Excursions

On one of the recent episodes of “Reconcilable Differences”, John Siracusa and Merlin Mann had an interesting conversation on who would make them feel starstruck. Especially they wondered -

Who do you wish you could meet and why? What would you say to Steve Jobs in an elevator or Bill Murray on a plane?

And of course, that sent my mind on a drive. Who would I want to meet? I think one big factor deciding that would be for whom meeting me will not be a burden. It clearly rules out all the musicians, tired of all the ad-hoc post-show crooning requests. It rules out most of the sports celebrities, already tired, looking out for relaxation. Film celebrities, a complete no.

I think people I would be most comfortable meeting would be the ones not too big of celebrities, but well respected in what they do — ones whom I admire for what they are and how they conduct themselves.

Podcasters, writers are of course high on that list. Anyway, here goes a short list, those I just want to convey I respect them.

• John Siracusa — I think the meet may make him awkward, but I admire him for his clarity of thought and his expertise to put that in words.

• Leo Laporte — One of the most fun, but equally knowledgable voices I listen to. I admire him for how effortlessly he hosts any topic of discussion. Experience does matter.

• Published writers to whom I just want to convey how unique and different perspective they have to the world around - Fredrik Backman, Christopher Moore, Khaled Hosseini

• Some creative writers I follow on Medium - Lizella Prescott, Nicole Willson

• And those I wish I just had even a selfie with - Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar, Steve Jobs, Terry Pratchett.

I don’t think this is a complete list. Rather I believe it would be difficult to put such an extensive list out. Anyway, the least I would do if I ever run into any of the folks I respect is to not make them feel awkward.

“When life gives you lemons, check to make sure they aren’t, in fact, underripe grapefruits. If they’re underripe grapefruits, you’re well and truly fucked.” https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/when-life-gives-you-lemons

@manton How does crossposting from micro.blog to twitter handle the syndication? Will the webmentions be pulled back to the post on website? I realised Bridgy didn’t send a webmention for the activity on twitter.

I think I might have finally cracked the Micropub endpoint riddle - an attempt to post via micro.blog.

Customary reminder that timezones are mess if not handled during dev and build.

“Software will always be simple and reliable if it is built to address the problem it aims at with whatever technology - platforms/frameworks/solutions - that suit best.” — wrote a response to a great post at Simple Thread on software complexity.

Facing an issue parsing webmentions accessed via webmention.io api. I am not sure what the sort order should be — neither id nor verified_date look to be correct. @aaronpk

I wish I did not have to use any of the Google apps on iOS. But I just can’t find a way to drop Gmail. I guess email has to die for that to happen — anyway it’s just a spam galore.

We, as an industry, need to find ways to simplify the process of building software, without ignoring the legitimate complexities of businesses. We need to admit that not every application out there needs the same level of interface sophistication and operational scalability as Gmail. There is a whole world of apps out there that need well thought-out interfaces, complicated logic, solid architectures, smooth workflows, etc…. but don’t need microservices or AI or chatbots or NoSQL or Redux or Kafka or Containers or whatever the tool dujour is.

A lot of developers right now seem to be so obsessed with the technical wizardry of it all that they can’t step back and ask themselves if any of this is really needed.

I can’t agree more with the whole premise of this article. The quest for adopting new, trending technology is making the overall design of the software we are building extremely complex. I can’t recount the number of times we are made to select the technology first to solve the problem at hand. It should never be so.

Software will always be simple and reliable if it is built to the address the problem it aims at with whatever technology - platforms/frameworks/solutions - that suit best. More often than not, simpler solutions are the most efficient ones to build and maintain software with.

Chris Lattner kind of sums it perfectly.

So true. Too many apparently "simple" techs merely shift the complexity to other places (higher level tools, frameworks, pkg managers, wrappers, syntax extensions, etc). Well designed systems are simple to learn and use end-to-end, while permitting experts to build amazing things https://t.co/sIlJYALYaO

— clattner_llvm (@clattner_llvm) January 30, 2018

Enabled the h-entry microformat markup to posts/journal entries. POSSE handled via IFTTT recipes on feeds. Still need to set up a micropub endpoint — this looks tricky. Daniel Goldsmith’s detailed post hopefully helps.