So this feels like the most Silicon Valley thing I’ve said in a few years, but the thing I’m working on right now is basically the same parts and programming language I was working on as a hobby back in 1997. Yes, the machine is in someone else’s data center, yes, the services it’s interactingContinue reading “Programming for the Ages”
Category Archives: programming
Greatness Abides
Okay, so when I looked at Google news this morning, this story was in the “For you…based on your interests” section: Gremlin Brings Chaos Monkey Testing to Spinnaker CD Platform. Now, I’m a respecter of Dev Ops, but I’m not really a practitioner of Dev Ops. So I think this is cool, but the coolestContinue reading “Greatness Abides”
It Could Be Better
A long time ago, my housemate (who is one of the only people who reads this – Hi, Kurt!) had this great explanation for why his homework wouldn’t compile: “It was perfect, so I fixed it.” Man, that so describes every programmer I’ve ever worked with. (Incidentally and orthogonal to the point of this post,Continue reading “It Could Be Better”
Things I Wish
I wish that Google provided an offline/dev version of Firebase so that I could work on my mobile app when I’m not actually online. Sort of like they offer a dev version of Datastore for App Engine development. I wish that Google made their Flutter documentation available as a downloadable package so that I couldContinue reading “Things I Wish”
Mobile Enterprise
So, I’m writing another mobile app. This one is a chore list for our household. And, since our household is not technologically homogenous, I’m writing it in Flutter so I can deploy it to All The Devices. Flutter’s idiom is lambda-heavy, and most of the tutorials and examples wind up embedding application logic in theContinue reading “Mobile Enterprise”
Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon
Oh, lots of things going through my head. No real coherence to speak of, though. Let’s see, a useful life lesson from Victor / Victoria happy outcome from reading the release notes not everything in the 80s sucked (X still makes me happy) (but most of the 80s sucked) Victor / Victoria Before I everContinue reading “Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon”
Something They Leave Out
Here’s something the tutorials don’t tell you, but that is kind of important: Flutter plugins add their own CocoaPod dependencies to the iOS project. This is why the installation instructions for Firebase tell you to skip through everything in the iOS installation after you install the GoogleService-Info.plist file. The rest of the installation gets handledContinue reading “Something They Leave Out”
Team of One
I have been writing programs of varying complexity since I was in the 6th grade, so, call it 39 years. For a portion of that time, call it 14 years, I worked on code that had other people contributing to it. During that, what, 36% percent of my programming life, I learned many lessons thatContinue reading “Team of One”
I Hate Your Bot
I dunno, something like a year ago, a guy I know started retweeting a client of his who was working on building a chatbot platform. Now, let’s be honest: in customer facing positions, a lot of interactions are going to be the same. People are way more similar than they are different, and so if oneContinue reading “I Hate Your Bot”
It’s Never Easy
So, the Internet of Things is a thing that’s mostly just a security nightmare, but there do exist some services that I find actually helpful. For instance, I put an Ambient Weather station on our roof and hooked it up to Weather Underground and that lets me get ad-free weather forecasts. Lots of people haveContinue reading “It’s Never Easy”