Excursions avatar

Excursions

One of the worst feeling is the helplessness you feel as you look into the painful eyes of your child down with fever, as they look back at you with a hope that you will abate this pain they are going through. Ah. Absolutely crushing! 😣

At times, I just wish I wasn’t following the technology space closely. My buying decisions would’ve been simpler, driven completely by what’s on display now. And not by the fear of roadmap, fear of remorse in future.

My MacBook is dying and I find nothing that can replace it.

I really liked this comment from a hacker news thread1 on a post around how Microservices architecture failed a product’s dev team.

Everytime (sic) you touch something under a repo, it affects everyone. You are forced to use existing code or improve it, or you risk breaking code for everyone else. What does this solve? This solves the fundamental problem a lot of leetcode/hackerrank monkeys miss, programming is a Social activity it is not a go into a cave and come out with a perfect solution in a month activity. More interaction among developers means Engineers are forced to account for trade offs. Software Engineering in its entirety is all about trade offs, unlike theoretical Comp Science. Anyway, this helps because as Engineers we must respect and account for other Engineers decisions.

Working on a shared code is indeed a social activity. And this principle is something I just can’t stress enough when amongst my team. There is a misguided view of coders as lone warriors, sitting in the dark corner somewhere, beating at their keyboards and delivering working software day and night.

Reality can’t be farther in most work environments, especially enterprises. Every coder needs to be accountable, extra cautious with each line of code he or she commits to the repository. If not, it might lead to a sleepless night of debugging for the whole team.

  1. I do not endorse the tone, of course. It’s from hacker news forum after all. May be people get trained to shout once you are in forum.↩

★ Liked Throwing and Catching by Seth Godin

We spend most of our time in catching mode. In dealing with the incoming. Putting out fires. Going to meetings that were called by other people. Reacting to whoever is shouting the loudest.

But if we learn a lesson from jugglers, we realize that the hard part isn’t catching, it’s throwing. Learn to throw, to initiate, to do with care and you’ll need to spend far less time worrying about catching in the first place.

Update on Micro.threads

I had recently realised the project I had much plan for wasn’t updated since sometime back. So much that for an observer it very well looks to be “potentially defunct”. There are many reasons why I couldn’t push regular updates to this. Priorities at home and at work just didn’t allow me enough time.

However, deep down I knew I just wasn’t satisfied with what I had achieved. I had a huge list of things that I needed to implement and the effort required I thought was huge. But I just couldn’t look at the stagnant progress of this service. I found it useful at multiple times and I know it can be improved so that others do too. So, I have decided to take up the project, small improvements at a time.

To start with, all the threads, mainly from posts featured in discover section and Emoji collections, are up to date. Well, @manton’s hard at work and has already grown the list of Emoji collections. Well, all the Emoji Collections from Micro.blog are available at Micro.threads now. So I (and others) can now get all the recommendations for that one 🍕 parlour or one’s 🗺️ogue.

But there’s more. The huge list of limitations I talked about at the top? Yeah, I have decided to start addressing them small updates at a time. Firstly just by noting them down.

  • Threads concept itself is limited. Currently it takes a post id, fetches the conversation (thread) and then pull out all the links and only show these links as a thread.
  • Creating thread is a mess and so is updating it.
  • No way for external users to generate threads. Keeping threads updated is a chore at this point.

So, I have been back to drawing board, working on the ways I want to address these and present what I have in mind. I have a clear objective with this service. What’s to come has already found its place on the homepage, just as a placeholder for now. I wish I manage to deliver it to my satisfaction, first and fore most. If along the way, it helps the community, well and good.

Back to work.

★ Liked “re-setting my mental clock” by @ayjay

I have always told myself that I have time to think about what, if anything, I want to write next, but I haven’t really believed it, and I think that’s been due to my immersion in the time-frame of Twitter and other social media.

Micropub endpoint from the ground up

The recent experiments with blot.im has given the perfect opportunity to explore if I can get a Micropub endpoint created specifically for my needs. Till now, I have been using a custom fork of a endpoint from Pelle Wessman for my Hugo site. It has served me well.

However, I always wished if I could get one written specifically for my simple needs. One that I know and understand every part of. Given that I have no endpoint yet for the blot site, this is clear opportunity to create one geared for making this site micropub enabled. Hugo site will address my third-party-posting needs till then. So here’s the start. I will capture this journey, of course, here and will keep this updated with progress (I hope). Below are the things at this point that I need to get started.

I want to explore python first as an option to get this implemented. I have come to realise that I do not like Javascript as a language. I can get work with it, but at times the inconsistencies and the constructs get in my hair.