Saturday 12th March, 2022 - Kindness on the rocks
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
You’ll be glad to learn I fixed the anchor issue from last week. After much troubleshooting it turned out the editor I was using had multiple writing modes, and the default for files with unrecognised file extensions creates double quotes that break HTML anchor tags. Changing the mode fixed the issue. This week had a new set of issues, but I’ll spare you the details :)
I implemented layouts in my static site generator, which enables you to define a top level template that all pages use. Quite a head trip to implement, because you have to take an entire hierarchy of templates and push them through another, common template, and then still render the hierarchy after the top level template. It’s difficult because the rendering is done recursively, so each template uses the same render method, which means if you don’t do it correctly you risk loosing the render context of the hierarchy.
Hopefully that makes sense, in the implementation, all you have to do is save the hierarchy’s render context somewhere safe, render the top level layout, then render the hierarchy using the saved context, and you have to do that without breaking the top level layout context. As always it doesn’t seem that complicated after it’s done, but with the hecticmess and synchronicities of life going on all around, it’s not easy to see through the layers of code while you write them. In fact I find that very often life has a tendency to actively work against you.
YMMV of course, maybe you’re swimming with the current, but it definitely did not feel that way for me this week. Much more like being repeatedly smashed around a rocky reef, with very very strong currents simultaneously hitting from opposite directions.
This week’s links:
Zendesk engineering writeup on Reliability
Kubernetes in Kubernetes (Ship It Podcast)
Robert Proctor on Nazi Science and Ideology (Lex Friedman Podcast)
Making the web better. With blocks! – Joel on Software
Tim Ferris interviews Matt Mullenweg in Antartica Ep #578 (Tim Ferris Podcast)
John Gruber interviews Tom Watson and Daniel Agee from photo sharing app Glass (The Talk Show Podcast)
Tyler interview with Sam Bankman Fried, effective altruism, crypto and web3 (Conversations with Tyler Podcast)
MIT Physicist describes the inside of a black hole (Into the Impossible Podcast)
There was so much heady stuff in what crossed my feeds this week, much of which is fascinating, but with the war in the Ukraine and life in general, I found it tough to wade through. The notes for this edition, so much notes, are a sprawling mess of bullets and quotes and thoughts, in the end I’m just posting a small selection of the links, with minimal commentary.
If you are looking for something uplifting I’d recommend the John Gruber interview because they reminisce about the web2.0 era, and pick out some of the great things that happened amongst the madness of that period. I ended up making a cool list of stuff I remember from then, and started imagining all sorts of wild and wonderful cross overs, blending some of the best from then with the current moment’s enthusiasm and optimism of web3/crypto.
With a lot of this stuff I keep coming back to kindness. Kindness to each other, and yourself. Don’t be afraid to walk away from some things, but also don’t be afraid to walk towards some others. Trust your instincts and feelings, but do some introspection occasionally to understand yourself better as you continue your life journey.
It’s not always obvious, but it’s worth remembering about kindness. It’s really much more important than I think we realise.
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
Consider becoming a patreon, any support would be very much appreciated
Thanks for reading!
If you liked this newsletter you might like my blog, daily linkblog or experimental podcast :)
I’m a freelance web developer, consultant and automation engineer, consider hiring me!
Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!