I fell for Ms. Priss’ trap. She rolled onto her back, exposing her belly, and sprung the trap when I started rubbing it. 😆
I fell for Ms. Priss’ trap. She rolled onto her back, exposing her belly, and sprung the trap when I started rubbing it. 😆
Just watching a little TV.
This fella knows how to live. He parties all night and sleeps all day.
More flowers coming in.
Flynn in his natural state.
Kim’s lilacs are coming in.
Kim’s first set of seasonal flowers are coming in. I love watching this area of our flower beds progress through the seasons. One set of flowers will die back as another set emerges. It’s amazing.
Momma Eastern Bluebird is giving me the stink eye. She’s not happy I’m 10 feet away as she builds her nest. Dad shows up once in a while to stare me down. 😆
Sitting on the front porch this morning, enjoying a nice cup-o-joe while I work.
Since I don’t really code any longer I had to open my Stream project so I’d look like a legit developer. 🤣
You can support my endeavors as an “Indie” dev by downloading Stream and leaving a tip! Thank you! 🙏🏼
This is the largest “refactor” I’ve done with my Home Screen in a really long time. I even moved one of my apps — RxCalc — to a different screen and stashed it in a group.
Just mowed the lawn — weeds — for the first time this year. Cut down a small tree for Kim, it was in really bad shape, and trimmed up some stumps remaining from last years post snowstorm cleanup.
It’s nice to get the yard cleaned up a bit but I’m pooped out. My legs are like “DUDE! We’re too old for this!” 😁
I’m not sure what kind of birdie this is but it’s a beautiful blue and orange. The picture doesn’t do it justice.
Good morning y’all. It’s raining this morning, a repeat performance of last weekend. I did manage to get the steps completed in the garden now we let the rain test my work.
This week I had to get a tooth and removed and a bone graft due to a 20 plus year old root canal failing. I don’t recommend it. 🦷
Time to go lay down in a field and have Kim throw some dirt on me. 😂
On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the roster of cities made notorious by a mass shooting epidemic much of the country seems prepared to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms.
No words. 😔
Today marks the debut of the new Microsoft Teams app, released in public preview for Windows customers.
This redesign of Teams looks extremely thoughtful, well planned, and well executed. I’d like to get my hands on it and run it through dumpbin and other tools to see just how it’s put together.
It’s my understanding it’s a native app — no more Electron — with an HTML/CSS/JavaScript filling using the new, Chromium based, WebView2 control
It also means no Mac or Linux client until they can get those items ported to Mac and Linux. You can write C#/.Net code on Linux and Mac today, but as far as I know WebView2 hasn’t been ported. Heck, who knows, the shell around the app could be written in C++? I’m not really clear on that bit, it’s why I want to get my hands on it. 😁
The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future.
Red States are becoming more and more radical. The entire anti-LGBQT, anti-woman, anti-education, movement is in full swing.
Next thing you know women will have to walk 10 paces behind their husbands in their modest to the ground dress with their eyes on the ground. Disgusting.🤬
In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction.
Neat little story about how podcasting got its name. 👍🏼
A dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.
The authoritarian was outwitted in this story. If you haven’t heard about this yet go read it. 🤭
This year is supposed to be the year of the Rust GUI. So why is it still so unsafe?
This discussion focused around handles in Windows is quite interesting.
Having written a lot of Windows code that uses handles everywhere — HWND, HINSTANCE, HANDLE, anyone(?) — because that’s the way the Windows API works I don’t see it as an issue.
A HANDLE is a persisted thing that allows Windows to shuffle the underlying object around if needed. It’s a remnant of 16-bit Windows days, because 640k of memory was a precious commodity. It’s a safe thing to the developer as I see it but I do not fault anyone wanting to make things even safer for developers. 👍🏼
Trump is and has always been the sort of person who believes that laws are for the little people, and has acted accordingly.
I love John Scalzi’s books and prior to Twitter becoming a worthless piece of poo I really enjoyed reading his tweets. In case you don’t know he’s had a blog for many years and it doesn’t disappoint.
We believe that designer-developer handoff is broken and to solve this problem well requires software that is familiar to designers and developers alike—software that makes building an app’s user interface a collaborative process instead of handing off files back and forth.
I’d really like to take a look at Judo to see how it could improve my own coding efforts. Stream for Mac could use some help. It’s been a slog for me and I keep switching between AppKit and SwiftUI. I really need to focus on SwiftUI going forward.
Only two centuries ago, a shallow inland sea dominated California’s Central Valley.
Tulare Lake is fascinating. California Highway 41 runs right through the lake between Lemoore and Kettleman City. I’ve heard tale in the olden days one had to catch a barge or take a boat from Lemoore to Kettle City.
We drove that route all the time when we lived there. It’s one way to get from the San Joaquin Valley to the Central Coast and all the lovely towns and beaches we fell in love with. Places like San Luis Obispo, Avila Beach, Cambria, Morro Bay, and Pismo Beach.
As it is today you’d have to go out to I-5 and loop back to get to Kettleman City.
I took these pictures of Flynn a few days back and saved them for today. It is #Caturday after all!
Flynn emerged from his blanket to look for the bird that caught his attention, then back under the blanket he went. 😆
Where’s Flynn? I don’t see him.
View from the back deck. It’s 80F outside, sunny, with a slight breeze. Pretty magical. 🕶️
It looks like 20 years after the initial post and at least 14 years after leaving Blogger I’ve broken the rules. 🤣
Who thought this would be done today? 😳
Oh, right, it was me. The further I go up the hill the more dirt I have to remove. 🤣
Kim’s flag selection for March.
I had a very vivid dream last night the moon was extremely close to Earth and you could see other planets behind it in the distance. The sky was always dark but you could see the stars. On the opposite side of the moons orbit around Earth was a clump of asteroids, or whatever the proper term is for a collection of rocks traveling in a pack. When the collection of rocks was passing by a number of them would fall from the sky, crashing into Earth. We all knew it was the end of our planet because the moon was going to eventually crash into us and there was nothing we could do.
It’s so difficult to describe. It’s like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie. It was both beautiful and terrifying.
This is Kim’s flag choice for January and February. I meant to get a picture of it in January but finally captured it a couple days back.
As I’m getting started it’s a nice crisp 27F outside just before 8AM EST. The sun is out and will be all day. We’ve had a very mild winter this year, with the exception of that polar blast around Christmas, and I don’t expect us to get any snow.🌞
My coffee is in hand, time to get started. Hope you enjoy the links. ☕️
A gunman opened fire on Monday night on the main campus of Michigan State University, killing three people and injuring five, before an hours-long manhunt for the suspect ended with his death, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot, police said.
It’s the guns. I don’t know what else to say. Over and over and over again we see this and do nothing. A truly American thing and not one to be proud of. 😞
Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl for the 2nd time in 4 years, beating the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on a FG with 8 seconds left
I’m happy for the Chiefs and their fans. It was a great Super Bowl, a nail biter, not a blowout. Oh, and the Mahomes to Kelce connection is without a doubt the best in football and one of the best ever. If Patrick Mahomes can stay healthy and have a 20-year run he’ll break all kinds of records and win some more rings.
Just short of the 10th anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.
Given Apple’s new chip architecture with memory and processor built into the chip I have a difficult time defining what a pro machine should or would be. Maybe you have to accept a new definition? Maybe it doesn’t mean a flexible and expandable architecture?
What I’d like to see is Apple give the Professional computing world a way to use their current investment in Mac Pro a way to replace the x86 based Xeon chips with Apple Silicon. Of course Apple would never do such a thing because money. 💸
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 15, 2022 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution to power and protect digital experiences, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers.
I follow a number of indie software developers and they tend to use Linode for their service backends. Two that come to mind are Micro.blog, the system I use for publishing my blog, and Overcast, the indie podcast app for iOS. I’m sure there are many more out there I don’t know about. I’ve never done any large scale backend work for my indie endeavors but if I did I’d most likely choose Linode because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and have great customer service.
Hopefully they don’t start hiking prices, laying off people, and becoming a terrible place to host. 🤞🏼
Spotify’s podcast push began in earnest in 2016, when Ek invited audio executives including higher ups at Gimlet to the company’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to explain the emerging American podcast market.
Spotify calls their recorded audio podcasting. It’s not. Podcasting is the audio plus a delivery mechanism in the form of RSS. Yes, you can have a podcast as I’ve defined it behind a paywall. They just want to lock you into their app with their advertising and try to upsell you on other things. That’s fine. It’s their business but don’t call them podcasts. Ok, off the soap box. 📦
I was listening to the Pivot Podcast last night and Scott Galloway point out that very few podcasts make a profit. That’s true of what he defines as a podcast. Remember, this started as an open technology built by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. It was used and loved long before businessmen decided they could monetize it. Just like blogging. It’s was and still is a way for us mere mortals to communicate to the outside world, even if we’re not paid a dime to do it.
Oh, and I have a feeling some of the small podcasting shops are doing just fine, but they do things differently and have well loved shows. They’re just not exclusive to Spotify or Apple or whatever Big Co place you get your podcasts. They’re fully open and downloadable using your podcast player of choice because they’re built on top of RSS as the delivery mechanism.
The key phrase to listen for when you hear a podcast advertised is ”Download wherever you get your podcasts.” Then you know it’s a real podcast.
The hearing got incredibly creepy when Arkansas state Sen. Matt McKee asked a trans pharmacist if she had a penis. “Do you have a penis?” he asked the woman, who seemed stunned at the question.
Unbelievable. I wish we could get past this and so many other things. So many people want to control how others behave and how they live their life. Often times based on some form of religion they’ve twisted to support their hate, disdain, or jealously of others.
Let people live their lives. Show them respect and grace as fellow human beings. It’s not our job to tell folks how they should live. That goes for women, brown skinned people, and the LBGTQ+ community. ❤️
After half a decade of sedate, steady growth, Mastodon suddenly surged, from 600,000 daily users to 2.6 million in the space of months.
Some folks are already writing off Mastodon. Silly people. If you’re looking to get a huge following and interacting with movie stars, influencers, government officials, and the rich and famous, don’t expect that from Mastodon. It’s not built for that. It’s built like your everyday neighborhood for us commoners to engage in. It’s real people carrying on real discussions. Sure, there’s gonna be some hate but there are mechanisms in place to take care of that crap. I love it and I’m excited to see it grow. There’s no algorithm to encourage you to follow people or corporate master to satisfy and no need to grow to billions of users because of it.
It’s like blogging. It’s all open and up to us, everyday people, to keep it. ✌🏼
Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.
Talk about hateful, mean, and unsympathetic to fellow human beings. DeSantis is an authoritarian who wants to mold Florida into his own disgusting image. He doesn’t want you to think for yourself or question authority, no sir. He wants a bunch of dumb drones serving the rich and powerful.
Get out if you can. It’s a terrible state. If you can’t, or don’t want to, I wish you luck and hope you find a way to help change the state. 🍀
In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times.
I don’t know Joseph personally but I’ve interacted with him on the NetNewsWire Slack and Mastodon and he’s a really kind, thoughtful, selfless man. He’s given me feedback on Stream and Mac programming questions. All that to say he’s one of the good ones.
Anywho, this is a great piece on how he built an XCFramework with a Rust core. Rust has become the new, safe, language for creating highly performant software and being able to use it natively on iOS or Mac and integrate it right into Xcode is wonderful. 🧰
Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!
Web tools continue to improve to the point that native apps may become a thing of the past for many companies. Of course folks like me will continue to do native iOS, and hopefully Mac, apps for as long as we can, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Native apps are becoming less and less important with each passing day. Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.
A really great piece by Jamelle Bouie. Please, go read it if you can.
Yours truly who accidentally started a conversation about SwiftUI List performance. Smooth, fast, stable, code is important to me and most developers. we do strive to make our apps the best they can be. I’m still learning, still trying, to make all my apps better each time I work on one. This conversation may change how I do Stream for Mac.
Happy Valentines Day to those who celebrate!
“One of the biggest reasons the title of “Staff Engineer” is so hard to wrap up in one quick explanation is because it entails such a wide scope. Over the course of my time as a Staff Engineer, I’ve had responsibilities that fall into all of the following categories at one time or another”
Up until I became an Engineering Director I’d been a Senior Software Engineer since the early 2000’s, not long before Microsoft acquired Visio. I was so self conscious about the title change I asked that nobody talk about it. I didn’t tell anyone. Why? I was kind of embarrassed because I thought there was no way I could be a Senior Engineer amongst all the legendary Principal Engineers I worked with. At Visio a Principal Software Engineer was equivalent to what we call a Staff Software Engineer at WillowTree.
Fast forward to 2019 when I join WillowTree we had Staff Software Engineers and I had never actually heard the term. We also had Principal Software Engineers. The difference was a Staff focused on technical stuff and the Principal on managing folks and helping them grow.
Since then the Principal role changed name to Engineering Director. Same responsibilities, new title.
One of the things I found attractive about WillowTree was the dual track a Senior Software Engineer had the choice of taking when they promoted to the next level. I’d been thinking for quite a while I’d like to become more of a people manager and get out of day-to-day coding. To this day I still love writing code and building product. I fill that need today by building my own products. They’re small, digestible, apps I enjoyed building and maintaining, especially Stream.
Since I became an Engineering Director I’ve caught myself missing the day-to-day work of building a product. By that I mean doing the code. It’s a real transition to become a people and project manager instead of writing code. It’s taken time for me to really embrace the change and I’m finally started to settle into it.
A part of me wonders if I could be a Staff Engineer and I think I could. Staff folks tend to work on stuff around the edges, gluing all the various bits together, making sure the build pipeline gets setup and working, working with the client to decide architectures, third-party services, and overall strategy. They also tend to jump on big issues, bugs, and hop around technologies at will and pick them up quickly. In my experience at WillowTree they have the ear of our client.
My history tells me I have filled a lot of those roles, all of them in fact, but the thing that I feel would stop me from doing that job is speed. I’ve never been quick to make change. Yes, I can adapt, but I’m not one to do it overnight. I’m not what I’d label intelligent. I work really hard at what I do to make things soak into my brain. Over the course of my career I’ve outworked people. I don’t give up when I’m onto something. My lack of speed has always been, I believe, my biggest weakness.
That’s why the people manager track was so interesting to me. I knew it was time to get out of coding, I love mentoring, and it feels really great to see others grow in their career.
But I sure do love sitting in a quiet room building software and if I could work on my own projects all day, every day, I’d do it in a heartbeat. 😃
Self portrait December 26, 2021