Hi there

Friday afternoon I received a call from my nephew Johan, who is going into business for himself. Johan is a bricklayer and doesn’t have experience running his own business, or with setting up an online presence for a small business. So, he’s asking his uncles (myself and my brother) for advice on what to do with email, domains, computers, etc. This post contains a paraphrased version of the advice I gave him. ...

Save the date! Uyanga and I will be celebrating our combined 90 years on this planet by having a birthday party on 2023-06-24 in the afternoon. It will be in Berlin, Germany and will be fairly casual. There will be some food … think mingling with a plate of delicious bits, not sitting down for a three course meal. There will be some drinks of what people like drinking on a Saturday afternoon in summer. ...

Unlike many tutorials today, this one will focus on minimizing the technical requirements to follow along. We will get up and running with TypeScript without opening a terminal, installing dependencies, or even initializing an NPM project. In the advanced portion we will need to do a bit of that, but for most users, all you will need is Visual Studio Code as your editor. Link Get Started With TypeScript the Easy Way ...

Everyone loves types, Everyone loves autocompletion, Everyone loves getting warnings before they arise. But nobody likes wasting time compiling stuff. Hopefully this will help convince you or your company that you don’t actually need the TypeScript flavor syntax. So i have embedded the same editor used in VS-code to show you that you can have type safety with vanilla JavaScript and have the best of both worlds and play around with it. ...

Last year I learned how to use two headphones with a Mac, which is a great feature to use when travelling. Basically, we can watch movies in Apple TV on one computer. Since our travel last year, my partner has switched from their Sony over the ear headphones (with built-in amplifier) to Airpods Pro (no built-in amplifier). That gave us some challenges, as they could not really hear what was going on, and couldn’t turn the volume up due to those headphones not having volume controls or amplifier. My Sony headphones do not have those challenges, so I was fine with the Multi-output audio. ...

This keynote presents my (and many other’s) thinking about #NoEstimates. It argues that estimation is a bad thing, particularly in the Agile world, and presents ways to plan that don’t involve estimation. Link: #NoEstimates

The rule “Everyone sweeps the floor” always resonated with me. This was very much the behaviour and expectations of the person that ran the unit that I worked in some years ago at Apple. At the time, I was unaware that the badge sticker existed. My boss did mention that they appreciated me always “sweeping the floor” … both in the codebases I worked in, but also emptying the dishwasher. ...

I thought this was a really interesting examination of the performance penalties of using ({...spread}) in JavaScript. Link: The reduce ({…spread}) anti-pattern

I firmly believe that writing a good git history, or narrative is important and worthwhile. Future Developer will thanks us when they’re using git log -S to find a particular line or fragment, or when they’re using git bisect to figure out when and how a particular defect was introduced. In the past I’ve given a talk about crafting a lovely git narrative. Thankfully, there’s no recording of that talk. ...

I can’t remember where I saw this first, as I configured it awhile ago. Emmanouil Liakos shares a quick tip about how to use git pull --rebase and to configure your git to do this automagically. Link: Don’t git pull, use git pull –rebase instead