Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Sippin’ on my coffee, sittin’ on the couch, typin’ this post out on my iPhone. Like most mornings the house is quiet so it’s a perfect time to write, or post a bunch of links.
The week has been good overall. Work was fine. Pretty quiet. Our Canadian and Brazilian brethren were off yesterday for Good Friday. I suppose that had a lot to do with it, well that and No Meetings Friday. 😃
Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.
I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.
I understand Gus’ sentiment. Swift feels, to me, like a dumping ground for programming language nerds.
Apple had pushed it as a simple language to learn. Sure, the basics may be simple, but overall it’s an extremely complex language, especially all the new Swift Concurrency stuff. Does anyone really understand when to use @MainActor?
I’m behind the curve when it comes to fully embracing Swift Concurrency. I currently have one place in Stream for Mac that uses it, and it’s nice, but I’m not implementing any Sendable types, just taking advantage of Task() and Async/Await.
Get a first look at Daniel Suárez’s Telcel-Infinitum scheme as he makes a homecoming to Mexico at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, June 15
This is cool! NASCAR is headed back to Mexico! I’d actually love to attend this event but I didn’t plan for it this year and I’m not sure how much Kim would appreciate me going all the way to Mexico to watch a NASCAR race when NASCAR is mainly a south-eastern thing. I could drive 45 minutes to Richmond Raceway if I wanted to see a race. 😃
I still think Daniel Suárez should try to get Papas and Beer onboard. 🍻
After growing up using Commodore and Atari computers, the first PC I bought with my own money (as a college student) was a “Macintari” in 1987. Proper Macs were super expensive, so instead, I purchased a Mega ST series Atari computer, which ran the same CPU as Macs of that era (the Motorola 68000). If you installed a Macintosh ROM (or EPROM) chip, you could boot into Macintosh System Software (as macOS was known at the time) and use the Atari hardware as if it were a “real” Apple Macintosh computer.
I had no idea you could run MacOS on an Atari computer!
If you’re interested in one persons observations about moving from Windows to Mac, this is a good one. It’s interesting to me how much third party software Windows users use today.
I have no idea how muchuva pain it would be for me to go back to Windows. Ive been gone for so long and it’s changed so much since 2006.
Specifically, Schleswig-Holstein is dumping Windows and Office for Linux and the popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice. The Schleswig-Holstein cabinet made this decision not because of Linux and LibreOffice’s technical superiority, but because it values “digital sovereignty.”
This is another way our fascist regime has affected American companies.
On the flip side this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop! 😜
Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.
Of course I latch on to the left handed thing. My folks converted me from left to right handed when I was pretty darned young because “The world is made for right handed people.”
The madness started, as baseball madness tends to start, with the New York Yankees: At the end of March, during the opening weekend of the new season, the team’s first three batters hit home runs on the first three pitches thrown their way. The final score, 20–9, was almost too good to be true. And then, everybody noticed the bats.
This is a great read and why we need science in the world. 😃 Leave it to a physicist to redesign, of all things, the baseball bat. Something that hasn’t really changed in well over 100 years. Progress! Hopefully the Majors doesn’t outlaw them.
There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-women flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.
The Blue Origin trip into space with a bunch of crazy rich people definitely seems a bit tone deaf.
At least it didn’t blow up like Space Karen’s rockets do.
Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.
I’ve always been impressed by Mr. Zeldman’s willingness to write about his life. You will find many posts labeled My Glamorous Life where he shares personal life stories. He’s a great writer, technologist, and by all accounts and amazing human being. I wish him nothing but the best. ❤️
Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.
I like this take. I’ve had numerous junior developers say to me something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see what you have to teach me.” Oftentimes that comment is met with a blank stare. 😳 The “teachings” will mostly come organically. I’ve just been around long enough to know how to build software from concept, to development, to shipping, and everything in between. I’ve had great mentors along the way and suffered through issues that seem to crop up in every product I’ve ever worked on. Experience is just age, repetition, and pain, but I do love sharing my experiences of only to help others avoid the pain.
We all know the saying “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.
All monster companies eventually experience problems scaling up. Oftentimes it’s because they believe that standardization on some methodology is going to save them. Well, that and people.
We’re still going through growing, and transition, pains at WillowTree since the TELUS acquisition. The cultural and systems transitions haven’t been easy on anyone.
Someday I’ll write about it a bit more.
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!
The remodel turned out really nice and it’s great to see them embrace the community by opening the doors for events. John Scalzi is one of those folks I wish I could know personally. He’s just so down to earth I imagine he’d be a great friend.
Forced RTO (Return To Office) is unacceptable, that is no discussion. But please also don’t forget how privileged many of us are to be able to work from home. The factory workers, the people working in grocery stores, doctors, nurses, truck drivers — the majority of the workforce out there — never had this luxury. I have always kept that in mind. They made it possible for people like us to actually be able to work from home.
The forced return to office put in place by many companies has been hard on folks and companies alike. WillowTrees CEO likes to have folks in the office. He likes the buzz and the randomness of bumping into folks. I can appreciate that and I also appreciate working from home. I must give him props for not forcing folks to return to office because he easily could have. ❤️
Would I go back if everyone was required to return? Yes, absolutely. There is a part of me that misses it.
Thanks to the openness of Mastodon and Bluesky, it’s possible to follow accounts across network boundaries.
And that’s the kind of openness that Tapestry, Reeder, and Surf are built on.
There is a new class of software that spans open networks and closed networks. I’ve thought about doing this for Stream ever since I learned more about ActivityPub. Folks can follow Mastodon feeds via RSS so it’s made it less important to write code to connect to ActivityPub directly, so I haven’t bothered.
The fine folks at The Iconfactory have created a pretty ingenious way to connect to any source material you’d like by writing a plug-in to Tapestry in JavaScript! Neat, right? 🙏🏼
Begs the question: What does native mean? 🤔
Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. Now it turns out that these generators were not exactly legal, yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.
Musks genius is being a narcissist and a sociopath. He doesn’t give a crap about anything or anyone who stands in his way. He and our President are one and the same. Ignore the law and do whatever they want. 🤬
I’ve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and it’s been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.
Its been a week. My back is really messing with me. I’ve had this problem for years and years and I absolutely hate when I’ve injured it. The meds I’m on leave me really sleepy so I wouldn’t be surprised if this set of links is short.
Its a bit late morning thanks to Daylight Saving. We’ve sprung ahead an hour.
