/notes

I started reading the Anxious Generation today and it is fascinating! Like, you just _know_ that phones are a problem, it's obvious, but what I realize now is less obvious is just _how_ they are a problem. To sum it up as I understand it so far; social media has been engineering to bypass crucial and important learning paths for youth during the most sensitive and important points in their development as members of society.

Spring is here! Backyard is setup. I will now live outside until November. Our poor apricot tree has blossomed, it survives another year. Hoping we get some fruit :)

Severance season 2 finale was meh. I'm bored by vibes shows and intentionally vague dialog. Season 2 had some good moments but after 3 years, I really wanted something more. I had expectations and it did not live up to them. That's on me.

I spent most of March sick. Literally 3 weeks just feel like they disappeared. It's been disorienting coming back; I celebrated a birthday, the time changed, and now it's spring. All of that is a blur.

I am learning how to incorporate AI into my day to day in more meaningful and impactful ways. Next up is to work with MCP servers to fine tune. It's all very fun. At the same time I want to find more ways to avoid touching computer. Hard to do when everything is computer.

https://phptherightway.com/ Doing more PHP these days. So I am catching up on better practices and modern php. I thought this site was a very helpful resource.

https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#introduction Learn to write clear, idiomatic Go.

https://gorails.com/ Learn Ruby on Rails. Gorails is amazing. Chris Oliver is a beast.

https://boringrails.com/ Solutions to everyday boring problems in web development to keep you productive.

https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism Solid model for adding seo meta to your rails cms.

https://anthonydmays.com/blog/2022/05/09/how-to-practice-leetcode-problems-the-right-way/ I've been practing leetcode to support and strengthen my understanding of data structures and algorithms. This article does a great job of helping you with how to think about and actually practice leetcode.

https://manifesto.getglu.dev/ Loved this CI/CD manifesto. I was taught to think about the devops and CI/CD pipeline the same way, and so learned to build them this way. Glad I did. The gist is to write them to be developer friendly and to be debuggable. The way I do that is with Ruby, because of how easy it is to create a DSL with Ruby. Also Rake is a great interface for things like pipeline code.

https://pippinbarr.com/it-is-as-if-you-were-on-your-phone/info/

Really funny site that simulates what it is like to just be on your phone.

Look at you! On your phone! But you've got a secret! And you won't tell! You're not on your phone! It is only as if you were on your phone! You're just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!

https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rgb-hsl Pretty cool new way to handle color in CSS. The gist as I understand it is it will give more reasonable and expected results as you lighten and darken a color. Additionally, it's an expanded color space (P3 color?) which means, if your monitor supports it, we can use more colors. Neat.

https://www.cosive.com/blog/my-washing-machine-refreshed-my-thinking-on-software-effort-estimation So often in my own job I am asked to estimate effort of something similar to what we have built before. And I get so much push back about how "easy" something should be. But we often fail to account for the unknowns, and fail to explain clearly that the 10% difference is the difference between a 1 day task and a 2 week task. This article does a great job of explaining that.

https://hybrd.co/posts/adding-meta-tags-to-a-rails-cms-with-polymorphism Great way to include meta tags in a Rails app. I've done this in a very similar way, but this article does a great job of explaining the why and how.

https://indieweb.org/ The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web". Build your own website, control your own data, post to your own site. Syndicate to the wider web. It's pretty neat, I am starting to tinker and integrate into my own site.

I finished reading a Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms. Really glad I read it. It filled many gaps I had on some fundamentals, like _how_ big notation works and why we do it and why and when we use certain data structures.

Also finished reading Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Incredible book. Reflecting on myself while reading and seeing just how much my ego has been in my way for most of my life, was not easy. But I am so glad I did.

Got a new workstation setup, a System76 Thelio Spark Premium (with sick pink racing stripe lol), to be my new home for deep work this year. It was a "grand gesture", a way to encourage and support myself while I do the deep work. It's going well so far!

Building this blog has been a lot of fun. Glad I moved away from micro.blog, not that their service is bad in any way, quite the opposite, I just really value building my own thing. It's very fun and rewarding.

I built a companion service for static websites. Currently, it scans new posts for urls to submit as webmentions, provides a commenting API, and provides an imageproxy service to do on demand image resizing and caching. In the future it will be a webmention provider, and syndicate posts to places like Bluesky, Mastodon, and maybe LinkedIn. I will probably write a full blog post about it.