At work I’ve been building a new program on top of an SDK that’s under very active development. After about 6 weeks without updating the version, the SDK had deleted some code I was using and had a ton of breaking changes. If I’d simply updated the library, my entire program would fail to build, and it also wouldn’t be clear how to get it back to a good state. Following in the spirit of Branch by Abstraction, I’d rather introduce the new code side-by-side with the old and incrementally migrate without breaking the program.

I recently read this Washington Post Article (archive.org) titled Caroline Ellison wanted to make a difference. Now she’s facing prison. After the first read-through I was incredulous at the sympathetic presentation in the biography. It reads like a resume, like a “it all spun out of control!” story about someone who got in over her head. I tweeted: Lol how do you get such a sympathetic bio after stealing billions of dollars @GerritD

JSON deserialization is Go seems easy, but there are a lot of tricky parts. Come and see!

I was reading about Phoenix today, looking at guides and documentation. It’s great to see in a guide when it’s easy to quickly set up a project, that makes it fun to get started and explore. The most exciting thing about Phoenix is that “reactivity”, or live updates, are a core part of the system, not an add-on. Nowadays I find any software without reactive updates frustrating and annoying to use.

There’s been a lot of restrospecting lately, lamenting the loss of the “indie web” and its subsumption by content platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter. (I’ve always wondered where Tumblr fit in - more indie than any of these, but still - owned by Yahoo!). A few casualties that fell by the wayside: blogs, web comics, and independent, topic specific forums. All of these media still exist, much diminished and publishing social posts to route you to their sites, but they are still self-hosted, free of editorial control and in their author’s hands.