MTBP: Take Two, This Time, With Guidance

Let’s try this again. This time around, I’ll start with a clear and simple statement of what I want to achieve with the program, and how I want the user experience to feel. There’s a clear use case, and it will probably exclude a lot of people, and I don’t care. I’m not trying toContinue reading “MTBP: Take Two, This Time, With Guidance”

I Made an Offline Thing!

I’ve built a bridge between my RSS readers (Vienna and Tapestry) and my web browser so that I can connect my laptop to the Internet, fetch updated news stories, then disconnect. Later, while looking through the feed, I can queue up individual articles to be downloaded fully. Even later, I can connect the laptop toContinue reading “I Made an Offline Thing!”

Software Architecture Matters

I’m starting to take a look at Swift Data, and the experience is really, really uncomfortable for me. The tutorials and explanations of how this framework works and how it integrates with SwiftUI really serve to remind me that the way I think about structuring my programs is just plain not how most other folks whoContinue reading “Software Architecture Matters”

Maybe Don’t Do That?

Right, so I am working on a service that replaces a single part in an existing workflow. The workflow itself has been in existence for, like, 30 years and really, I’m not prepared to go down the path of explaining why the whole thing isn’t being replaced with a shiny new integrated and up-to-date system.Continue reading “Maybe Don’t Do That?”

Hobby Utility

So, we’re on a cruise ship and I got to thinking about the population and the environment and I developed a morbid curiosity. More about that below the fold. The high point, though, is that I’ve written another application — this one for the iPhone — that fills a neat, narrow niche: it’s a combination tallyContinue reading “Hobby Utility”

Here’s a (docker) image for you

We’re getting closer to a long vacation with intermittent Internet, so I’m going through all my developer tools, making sure that everything’s ready. Now that I know how to get VSCode to persist its downloaded stuff between runs in a given container (make sure there’s a .vscode-server/extensions directory in the container user’s $HOME), I wantedContinue reading “Here’s a (docker) image for you”

Language Feelings Matter

I just finished a first pass at implementing a new feature in an application I wrote in Flutter. I’ve been working hard at it, not letting myself get distracted with any of my fun programming projects. So, to celebrate handing it off for evaluation and feedback, I just took this morning to do a massiveContinue reading “Language Feelings Matter”