Saturday 16th April, 2022 - Git push brain
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
A modest amount of links in this week’s issue, but hopefully you got the midweek special that I just sent out. As I write this it looks like Elon Musk has bought Twitter or something. I guess that’s the big story then, nothing in this issue about that though. Best of luck Elon.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about topics, trends and themes, now that my basic workflow has settled to be an agile backlog.
I want to have a more consistent way of finding the higher level flavours that are percolating. It’s an abstract space that I don’t spend that much time in. I prefer to be implementing in base reality, but it’s undoubtably useful to be able to pop up to the thought stratosphere for a gander every once and a while.
The hard part is to find the topics that interest you, rather than just parroting everybody else’s view of the world. And it’s easy to get lost up there. Not so obvious, but when you are able to organise that space a bit, things start to flow a lot easier in other areas. I’m still learning, even after many years.
Back in base reality, I’ve been struggling the past few weeks to find a way to npm install modules from repos hosted in private Github repos from a Github Actions workflow. It’s possible but when you try installing multiple private repos, you have to use ssh aliases, and so far I’ve found that the repos that get installed are some strange symlinked simulacrum of the module. When you try to use them, none of the files are there. Hoping to get that working next week, so that I can make a start on a composable websites feature I have designed for my SSG. The idea is to be able to npm install functionality.
It’s the second week using my new agile backlog methodology of organising notes and tasks. It’s working really well. I’m mostly able to very quickly switch between tasks without loosing context. One thing I did have trouble with last week was sprint planning. I documented the manual process, so at least I won’t forget what needs to happen each week.
I then figured it might be worth adding some automation using iOS Shortcuts app.
Total disaster. I spent several hours trying to create some workflows to speed things up, but just couldn’t figure out how to do anything. It’s so unintuitive, there’s nothing familiar in the UI. Nothing. You basically have to guess what todo. I couldn’t even get the most basic automations functioning. Maybe there’s some good Shortcuts online learning resources?
I wrote a couple of blog posts:
Hoping it doesn’t rain too much next week, and that my knees get better. Way too much pain in recent weeks. I’m going to try and focus on positive ideas, and things that flow well together.
This week’s links…
Podcasts
We could kick start life on another planet, should we? Betul Kaçar (TED Podcasts Daily) - Great definition of what life actually is, then goes on to talk about many of the unexpected moral issues that are forecasted to arise once we start creating other life forms
Fred Schott on Astro Ep#510 (Shop Talk Show) - Interesting for me because it covers the bleeding edge in SSG development as well as the recent trend for implementing web standards into non-browser environments like NodeJS, ESM for unbundled development, Http3 and the very cool http pre-load headers
Karl Deisseroth on Depression, Schizophrenia and Psychiatry Ep#274 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - Only partially through this episode, but it’s wild! It covers opto-genetics where they use genetically altered neurons that respond to light, which they can then control using light, with the ability to replay activity sequences directly into the brain’s visual cortex. I studied opto-electronics as part of my Materials Science and Engineering university degree, so I’m finding it mind-blowing that the brain is now essentially a deploy target.
Links
neomjs/neo: The application worker driven frontend framework - First attempt I have seen of building a framework that makes workers a core part of the design. Interested to see where this goes.
ehmicky/wild-wild-path - Object property paths with wildcards and regexps. Looks very useful.
Plugin Architecture Overview Between Express, Fastify and NestJS - Haven’t had time to read this yet but I’m posting it because it’s very relevant to my current ssg project
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!