, everything until that day remains so: that’s its legacy). From now on, it’s mine alone. It has crossed from one state to another. I’m not sure yet how it will change, if at all. But I feel energized about what new things I might do with it.
Speaking of Harvard, it sounds like they’ve shut down and archived a bunch of blogs and their associated blogging tools. I’d venture to guess the tools they were using were long in the tooth, not well maintained, and a security risk, but I could be completely wrong about that! 😆
It’s nice to see Doc in his new home. I just need to remember to subscribe to the new site.
Keaton Brandt
Instead, I think it’s safe to say it’s largely Apple’s fault. Or, maybe “fault” is the wrong word. We’ve moved on from the era of beautiful Mac software to the era of web-based apps, for better and for worse. There’s no one simple reason for this evolution, but it’s interesting to think through some of the factors.
This piece goes to all kinds of interesting places. I think the bottom line is Apple is running Microsoft’s playbook from the late 90’s when the web was taking off and they were desperately trying to keep folks tied into their OS and tools.
Eventually Microsoft got their act together and found their way into web technologies. Heck, they even went as far as scrapping their own home built browser for Chromium, but that’s another story I’m very opinionated about.
Jay Barmann • sfist.com
This is very sad. HRD Coffee Shop (521A Third Street), which has seen two generations of owners in SoMa/South Beach and became so well known for its fusion-style burritos and Mongolian beef cheesesteak a decade ago that they were paid a visit by Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives in 2010, closed for good on Friday, June 23. The restaurant had just celebrated its 70th birthday this year.
This was one of the places on my “need to eat there someday” list and it’s a real shame to see it close down. I really wanted to try their spicy pork and kimchi burrito. Guess that ain’t gonna happen now. 😔
Pieter Hintjens
It’s one of my interview questions: “what is Good Code?” Surprisingly, almost no-one gets it right. It’s not about speed, elegance, language, or style. Good Code is code that solves real problems for real people, in an effective way. Let me list the top 10 rules for writing good code.
I enjoy reading how others approach coding. I’m constantly hearing the term “best practices” and makes me cringe a little.
I don’t agree with Pieter’s number zero rule: Use Git and Github. I know git is super popular and I use it and GitHub every day, but it’s not the only version control system on the planet and there are others that work just fine. The advice I’ve always given folks is pick a version control system and use it.
GitHub is, of course, a very good choice. 😃
[David Pierce • The Verge](<https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social)
To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
I remember how down my brother was when Google shut down Reader. He had a really nice workflow and could navigate Reader with his keyboard. It also had some very unique to Reader features he made good use of. I don’t remember what they were but I should ask him. If they’re unique perhaps Stream could benefit from implementing some? 🤔
Jason Kottke
When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:
I’ve heard about these rules before and they’re no bad at all, especially for smaller, self contained programs. Anything mission critical should be extra safe in its implementation.
Remember when the Mars Lander crashed because the teams used different measurement systems? It only cost $125 million to build. Good times. 💥
Jack Gutzler • beyondtheflag.com
As NASCAR descends upon the streets of Chicago for the inaugural race at the new Chicago Street Course, a new chapter in the sport’s 75-year history will be written.
Since getting into NASCAR I’ve had this one marked on my calendar and wish I could’ve attended it. I’ve never been to Chicago or a NASCAR race, why not get a twofer?
I’ll be watching it from the safety of my own living room this time around. 🛋️
Manton Reece
Meta adopting ActivityPub has the potential to fast-forward the progress of the social web by years. Ever since I grew disillusioned with Twitter a decade ago and started pushing for indie microblogs, then writing a book about social networks and founding Micro.blog, I could only dream of a moment where a massive tech company embraced such a fundamental open API.
I’ve been trying to keep my nose out of the discussions around this on Mastodon. Opinions vary, of course, and some folks are very angry about the whole thing. It mostly boils down to folks in marginalized and discriminated against groups who made their homes on Mastodon being afraid. They don’t want to have to deal with the hate that will come along with an extremely popular, large, instance. I can’t say that I blame them.
I’m hopeful this will all work out and won’t divide the community.🕊️
The thing that stands out to me is Meta has all these absolutely amazing people working for them and what exactly do they work on? New ways to extract personal information or track people around the web?
I’m on a project at work using React Native but not in the typical way, which is to say it didn’t start as a React Native project. It’s an exiting app out in the world actively uses by, I’d imagine, tens and tens of thousands of people. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Bottom line is, it’s a frontline app and is important to our client.
With all that in mind here’s what our client is looking to do. We are building new features in React Native and leveraging much of the internal native code to fetch network data, build models, and return that data to React Native code. The API or Interface to the native code is well defined and implemented on iOS and Android. The React Native team code is the same for both platforms. I’m part of the platform team integrating React Native into the existing app and providing the API/Interfaces to the React Native developers.
The one really ugly bit, at least to me, is the requirement to use npm. I know web devs are accustomed to using it but it feels really strange and fragile to use these two package managers to be able to build and run an app that includes React Native. I know I’ve run into random issues I can’t explain when node packages change or are added but that’s just me being a big whiny cry baby developer. I understand it well enough to be dangerous but I don’t currently have that deep knowledge I like to have. I’m learning new stuff everyday but I’ve only scratched the surface.
I can see why companies are making this choice, especially companies with an army of React developers. It makes complete sense for them to build great UI with their existing developers. And, yes, you can build a great iOS UI with React Native. I’ve witnessed it first hand. If you didn’t know a view was React Native you wouldn’t know the difference in this app. It’s seamless. It’s great in that way.
Sorry for the lateness in publishing today. We had a deployment of some services for a project at work and duty calls! I did have my fair share of coffee to get the old noggin going this morning.
We’ve been home for a week now and it’s been really nice to sleep in our own bed!
There is much consternation on Mastodon around Project 92. It’s rumored to support the Mastodon API and folks are not happy about it. Why? I have no idea.