Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Where did the week go? I supposed getting to the weekend so quickly is a sign of how much I’m enjoying work.

My coffee is at the perfect temperature, time to have some. I hope you enjoy the links as much as I do putting them together.

Ibrahim Dahman, Hadas Gold, Lauren Iszo, Amir Tal, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder, Richard Allen Greene and Hande Atay Alam • CNN

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the country was “at war” on Saturday, after Palestinian militants in Gaza fired a deadly barrage of rockets and sent gunmen into Israeli territory in a major escalation of the long running conflict between the two sides.

Indiscriminate murder is a terrorists trait. Hamas did just that, killing innocent civilians as they attacked Israel.

I hate war. So many innocent people in Israel and the Gaza Strip will lose their lives over this. Yes, blame Hamas. They’re the assholes who caused this, but in the end innocent folks will die, and that is unacceptable.

I felt this way about invading Iraq and Afghanistan when we did it.

Nothing good will come of it. 😢

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

How a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug

I love stories like this. It just took someone focusing on the problem to provide what turned out to be a fairly simple fix. 👍🏼

Gleb Tsipursky • Fortune

Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.

I love working from home but if WillowTree said I had to return to the office or lose my job I’d go in. We have a great facility, everything you could want right in the building! But I still prefer home. I have a quiet space, configured the way I like, and I can walk up stairs to have a coffee with my wife or do dishes during lunch. 😃

Dan Moren • Six Colors

But as anybody who’s ever tried to troubleshoot iCloud problems can tell you, when it goes wrong, trying to fix it is an exercise in frustration—as I learned recently, in a particularly spectacular fashion.

Thankfully I haven’t run into these issues. The only thing that goes wonky on me is Music. When I stop the stream after work it won’t start back up in the morning when I press play. This has been an issue for years. I’ve learned to just close Music and reopen it. Problem solved.

The iCloud syncing issues is something that’s held me back from adding that support to Stream. Even though I make a feed reader I’m a fan of other readers and I keep up with NetNewsWire. They get a lot of support questions about why their syncing doesn’t work the way folks expect.

I will eventually add this support because Stream for Mac and iOS will need to sync at some point. Of course I need to finish Stream for Mac. 🤔

Matt Wojciakowski • Microsoft Learn

Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution.

I linked to this because it’s a how-to for installing Linux, on a Microsoft site! 😳

Katie Robertson • The New York Times

The Washington Post is cutting about 240 jobs across the organization as it tries to offset challenges with digital subscriptions and advertising, according to a companywide email on Tuesday.

The jobs market is so scary right now. I hope everyone hit by the layoff is able to find work quickly.

Sean Hollister • The Verge

Unity, the company behind the game development engine of the same name, has just announced that its president, CEO, and chairman John Riccitiello “will retire” effective immediately.

And all the Unity developer community cheer!

Hopefully this will lead to a better situation for the company and developers who rely on Unity to build amazing games. 🤞🏼

Jason Snell • Macworld

Apple is destroying the Mac by trying to make it safer

As I said earlier about iCloud I haven’t been bitten by these sorts of issues, knock wood.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft has finalized its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo.

What a crazy deal! Microsoft has purchased franchise games before and I can’t imagine what they’re going to do with these absolute gems! Hopefully they don’t screw them up. That’s always the fear. 👾

Dave Rogers

I think that the whole world may be a lot like Israel in 50 years. Perhaps sooner. You can decide if that’s a good thing.

Dave and I share similar feelings about the state of the United States and the world.

I’ve expected civil war to break out here in the United States. We have radical white supremacist organizations and the like of the Proud Boys who could potentially cause big damage here if they could get organized. The only thing that stands between them and the rest of us is a functioning government, oh, and a citizenry not willing to watch the country descend into chaos.

Gabe Bullard • Nieman Reports

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point

This is good news for NPR and hopefully more news organizations will take that lesson and leave X.

I still believe they should have their own Mastodon instances or band together to create on instance committed to all news organizations.

Now that WordPress have added ActivityPub support it may be easier than ever for news orgs to have a presence on Mastodon.

They should probably participate in Thread and Bluesky to see how things shake out.

Matthias Pfefferle • WordPress

Exciting times are here for all WordPress.com users! The revolutionary ActivityPub feature is now available across all WordPress.com plans, unlocking a world of engagement and interaction for your blog. Your blogs can now be part of the rapidly expanding fediverse, which enables you to connect with a broader audience and attract more followers.

Here we go! WordPress is a huge win for ActivityPub and the open web. Hopefully Tumblr and Thread will follow soon.

I will take this opportunity to point out an indie shop who have fully embraced ActivityPub and integration with Mastodon: Micro.blog. If you’re a blogger and also enjoy a social timeline check them out.

Nolen • eieio.games

I made a game. It’s called Flappy Dird. It’s Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder.

I’ve seen my fellow Visio developers create games inside Visio using shapes and VBA. Two come to mind; Tetris and Asteroids, but I digress.

This game kind of takes the cake because it’s in an OS provided, very important, component.

Really clever. 🥳

Flynn loves him some sleep. 🐱💤

We went to a local apple picking place and I found a bunch of bumble bees to take pictures of.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been really busy at work lately but it’s felt really good overall. Sure I’m feeling a little pressure and I’m a bit stressed but that’s par for the course.

A random aside. There was a time when I did a Movie Line of the Week post on this here blog. It’s been seen from time to time but I thought I’d throw one in here this week.

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: “Have ya paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail.”

I love this film. It’s a great action comedy.

I hope you enjoy the links.

ESPN

Dick Butkus, arguably the fiercest Monster of the Midway, has died at age 80, the Chicago Bears announced Thursday.

This man was an animal on the football field. I for one loved that style of play. I know it’s not great but I can’t help it. When I played football I always wanted to make folks remember I hit them. Problem was, I was a beanpole and was the one getting hammered! 🤣

RIP Mr. Butkus. 🪦

Matt Mullenweg

This month, Automattic had the privilege of working with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) to migrate their early 2000s blogging platform over to our Pressable infrastructure.

I’m really happy to see WordPress do this. There was a time when it seemed the Berkman content would just disappear.

Thank you Matt and WordPress! ❤️

Dr Katie Mack • BBC Science Focus

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of ancient galaxies that shouldn’t exist. A cosmologist explains what could be going on.

I love science. That about sums it up for me. We’ve now explored further than ever before and are finding new and interesting things to understand! 🔭

Sharon Adarlo • Futurism

Microsoft’s data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year, the Associated Press reported earlier this month, to keep cool while training OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, the Microsoft-backed company’s most advanced publicly available large language model.

It’s time for someone to work on a new cooling system for these data centers or stop doing what they’re doing.

Just burn the world down in the name of shareholder value! 🔥

Joseph Foley • Creative Bloq

Bad news for anyone using Unreal Engine for VFX or animation. Epic Games has confirmed that it will begin charging industries outside gaming to use of the 3D graphics engine next year. Fees will be charged on a per-seat basis.

I wonder how Hollywood is going to react to this news?

Also, isn’t Unreal Engine amazing? 🎥

The Register

In a sane world, such massive, sustained incompetence coupled with warning signs a mole rat could see from Mars would have killed Twitter by now, with Musk’s rep as a hands-on CEO on a par with Uri Geller’s as a metalworker.

Yeah, a Space Karen appearance. I have so darned many pieces stashed in Pocket about the man I need to do another Musk Files post.

Can someone please convince the man to sell the twitter.com domain to them and fire up a Mastodon instance? 🐘

By Trisha Thadani,  Rachel Lerman,  Imogen Piper,  Faiz Siddiqui and  Irfan Uraizee • The Washington Post

Teslas guided by Autopilot have slammed on the brakes at high speeds without clear cause, accelerated or lurched from the road without warning and crashed into parked emergency vehicles displaying flashing lights, according to investigation and police reports obtained by The Post.

It’s time to remove “self-driving” and “assisted driving” technologies from cars until they’re proven to work.

Yeah, I’m a curmudgeon. 👴🏼

Jonathan Prynn • Evening Standard

First look inside Apple’s spectacular offices at Battersea Power Station

Now this is a cool looking office. It’s nice to see Apple renovate something instead of doing a new new build. More companies should do this. 👍🏼

John Yoon and Orlando Mayorquin • The New York Times

The authorities in Baltimore on Wednesday said they had not located any suspects or made any arrests after five people, including four students, were shot and injured on the Morgan State University campus on Tuesday night.

The fun epidemic in America continues. 😔

HILARY HOWARD and PATRICK McGEEHAN • The New York Times

The limit on the capacity of the city’s network of drains, pipes and water-treatment plants is the main reason New Yorkers across all five boroughs suffered through flooding. And this probably will not be the city’s last bout with heavy flooding as it plays catch-up with the pace of climate change, experts said.

Climate change is coming home to roost. I suppose it has been for a while now but it gets a lot of attention when a major American city gets hit.

I feel pretty gloomy about our future as a species. ⛈️

George Carden • The Argus

Shock as yew tree which ‘predates the Battle of Hastings’ felled

Two ancient trees felled in a weeks time. What is wrong with people?

Don’t they know we need more trees, not fewer? 🌳

A surprise October blossom on Kim’s gardenia.

A Giant Leopard Moth, pre moth of course. 😁

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week in the books. It’s my favorite time of the year. Trees are changing color and dropping leaves. Temperatures are beginning to drop. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving coming up. What a wonderful season!🍁🎃🦃

Robert D. McFadden • New York Times

Dianne Feinstein, 90, Dies; Oldest Sitting Senator and Fixture of California Politics

A friend of mine worked for Dianne Feinstein when he was in college. He was a registered Republican but that didn’t matter to her. She still hired him.

RIP 🪦

Moira Warburton and David Morgan • Reuters

WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Hardline Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected a bill proposed by their leader to temporarily fund the government, making it all but certain that federal agencies will partially shut down beginning on Sunday.

And, here we go. All these knuckleheads want to do is tear down democracy. They don’t legislate and pass laws. You’re there to do the work of the people you represent back home.

Anyway, the modern GOP is full of idiots like Gaetz, Boebert, and Green. Why Republicans are so angry and hateful is beyond me. 🤬

Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

“Did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it?” Yaccarino asked.

That was Linda Yaccarino’s reply when asked if Twitter was going to start charging a fee for all users, a claim Space Karen made. She was caught off guard, she didn’t know that was the plan. She’s not the CEO of the company. She’s probably there just so Space Karen can say he lived up to his stupid poll.

I’m sure Linda Yaccarino is a more than competent executive but she’s made a deal with the devil. She should be nervous. Especially once he’s fired her. I originally said she be gone in six months. I’m sticking by that. She’s 100 days into her new role and already out of the loop.

Christian Tietze

SwiftUI.View is actually a view model – a model of the view. It’s a blueprint for what to display, but doesn’t contain any actual pixel drawing.

This is an interesting take and I think Christian is right. Once you think about it for a bit it starts to make sense. At least it did for me.

Now, I’ve done a bit of work on one of my apps — Arrgly — that has a few view models and they fit right into the new SwiftUI I’m writing. So, view models work as well, but is it an unneeded level of indirection? Maybe. 🤔

Jenny Gross • The New York Times

A 16-year-old boy was arrested Thursday on suspicion of criminal damage after one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down overnight in what the authorities described as “an act of vandalism.”

This is one of those head scratchers. Why in the world would someone just cut a down a random tree?

Hopefully we find out.

Craig Hockenberry

The only explanation I can find for the Timer’s design regressions is an unfamiliarity with some use cases. In the following critique, I’ll focus on how the watch is used in the kitchen and how older customers struggle with the new layout. Suggestions will be kept to a minimum: the effort here is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Wow! Craig does a deep dive into the Apple Watch Timer. I also used the built in timers when I’d grill.

Umar Shakir • The Verge

Google is offering its employees a new incentive to come into its Mountain View, California office: discounted hotel stays. The company is promoting $99 per night rates for its on-campus hotel to help remote employees transition into a hybrid working schedule, according to a report from CNBC.

Yeah, that’s not what I’d call good marketing. 🤣 you pay us $99 a night so you don’t have to commute to work! Brilliant! How ‘bout you just let folks work from home? 🧠

Gabriela Galindo • WIRED

The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

If Apple goes after a company over 100 years old because the have a logo with an apple on it they’re pathetic. 🤬

Believe it or not it’s part of what motivated me to change my little company’s name from Apple Core Labs to Hayseed.

Scott Jenson

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

I’ve mentioned I compose all my blog posts on my iPhone. I do it largely out of laziness. 😁

I’ve used Tot for a number of years and it has the best editing experience of any iPhone apps I’ve used.

Once I’m happy with my post I copy it to Micro.Blog and post it to my blog. Easy peasy.

Jeff Seldin • Voice of America

White supremacists appear to have settled on a new strategy to grow their numbers and ready capable fighting forces across the United States, Canada and Europe while avoiding the scrutiny of law enforcement.

I’ve been waiting for a war to break out in our country. At the least a bunch of very targeted attacks. If these wannabe soldiers can actually get their act together folks may have to start worrying. If they’re as disorganized and dumbass as they were on January 6, we’ll be fine. Yes, people will die, and that’s a terrible price to pay for stupidity.

Rogers Cadenhead

I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth.

I’ve read Rogers blog for years and years and I had no idea it was a home rolled solution. Good for you, Rogers! I’ve always wanted to create my own publishing system but I don’t have the gumption any longer to do it. 🎩

Ross Dellenger • Yahoo Sports

About 20 minutes after the conclusion of, let’s call it, the Autzen Stadium Massacre — Oregon 42, Colorado 6 — Prime Time himself nicely summed up the sordid affair.

I knew they’d lose eventually. It’s just going to happen, especially with a program in rebuild mode. They’ve already doubled last years win total so I’d say this year has already been a success. I also suspect they’ll win quite a few games this season. More than they lose. 🏈

X Out Hate

We are a group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists, and academics. We have diverse ideologies and beliefs, but we have come together to address the danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others.

Space Karen strikes again. He’s a racist and antisemite and has no place running a social media sit with so much power. X has become a home for the worst of the worst and it all his fault.

Hopefully we get some regulation around trust and safety issues that force social media companies to police their platforms better. 🤞🏼

It’s beyond time to leave Twitter. You now have much better choices; Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Very selfishly I’d recommend Mastodon. It’s not controlled by a corporate entity who’s interest is using your data as the product. It’s a rag tag, loosely federated, collection of misfits and absolutely beautiful people carrying on the best conversations. It’s a place to build your community with a site controlled by your community. You don’t answer to anyone but yourself.

Aaron Brooks • MakeUseOf

A critical vulnerability in the WebP Codec has been discovered, forcing major browsers to fast-track security updates. However, widespread use of the same WebP rendering code means countless apps are also affected, until they release security patches.

Yikes! Make sure you patch your browser ASAP.

Evan Low • The Mercury News

Contrary to how some have misrepresented the letter my colleagues and I sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, we are not asking to “unilaterally strike (Donald) Trump’s name” from the ballot.

I’d love to see Trumps name stricken from as many states as possible. Especially those where he encouraged election fraud.

As a nation we need to do everything legally possible to keep this dangerous man out of office.

David Jays • The Guardian

A star with incredible presence, Gambon – who has died at the age of 82 – brought heft and delicacy, mischief and feeling, to the stage and screen

Most folks will remember him as Dumbledore. I remember him best for his roles in Sleepy Hollow and Mary Reilly. He played a real nasty piece of work in Mary Reilly and that stuck with me. 🪦

I’ve never purchased an Apple iPhone case because they’re just too darned expensive for what you get. I have a couple of custom cases from Syd Cases and a couple Unicorn Beetle cases.

They do the job I intended for them to do, they protect my $1,000+ investment.

If I decide to get an iPhone 15 I’m totally buying a FineWoven case just so I can enjoy all the ugly marks it gets. I don’t mind them and I miss the olden days of aluminum iPhone bodies that scratched and wore over time. My iPhone 7 is a perfect example and I love the way it looks.

Maybe we can convince Apple to abandon Xi charging on the low end models and go to 100% USB C charging with a change back to an aluminum body? 🤣

I’d welcome it.

UPDATE:

I thought I’d drop a picture of one of my Syd Cases in here to show how it’s beat up. Now, don’t judge how the original artwork turned out. I provided that and it wasn’t of good quality, but I like it. My Stream Syd Case is much nicer.

Anywho, here’s the case.

Exciting update on Gracie’s potty training! She’s eight months old today and doing really well. She now comes to me and boops me with her nose or smacks me with her monstrous paw when she needs to do her thing. That’s a huge improvement.

I’m getting four to five hours sleep without interruption consistently which is a huge improvement. E.G. Last night was 1:30AM wake up and a 6AM wake up. I was in be at 11:30.

Not bad at all! I’ll take it!

I’ve never purchased an Apple iPhone case because they’re just too darned expensive for what you get. I have a couple of custom cases from Syd Cases and a couple Unicorn Beetle cases.

They do the job I intended for them to do, they protect my $1,000+ investment.

If I decide to get an iPhone 15 I’m totally buying a FineWoven case just so I can enjoy all the ugly marks it gets. I don’t mind them and I miss the olden days of aluminum iPhone bodies that scratched and wore over time. My iPhone 7 is a perfect example and I love the way it looks.

Maybe we can convince Apple to abandon Xi charging on the low end models and go to 100% USB C charging with a change back to an aluminum body? 🤣

I’d welcome it.

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.

Our client has a large team of React developers and a team dedicated to the design and development of reusable React components for the company. They’ve done an amazing job creating a platform for their devs to build on and would like to have those devs build mobile experiences as well. I can’t blame them. They’re very good at it.

They currently have native iOS and Android apps that are almost ten years old and use various frameworks and technologies. Your typical legacy codebase. That’s nothing new or frightening. All code develops its rough patches over time and as time goes by we go in and turn the soil so to speak. We replace outdated frameworks developed out of necessity with new platform supplied frameworks and our code is more robust and easier to read and maintain, especially for developers coming right out of school.

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.

Like I said, this is a non-standard way of doing this but it’s been done by others with stories of success and failure. I believe we are on track to have a story of success. It’s not going to be free of bumps along the way but we’re making really great progress and I believe we will hit a steady working state as soon as next week. That means the foundation to strap up and host React Native code is in place and working as expected. Now it’s time to build out the API more thoroughly, driven by our React Native developers need for specific data or business logic. It’s a single app, purpose built, API. The idea is to hide any ugly code on the native side and keep the API to the app clean for the React Native developers.

Cool Bits

One of the extremely cool things about how we’re approaching it is how our React Native devs work.

They work inside of a separate application while they’re developing new views and logic. It allows them to move more quickly and not have to rely on the native apps to update before writing their code. It also means they don’t have to worry about keeping the existing native app building on their computers. That can be a headache, I wish it weren’t, but it can be. More on that in a bit.

How does it work? Well, when you create a brand new React Native project you run some tool to generate the project for you. It creates the scaffolding for your React Native code as well and iOS and Android host app projects complete with the frameworks necessary to build the native host apps. On iOS uses CocoaPods. I don’t know what Android used.

That allows the React Native Developers to run ahead of the platform native developers to build their UI’s.

Ok, so how does that work?

We negotiate with the React Native development team to define an API signature for the native apps. They build a mock version of that in their development host app that matches the agreed upon signature and go about coding.

We build out the platform side to do the true implementation. When we have something to test we pull over a packaged version of the React Native code and give it a spin. If there are problems we work directly with the React Native developers to figure it out. Once it’s ironed out it’s wash, rinse, repeat. We currently have a feature built by WillowTree and one built by our client working in the development host and in the existing native applications.

It’s pretty darned magical when it works! 🧙🏼‍♂️

The Ugly Bits

Getting the React Native frameworks and nuanced build settings and scripts in place has been a bit of a struggle but I think we may finally have all that figured out. But it is painful for a native developer who’s used to opening Xcode, loading the project, hitting build, and it runs. Sure, we may have to use CocoaPods to get started, but that’s rare now since Apple introduced Swift Package Manager, or SPM.

SPM is integrated into Xcode and works really well. I’ve never had an issue with it, knock wood, and went through Stream a couple years back and replaced my use of Carthage and CocoaPods with SPM. It’s been glorious.

This option is, unfortunately, not available to React Native projects AFAIK. That’s fine. CocoaPods works and is familiar.

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.

Great! How do you feel about it overall? 🤔

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.

Angelo Stavrow

but oof — it still feels like I’m working with a business decision, rather than a sharp tool.

I think Angelo’s quote above is a nice TL;DR for me. On the downside I really dislike the tooling. It feels so arcane. I’d love to see something integrated into the Xcode UI for package management and project settings. That’s probably asking a bit much but I’d rather have some do an amazing job of all this scaffolding so I can just hit the build button to run the app.

All that said, it’s still worth using. 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It looks like we’ll be getting heavy rain all day with chances of flash flooding. I think we’ll be fine where we are as far as flooding goes but I wouldn’t be surprised if we lose power.

Good thing my coffee is brewed and in hand. 😃

Sarah Vogelsong • virginiamercury.com

Youngkin declares state of emergency ahead of Tropical Storm Ophelia

So, yeah, this is why we have a state of emergency here in Virginia. Overnight we got a bit of rain, enough to have standing water in the yard, but we’ll be fine. I feel for folks in lower lying areas. The town of Staunton often has flooding issues. Here’s hoping everyone stays safe and dry today. 🤞🏼

Nathan Edwards • The Verge

Mastodon, the federated microblogging platform, has been updated to version 4.2, which comes with massive improvements to search and the web interface, particularly for logged-out and first-time users.

The tiny open source crew behind Mastodon continues to deliver excellent features and they do it right unlike Space Karen’s company.

While I wish some friends would leave the bird place I’m still extremely happy to have this space to share and have wonderful conversations with amazing people every day. ❤️

Paul Sutter • Space.com

The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it

This is pretty sad, isn’t it? I read this great piece in The Bitter Southerner a few years back that talked about a small town in Georgia Astronomers love because it’s so dark out there. 🌚

Joe George • Den Of Geek

The Star Trek Next Generation Story That Connects the Borg to The Original Series Crew

My question for Star Trek fans, do you love this or hate this?

I like it! 👍🏼

Vjeran Pavic • The Verge

Apple recently extended its deal for Qualcomm modems despite years of effort to develop its own — now we know why. According to a detailed report from the Wall Street Journal, Apple’s attempt to develop its own in-house 5G modem has been stymied by issues resulting from the iPhone maker underestimating the complexity and technical challenges of the task, and a lack of global leadership to guide the separate development groups siloed in the US and abroad.

This is a surprise to me. I can’t see it being because of the technical challenges. I could understand them saying “It’s just not ready.” But a technical challenge? Perhaps? 🤔

Joel Chrono • joelchrono12.xyz

This post was inspired by Rob Fahrni’s post, Saturday Morning Coffee. It has absolutely nothing to do with the content itself, but I got up, served myself a coffe, and wrote all this…

Hey! I inspired someone to write on their blog! That’s never happened before! It’s really wonderful and I hope Joel continues to write and bring us interesting content. Thanks for the love, Joel! ❤️

Ageist

I believe we’ve got retirement wrong. Hear me out. In the early 1990s, I attended my first business trip as a fresh-faced 23-year-old eager to make my mark in the world. I found myself at a workshop, listening to a speaker discuss the concept of retirement. At that age, retirement was a distant, almost foreign concept. Still, one statement from the speaker stuck in my mind: “People know to prepare financially for retirement but don’t know to prepare mentally.” He revealed a startling fact: mortality rates increase dramatically within the first three years of retirement. This revelation has stayed with me ever since.

Right. Do not retire and live like Blue Zone folks live. I actually love this idea.

Not retiring can take on different forms so go read the piece. Folks that know me know I want to write my own software if I ever achieve the financial stability to do it. I’ve considered doing part time work for someone like Starbucks just to socialize a bit. When we lived in Exeter I would frequent Exeter Coffee Company and hang out with a ragtag gang of folks. That’s living in my book. 👍🏼

Robert Harrington • palmerreport.com

What does it mean should Trump’s bail be revoked? First it’s important to recall he’s out on bail on four different felony charges in the first place. In other words, “out on bail” means he’s free and at liberty at the pleasure of four separate jurisdictions. If that bail is revoked in any of those jurisdictions, US marshals will be sent to wherever Trump is at the moment and summarily drag him out — in handcuffs — and take him to jail.

I know some people don’t believe a former President should be indicted of a crime much less be prosecuted or spend time in jail if convicted. I’m certainly not one of those people. TFG is a criminal and as such deserves a bit of time in the clank. 🚓

And, yeah, even at the risk of violence. If we allow certain people to get away with anything we don’t have a democracy or the rule of law. 🧑‍⚖️

Catherine Thorbecke • CNN

Alyssa Henry, the CEO of Square – a unit of Jack Dorsey’s fintech company, Block – will leave her post at the company next month.

I wonder if Jack plans to sell Block off to Space Karen so he can realize his everything app? 🤣

Valerie Ettenhofer • /Film

While you won’t find a “Joker” alternate ending available to view online, rumors about one persist thanks to a tidbit shared by filmmaker Kevin Smith on his “Fatman Beyond” podcast (via CinemaBlend). In a discussion of the film, Smith explains that he was told about a proposed original ending for the movie in which Arthur himself is revealed to be the Wayne family’s killer, and Bruce Wayne ends up in his crosshairs.

This would’ve been an amazing ending for Joker! The only problem with that is we couldn’t have sequels where Joker and Batman tangle.

I want so badly to see a Batman movie or series of movies that feature Joker exclusively. That may be too much to pull off so at the very least give us A Death in The Family in movie form. In Superman vs. Batman we get a glimpse of Robin’s — Jason Todd — armor in a glass case with Jokers writing on it. Great Easter egg.

Dave Rogers

The second night I was there, two more of our classmates joined us. One was a retired Air Force E-9 who’d worked in meteorology his whole career. The other is a highly trained engineer. Climate came up again, this time from the engineer. He’s convinced we can solve the crisis. Our host told him not to ask me, because he wouldn’t like the answer. But our Air Force friend was in my camp. It was interesting to me to listen to his take. Our views differ somewhat, but our conclusions are the same. It’s too late to avert a general collapse of civilization, likely before this century is out.

I like Dave’s writing a lot. He’s very open in what her shares and is extremely concerned with the state of the state of Florida. It’s a complete nightmare to live in if you’re an empathetic, caring, person. The GOP lead government doesn’t care about anyone or anything.

Dave’s take may seem a bit dark but I think he’s hit the nail on the head. We have screwed ourselves in the name of capitalism and investor return. And we’ve screwed future generations. 🤬

Bradley Brownell • Jalopnik

The United Auto Workers strike has expanded from three facilities to 41, as contract negotiations continue to slog on. Ford and the UAW have come together to form a tentative agreement, and while there is still a lot of work to be done, the union has chosen not to expand its striking efforts against Ford facilities.

Here’s an industry where we need radical transformation, now. I know the piece is about workers and I hope they’re able to negotiate and get what they need to survive and thrive.

At one point Detroit was a model of the middle class because of the automobile.

James Robins • defector.com

Musk’s life and personality, it turns out, is not so hard to contain. It is flat and shallow and open for all to read. The difficulty comes when Isaacson tries to impose some fabricated complexity on a not-very-complex man, and uses that illusion of knottiness as an excuse to paper over a much truer and more interesting story.

Space Karen isn’t the genius everyone thinks he is. He’s a bully who needs someone to smash his nose a few times so he’ll understand that treating people like crap has consequences.

Garbage human who managed to con his way into crap tons of money.

NASCAR.com

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Denny Hamlin landed a knockout punch in the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Some random observations from a NASCAR noob.

Denny Hamlin looks strong at the right time. He always seems to be fast and has a crazy high racing IQ.

Kyle Larson also looks amazing. He can drive up through anything to get to the front. He’s been first, fourth, and second in the first elimination round of the playoffs. Definitely the strongest of the field at them moment.

Christopher Bell continues to land pole positions and can’t manage to make it to victory lane.

Corey LaJoie finished the second stage in second place and I couldn’t be happier for him! He’s a “middle of the pack” racer and is not supposed to be up in front. He even lead a number of laps. He’s part of a smaller team and is getting better and better each weekend. 👍🏼

Last years Cup Champion, Joey Logano, is out of contention for this years championship after an accident forced him to retire the car.

Bubba Wallace continues to his race craft each and every week and has managed to get into the round of 12. I’m super happy for him and I hope he can make it to at least the round of eight. That would be an amazing accomplishment for 23XI Racing.

I know the Bristol Night Race is very popular but I found it extremely boring. After a couple laps of racing up front it seems like it turns into a single line of cars doing laps. Now, there were times where the racing did get interesting, but overall I found it boring. That’s not typical of a NASCAR race for me.

Bristol is not doing a dirt track next season. That’s too bad. I found that race to be much more exciting. Cars had multiple lines to choose from and the racing was exciting, not to mention Michael McDowell’s two spins that resulted in 360 degree saves. It was an incredible sight to behold.

Kevin Harvick is also out of the playoffs. It’s a real shame as it’s his final season as a driver and he has yet to win a race this year. The man proves his excellent fact crave as a driver every week as the Stuart Haas Racing cars aren’t very competitive, except for Harvick’s. Yes, he’s that good.

It was good to see Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the Xfinity race on Friday night. He drove really well, lead a number of laps, and I have to believe he had a really great chance to win the entire thing but his car caught fire late in the race and he had to retire it. Let’s get that man back in a Cup car a few times a year!

Favorite livery was Tyler Reddick’s 45.

My picks for the Final Four.

• Kyle Larson - Hendrick Motorsports
• Denny Hamlin - Joe Gibbs Racing
• Chris Buescher - Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing
• Tyler Reddick - 23XI Racing

Champion: Kyle Larson

If it’s not Larson I think it’ll be Denny Hamlin.

Of course I could be full of hot air with that list but I really like it!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I took Friday off to take some folks visiting us to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s a beautiful place I used to pass daily on my way to work prior to the pandemic turning the world on its head.

It’s both impressive and sad. To know that Monticello was built and maintained by enslaved people puts a stain on an otherwise beautiful place.

What’s worse is Jefferson hated slavery but kept enslaved people because he knew he couldn’t run a 5,000 acre plantation without them.

Bryant Francis • gamedeveloper.com

The cost of using Unity as a game engine is once again about to increase. Starting in January 2024, the company will begin charging what it’s calling a “Unity Runtime Fee” that is based on the number of users installing games built on the widely-used engine.

This has been a huge topic this week. I feel really bad for smaller game devs because it’s going to really hurt their ability to continue operating, much less making great games for folks to enjoy.

I hope the Unity folks come around with something more agreeable.

Matt Birchler • birchtree.me

It’s been nearly a year since it became clear Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter, and I wanted to take a second and just say thank goodness for Mastodon.

Yes indeed! Thank goodness for Mastodon! I don’t regret for one moment spinning up Curmudgeon Cafe and I hope I can keep it going for years to come. 🤞🏼

Yahoo Sports

Aaron Rodgers out for season after MRI confirms Achilles injury for Jets QB

Welp, the Aaron Rodgers story takes a strange turn four plays into the 2023 season.

The big question on everybody’s mind is, is this career ending? He’s 39 years old, which now doesn’t seem so old for an NFL Quarterback, but it’s more difficult to heal as we age and does he have the desire to get healed up and put in the grueling work to get prepared for next season?

Perhaps rubbing a little Ivermectin on it will heal it up sooner?

Too soon?

Charles Chen

This two part musing reflects the conversations I’ve had with some good friends and former teammates of mine as well as reflections on some of my own observations over the last few years as I prepare to join one of the few Bay Area VC-backed startups using .NET on the backend.

A VC backed startup using .NET? Outrageous! 😁

Yeah, not really. I like .NET and C#. If you’re coming from another curly braced language like C or C++ you should feel right at home with C#. And the .NET runtime and supporting libraries are feature rich and give you the tools to do anything you’d like.

Myles Simmons • NBC Sports

News continues to trickle out of ESPN’s on-air layoffs and another former NFL player is among the cuts.

This is a piece from July. I’m not sure how I missed it. I like to watch Sunday NFL Countdown and the opening weekend of the 2023 season the crew had a new member, Alex Smith. That got me asking questions and I find out Matt Hasselbeck was let go.

I’m not a fan of the new set. The old round table in their waterfront studio was nice and different than any other pre-game analysis show. They were all in reaching distance of each other. It had a more intimate feel. It was nice.

This year the crew is spread out along your typical long desk in a drab set. I suspect it’s in the basement of some building to cut costs, which is fine, but why’d you have to make it so drab?

Anywho, enough bellyaching. The NFL is back! 🏈

Ron Amadeo • Ars Technica

Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today.

I’m not a fan of Chrome. They’re definitely the new Internet Explorer.

I’ll stick with Safari and Firefox. They’re both great browsers and are more concerned about user privacy.

Clean up the web!

Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side: will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?

This isn’t a blog, rather a site encouraging web devs to clean up their act and fight against privacy invasion. Here’s hoping it works.

Of course we all know every news site is all about tracking and advertising. Good luck getting them to change.

FRANK BRUNI • The New York Times

But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?

Yeah, why is the focus 100% on Biden? Sure he’s older than Orange Man but three years isn’t that much older.

Also, who in the Democratic Party is ready, willing, and able to beat Orange Man in a general election?

I still wish we had a Hillary Presidency but that ship has sailed.

Aria Yang • Business Insider

I moved to Seattle for a high-paying tech job. It turned out to be the loneliest time of my life.

I can’t imagine having to adjust to a new city — across the country — in our new COVID-19 world.

When we moved to Seattle in the early 1990’s I had a family to care for and enjoy time with at night and on the weekends. Oh, and there wasn’t a pandemic raging across the planet killing folks.

I’d also imagine the transition from college life right into a place like Amazon could be rough. It’s my understanding Amazon is a tough place to work and if you’re a social person I could see it putting a dampener on your social calendar.

Stephanie Keith • commondreams.org

The slow-mo wave of fascism engulfing Florida - book bans, more guns, no drag, cheerleading for slavery - took a big goose-step forward with the latest incursion of a snarling horde of swastika-swathed Nazis screaming “White Power!” and “Did you thank Hitler today?”

The MAGA loving GOP has given white supremacists groups the courage to crawl out from under their rocks and show their true colors.

The GOP needs a boring old conservative to become the head of the ticket.

The MAGA movement needs to die in a fire.

Shape Your City

The City of Vancouver is exploring ways to support existing and new corner stores, and other small-scale shops and services in residential areas.

When I was a little fella growing up in Lindsay and Exeter we had little markets nearby. In particular I remember Lynwood Market near my grandparents house in Lindsay. It’s long gone now but we neighborhood kids would collect our pennies and trek down to Lynwood Market to buy sarsaparilla for the entire gang. I really enjoyed that and still think about it from time to time.

Seeing Vancouver work toward this is encouraging to me.

Dr. Cat Hicks

He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.

Craft. No matter the thing we do for a living we should always work on our craft. I believe I grow a little every day I’m working on developing software. I’ve had so many influences over the years who I believe have collectively made me better at the craft of software development.

It’s a never ending process!

Flynn is definitely not ready to face the day.

I finally did it. I deleted my Twitter account.

After the shenanigans Space Karen pulled with third-party Twitter clients I knew I wasn’t going to use my trusty fahrni@twitter.com account again but I held onto it until now. I kept it because I didn’t want anyone else to have the handle, especially some Nazi asshole.

It’s obvious Elon Musk is an antisemite wing nut and his support of Russia in the war against Ukraine was kind of my final straw.

He’s just a horrible human being. A big baby man full of himself and high on his own supply.

Good riddance.

Hey, Space Karen, when you finally jettison that wonderful Twitter domain I hope someone turns it into a wildly successful Mastodon instance.

Follow me on Mastodon.

• Titans over Saints
• Bears over Packers
• Bills over Jets
• Falcons over Panthers
• Bengals over Browns
• Jaguars over Colts
• Vikings over Buccaneers
• Steelers over 49ers
• Commanders over Cardinals
• Ravens over Texans
• Broncos over Raiders
• Eagles over Patriots
• Chargers over Dolphins
• Seahawks over Rams
• Giants over Cowboys

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim and I had the grandkids overnight so they’re worn out and we’re worn out. Heck, even our pups are worn out. The house is really quiet, just how I like it. I’m sitting here in the dark, sipping coffee, composing today’s post.

This week work was mostly about onboarding a couple new iOS Devs who’ll be working with me on our project to add React Native support to existing native apps. I’m really enjoying it. 😀

Caitlin Harrington • WIRED

Last month, Grindr gave its all-remote staff two weeks to pledge to work from an office two days a week starting in October or lose their jobs come August 31. Many declined to return: 82 out of 178 employees—46 percent of the staff—were let go after rejecting the mandate, according to the Grindr union, which went public two weeks before the ultimatum.

Wow. That’s about all I had to say when I read this piece. I have a friend who took a job there — as a remote test engineer — only to have this mandate cross his desk two weeks later. Needless to say he didn’t move and is now looking for a new gig. It’s a real head scratcher.

Ron Amadeo • Ars Technica

The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on.

Emphasis is mine. At least they admit what they’re doing and it’s pathetic. 😳

You know what’s worse? People won’t switch away from Chrome.

thehackernews.com

Apple on Thursday released emergency security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS to address two zero-day flaws that have been exploited in the wild to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware.

Update your devices right away. The talent possessed to do this type of ferreting around an OS looking for holes is both impressive and terrifying all at the same time.

Branko Marcetic • jacobin.com

The inflation rate — that is, the pace at which prices are going up — might be slowing down, but that doesn’t mean prices are lower. In fact, they are much, much higher for all kinds of goods and services than they were three years ago.

I’ve definitely noticed this when we go to our favorite Mexican restaurant here in Charlottesville.

It’s really becoming apparent in the streaming business. I just received email saying our Hulu subscription is going up to $81.99/month. We currently pay $64/month. That’s close to a 25% increase. 🤬

Taegan Goddard • politicalwire.com

Pence Calls Trump’s Populism a ‘Road to Ruin’

Wow. Pence finally figured it out. Took long enough.

I know folks have praised him for what he did January 6 — myself included — but the truth is he could’ve done a lot more prior to the sixth to avert this, like call the FBI.

MSRC • msrc.microsoft.com

Upon identifying that the threat actor had acquired the consumer key, Microsoft performed a comprehensive technical investigation into the acquisition of the Microsoft account consumer signing key, including how it was used to access enterprise email. Our technical investigation has concluded. As part of our commitment to transparency and trust, we are releasing our investigation findings.

Reading these reports is fascinating. I love seeing them own up to mistakes and solve the problems that lead them there. I personally like to focus on the problem and not point fingers. These reports come across like that to me.

Greg Jones • enginebuildermag.com

As a kid, Dan Keenan loved fixing things, tearing things apart, and figuring out a way to build something new. But he never dreamed his skills would one day lead to being a key player in designing a brand-new race engine for NASCAR.

This is an older piece but is a great little read if you’re at all interested in engine building. I most definitely am and would love to see some deep dives of all the motors used in the NASCAR Cup Series. The teams use a new motor each week! It’s amazing to me how consistent the builds are from week to week.

They do see the occasional failure but those are rare. It would be amazing to see reports from engine builders outlining the failures and the steps taken to mitigate them, just like that Microsoft Security piece linked above.

Michael Meng • eng.lyft.com

Lyft runs hundreds of microservices to power the company’s offerings. Our team, the Developer Infrastructure team, aims to build the best tools to enable microservice owners (our “customers”) to reliably and quickly test changes in a local and/or end-to-end environment.

When we crossed that line from desktop focused computing on local networks to service based computing on the open web software development became infinitely more complicated. I know a lot of folks who’ll disagree with that assessment and that’s fine. It’s how it feels to me. I’m a simpleton and prefer my little self contained IDE and platform. 😃

GMS Racing • legacymotorclub.com

LEGACY MOTOR CLUB™ Signs John Hunter Nemechek to Drive the No. 42 in 2024

It’s fun to watch NASCAR teams make lineup changes for next season. How many more changes will we see between now and next season? Who knows.

It’ll also be nice to see where the Stewart Haas Racing rumors land. Do they run two or four cars next year? Do they have charters for sale? If so, who picks them up?

Oh, right, when is Dodge coming back! 🤣 Yes, I really do want to see it.

Lane Brown • Vulture

The Ophelia affair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a Hot or Not for movies. Now, it can make or break them — with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit. The Tomatometer may be the most important metric in entertainment, yet it’s also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.

I’d not heard of folks gamifying Rotten Tomatoes scores but it makes sense it would happen. Gotta keep those scores fresh so folks will watch your movie and put money in your pocket. 🍅

Kitty? What kitty?

I just finished watching the Italian Grand Prix and the racing is extremely boring for first place.

Verstappen in a post race interview he said “We had to work for this one today.” No, you didn’t. The Red Bull cars are just too darned fast.

It was nice to see Carlos Sainz take P3 but no car on the grid can compete with the Red Bulls.

So, once again, Verstappen wins by 10 seconds going away. He even coasted on some laps, I mean why not?

In the end F1 wins for its fantastic production. There’s nothing better than a commercial free race, even if it’s boring from a racing perspective.

I wish NASCAR could fix their terrible race production. It’s more commercials than racing, which is extremely frustrating.

NASCAR wins for racing value, F1 for production value.

Hello Mr. Cicada exoskeleton.

Well! Good morning little froggy!

I was mowing the lawn! Glad the little dude hopped and caught my attention!

Flynn says good morning.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Just poured my first cup, letting it sit a spell while I get started. Kolby and Gracie are chillin’ at the moment, which is nice. It means I don’t have to get them to leave the cats alone. Even though Flynn usually starts the loud morning play fest.

The leaves have started falling off the trees and early mornings have been extremely cool. It’s really nice and is a signal to me fall is coming. 🍁

However, Charlottesville weather is unkind and likes to play mind games. This is fake fall. Next week daytime highs are forecast to be in the 90’s. Ugh. 🥵

I hope you enjoy the links.

Rolling Stone

Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter known for his enduring anthem “Margaritaville” and businessman who transformed the 1977 song into an empire that encompassed restaurants, resorts, and more, has died at the age of 76.

RIP Jimmy.

amo

One interesting choice we’ve decided to stick to throughout the years and on to this new project is to have the app infrastructure (networking, authentication, data synchronization and persistence, feature data backends, etc.) done using the same technology as the backend (in Rust, see more in Production Environment) and shared across iOS and Android.

I like this choice. I’ve tried to sell this idea inside WillowTree but I think we’ll be doing more React Native going forward. Look, if your primary business is not shipping applications it makes sense to use cross platform tooling. From what I’ve seen of our React Native work it’s quite good and you can’t tell the difference.

If you are an application developer and want to get some shared code across native platforms, Rust is a good alternative to languages like C and C++ — even though I still really love C++. 😁

Using Rust for all that common code just feels right to me.

Jennifer Sandlin • Boing Boing

According to Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Pizza Hut boxes are encouraging Satanic ritual abuse

I watched the YouTube video linked from the piece and boy do these folks have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to make this stuff up. It is crazy. If the entire Q phenomenon did anything it was to create a legion of complete nut jobs.

Heck we all thought al-Qaeda was a threat to our nation. We’ve been able to screw things up from the inside with things like the Orange Menace, the GOP, and Q. No outside help necessary.

Denise Yu

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team? — Tanya Reilly

This is why I wanted to become an Engineering Director at WillowTree. Turns out I was good at team building but horrible at all the management stuff, like reviews.

Now that I’ve gone back to an engineering role I can focus more on team building from a technical perspective, which I love. Sure, I do day-to-day coding, but I also help other grow and do whatever needs doing.

Keri Blakinger • The New York Times

The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy white kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it.

My brothers, their friends, and I were part of that nerdy set who played D&D in the 80s. I have wonderful memories of that time in my life. An easier time. The 80s was a great time to be a teenager and D&D contributed heavily to that greatness.

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple will receive all of TSMC’s first-generation 3-nanometer process chips this year for upcoming iPhones, Macs, and iPads, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes.

Isn’t it wild to think Apple will take the entire capacity of a chip manufacturer? Heck, I think Intel is finally at 10-nanometer and is expected to move to 7-nanometer this year — maybe they already have, I’m not sure.

It makes me wonder if Intel could get to the point that they’re manufacturing chips for Apple?

Is saying “NO DUH!” too sarcastic? Big oil, gotta love ‘em. 🤬

Thomas Ricouard

I’ve seen countless of tweets and stories lately about modern iOS architecture. I’ve been a huge fan of trying new architecture on iOS, and in the past I have worked with Redux / TCA like architecture because I believe unidirectional data flow is the only way to have a good & robust architecture.

Thomas is a super smart fella and is worth a read. He’s the author of the excellent iOS Mastodon client, Ice Cubes. He’s done an amazing amount to work in the area of SwiftUI performance tuning. Give his piece a read.

George Wright • BBC

Canada has issued a new travel warning to its LGBT citizens planning to visit the United States.

This doesn’t surprise me. Our nation, as a whole, has taken so many steps backwards. Most of the nation wants to move forward but the GOP wants to take us back. They hate women and want them to stay home and be baby making machines, they want to exterminate trans folks, they’re racist, and they’d like to destroy the planet in the name of capitalism.

Meanwhile the sane people want healthcare for all, would like to see an educated America, let the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities exist and be first class citizens, amongst other things.

The choice has always been easy for me. I believe in people and want the best for everyone. We’re all so much better off being a diverse nation.

Sam Gold • lickability.com

SwiftUI is really good. (Stop booing me, I’m right.) However, there comes a time when you may look at your app and think, “this reeks of SwiftUI.” System-provided list layouts, the same typography, the same colors as every other app.

It’s always been a bit hacky to do a good job of theming an iOS App. Especially if you want to support dynamic text in your app, which you most definitely should.

I’m always on the lookout for articles that try to solve this problem.

This article isn’t about that as much as it’s about how to make your app shine in multiple ways.

Yahoo

Managers should not use the budget cuts as an “explanation” for compensation decisions for individual employees and instead should emphasize that the employee’s own “impact” determines “rewards.”

This guidance feels so scummy. Just say you had to do because of budget cuts. Sure, folks will be pissed off they’re missing their raise because of the cuts but do you think allowing them to believe they didn’t get a raise because of their lack of performance is better?

Maybe the goal is to get people to quit? If that is the goal, I think this is a good way to do it. Nice work.

Xe Iaso

WebAssembly is a compiler target for an imaginary CPU that your phones, tablets, laptops, gaming towers and even watches can run. It’s intended to be a level below JavaScript to allow us to ship code in maintainable languages.

I love they this article uses the term imaginary CPU. That imaginary CPU is a computer program that interprets the WebAssembly and executes it on your particular platform. Yes, in almost all cases, it’s going to be a JavaScript runtime.

If you’d like to learn more about WebAssembly you should read the official docs but I’d also encourage you to read my colleagues work on the subject. I’ve mentioned Nish Tahir before. The man’s pretty much a genius and can make a computer do anything he wants with any language. Oh, he can also handle DevOps as well as anyone. A real glue engineer if ever there was one. WillowTree is really lucky to have him.

Kim was not amused with our visitors this morning.

Don’t eat the hydrangeas! 😃