I bought two of the original Loog guitars, little 3-string acoustic guitars intended for new learners and especially children. There’s a lot to like about them: they’re inexpensive, cute, and have surprisingly good sound and volume. The larger one gives a tenor guitar sort of sound that’s pleasant, and the smaller one is ukulele-ish. The kids are getting old enough to be into them, and I love having them around.

I remember when everyone started talking about using “thunks” in Redux to execute code without blocking the UI. And I remember getting tripped up on the word “thunk”. What’s a “thunk”? Why are we calling it that? The term “thunk” goes all the way back to ALGOL 60! It’s a play on “think”, because the ALGOL compiler needed to “think” about what sort of subroutines to generate. ALGOL allows passing expressions as arguments to subroutines, not just constants.

jq, a tool for manipulating JSON data, is one of the easiest most powerful ways to work with JSON text values in a terminal. I use it frequently. Mostly, I use it to extract values from HTTP responses. To combine multiple files or program outputs, some extra paramaters are useful.

Writing good unit tests is made much easier by dependency injection. This lets you separate your code’s behavior from that of your dependencies.

Many people use mocks to add dependencies to unit tests. I think this is usually a mistake.

In the latest edition of Casey Newton’s newsletter, Platformer, he makes the case for why the plaintiffs in Gonzalez vs Google botched their oral arguments. The mechanism is fascinating.