What is up? It s hot over here. I have had the pleasure of flying with three European budget airlines this summer. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Ryanair check-in experience. It was exactly the dark pattern UX hellscape that I dreamed of a true education and delight. I ve now also flown with [...] Read More...
I now spend many hours a day reading LLM generated text. Summaries of systems and interactions, guesses at what caused a bug, implementation plans, pull requests descriptions. Pages and pages of flabby prose, which I skim, and then offer a pointed response, increasingly impatient. “NO don’t cast just use the type”, “why is this needed? [...] Read More...
Years ago I worked somewhere which, for a couple of years, had a staff club . This was a room in a weird spot behind a staff canteen (also an odd place ) which I guess was otherwise dead space. So some committee somewhere decided to designate it as a club which in practice means it [...] Read More...
Everyone likes dark UX patterns such fun! Ryanair are Europe s most profitable airline and they are masters of this noble form. This is an all time classic from around 8 years ago to not buy travel insurance, you must select Don t Insure Me, midway down a list of countries: I have the joy [...] Read More...
Hi all, Today I’m announcing a project that I’ve been working on for a while: Try Langwag Learn any language by reading the news Langwag: a language learning app. It supports more than 30 languages. The idea is that you can copy and paste any news story into it to get a personalised translation and [...] Read More...
Hello! It s a clear-skied, crisp day here in Minnesota. Winter is coming, but not today. While we wait for the world to turn and the seasons to change, why not pass some time thinking about database configuration? I recently moved from SQLite to PostgreSQL as the database for pythondocs.xyz, my project that tries to bring [...] Read More...
Yesterday, I was playing around with my VS Code settings, which is something normal that I do for fun. I came across settings for Inlay Type Hints, which is a new feature to me, but apparently has been available since July. Here s a quick demo: You can see that Pylance (VS Code s Python language server) [...] Read More...
Hello friends! Today I m presenting the database configuration that I (currently) use on pythondocs.xyz – real time interactive search of Python documentation. It copies a SQLite database from disk into memory, so it s very fast. It s great for read-only workflows dashboards and the like. It s not suitable for sites that accept user input, as [...] Read More...
Hey. Are you stuck in the year 2020? Are you trying backup Microsoft To Do tasks with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph? Have you become infuriated because the Graph API doesn t let you export sub-tasks? Well, the good news is that in 2022 in the future Microsoft Graph will add support for what they [...] Read More...
Hello world! How s it going out there? Monkey pox scars healing OK? Great. My most recent project is pythondocs.xyz real time interactive search of Python documentation. If you haven t checked it out yet, please take a look and let me know what you think over here. The site is built with FastAPI and I [...] Read More...