I write code, and occasionally complain about it, too.
Types of People You Need to Hang On To A special person in my life checks several of these boxes. But she's exceptional. How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization I could not agree more with the intent, but in my opinion, that battle has long been lost. Still, interesting suggestions. .gitignore Isn’t The Only Way To Ignore Files In Git I dislike Git because it's convoluted…
I've been meaning to go back to blogging for a while, now. One of the reasons that kept me from doing so was how cumbersome my blogging setup was; last November, I considered moving to Pagecord but remedy this, but then it was the cumbersomeness of migrating that held me back. Well, not anymore. Third time is the charm This is the third iteration of my blog. It started as a Jekyll site, hosted on…
Blood's a Rover (James Ellroy) I don't know if I really love James Ellroy anymore. I love the idea of James Ellroy, merciless writer of charged hard-boiled fiction. But more often than not, I always find something disappointing in his works. I devoured American Tabloid, 20 years ago. I was bored numb by The Cold Six Thousand. And I didn't even know about the final piece of the trilogy, Blood's A…
Tailwing marketing and misinformation engine When the Tailwind hype train arrived at my station, back in 2018 I believe, I missed it because it was relying on Less , and setting it up was a pain – back then I was more of a Sass guy. Years later, not only do I not get the appeal of this framework (or any CSS framework for that matter) but I'm glad not to be part of what looks, from the outside,…
Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2024 A yearly ritual by people used to thinking about the future, in a virtual space that is also a time capsule of the early web. The Well's UI is clunky like old mailing lists archives, but the ideas are rich, the analysis sharp, if also bleak. Stop saying “technical debt” I used to love the “technical debt” metaphor. Now I'm very suspicious…
December was rather busy for me, but as often, the last week of the year is quiet, and I'm finally able to pop and shift from my overflowing reading list. The ‘Three-Body Problem’, the Imperative of Survival, and the Misogyny of Reactionary Rhetoric Fascinating take of the Three-Body Problem trilogy and its underlying ideology. I haven't read the whole trilogy, since I found the first novel a drag…
Helvetic Ruby was a great conference. I missed the time window to write about how much I enjoyed, but thankfully other people did . However, I did take notes with the intent to share my thoughts, and there is one talk in particular for which I took a lot of notes (comparatively). Disclaimer: I really enjoyed Harriet Oughton's presentation, and I certainly don't want to critizise her work. Still, I…
I am now four sessions deep into my Cyberpunk RED campaign, codenamed Chrome Shift , and it seems like the group has found its rhythm, which is great. As we're reaching the end of the first scenario, here is a summary of the story so far, and my GM commentary track. Saving customers with extreme prejudice The dystopian future of Cyberpunk RED is a dangerous place. In Night City, in 2045, violence…
Even since I heard about it, I've been fond of the Rockstar programming language. Or, more precisely, I've been fond of the humor behind this langage, and the fact Rockstar it is basically a joke pushed to eleven , with actual implementations and potentially actual programs to be written. Last year, I tried to do the Advent of Code using Rockstar, but immediately hit a roadblock. This year, I…
HTTP 303 Redirects with anchor not respected An unexpected issue with Turbo that I came across while working on a pet project. It's all the more a bummer that the problem is not really with Turbo, but with fetch() . The silver lining is that I learned a couple of things through this, starting with the fact that there is a whole spec for fetching (which goes beyond the JS function). Spicy Web I may…
It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks. Probably the best article I've stumbled upon in the past couple of weeks. Reading it go me so excited that I couldn't help but forwarding it around, especially to designers or managers I've worked with in the past. Heather Buchel explains exactly what I've been trying to say for years, but way better than I ever could, and with an extra dash of…
Some time ago, I stumbled upon an interesting technical test . However, the more I looked at the provided Rails app, the more issues I found with it, to the point that I find it good material for an educational (hopefully) piece. But before I start, two disclaimers: This is not a rebuttal of the test itself. And I'm certainly not trying to explain away my poor performance. The test was fair and…
Last Sunday, I had the pleasure to attend one of Jason Swett 's online meetups. This time, Jason had put his consultant hat on, and was helping a cheerful developer, Duncan, fix his app. Having played the role of the consultant myself quite often, watching someone else's approach was really interesting, so thank you Jason for this opportunity. However, even more interesting was Duncan's problem,…
I consider myself a solid developer, especially with Ruby and Rails. After all, I've been writing code and building systems for more than twenty years now. However, I'm weary of becoming complacent, or even worse, overestimating abilities that would be declining without me realizing it. That is why I keep practicing and always welcome a challenge or an assessment. And such a test is exactly what I…
I really, really liked Midnight Mass . So much so that it got me to catch up with Mike Flanagan's "Haunting of" shows, which were, say, of uneven quality but still enjoyable. And it got me rather excited for The Fall of the House of Usher. Now that I've watched this latest show, the more I think about it, the more I see issues in its pacing, tone, text and subtext, to the point that I honestly…