Recent content on Flying Croissant
Introduction After witnessing some truly chaotic political news about tariffs in early 2025, I was starting to get lost in the constant churn of changing rules and regulations being announced in news articles on a nearly-hourly basis. While an active observer could, perhaps, keep track of everything and put together a mental model of the state of the world, I found the idea of this to be…
The Twitter Vibe Shift Recent Experience From my point of view, at least, the only ones left on Twitter X are the indecisive stragglers (I count myself among this group), the corporate/government accounts, the bots, the thinkbois trying to grind for followers, and some truly awful people that I don’t even want to talk about. It’s a weird ghost town. People don’t even like each…
Is VR/AR computing actually useful? Apple announced a new platform – the Vision Pro . The idea is to strap it to your face and enter a virtual workspace, doing all of your general computing. I kind of don’t need this at all at the moment. I already use all of the other platforms: phone, laptop, tablet, watch, TV, portable game console, headphones. First impressions are that this is wildly…
Not every part of life can be a cozy snooze, but being able to find times and places where you can relax is very important (most especially when you’re stressing). I’ve found some of the following areas to be helpful for me to tease out those moments of calm. Music Find some music that you like and that helps you to feel calm. This could be your favourite albums or something…
Update Not a whole lot new to update this time. This one is going to be mostly media links! Video Star Trek: Picard, Season 3 The third season resolution of the story finally pays off with some classic TNG action. Star Trek: The Next Generation Reviews - Reverse Angle I like TNG a lot, but it’s true that many of the episodes are quite bad. I have enjoyed the thorough roasting these reviewers…
Update As the winter here in the Canadian prairies starts to very slowly thaw and the days grow gradually longer again, I remember that I haven’t blogged for a while. What’s the easiest way to remedy that? Another update filled with what has been keeping me busy for the last few months, including a bunch of links to content I’ve enjoyed! TV & Movies No Time To Die - I watched…
Trip Context Last time I was on a flight was in March 2020, uncomfortably close to the initial COVID-19 shutdowns in my city. A work-related team-building trip to a Cabo San Lucas resort surrounded by other guests shouting “SPRING BREAK” as they drank more alcohol than many of them could handle. For the last two years or so since then, I haven’t travelled. As restrictions eased…
Motivation When you are actively working on new features in your software, it’s fairly easy to keep dependencies updated and make any framework changes as you go. Even if you have to break that work out into its own work item to do separately from the feature work, it’s often not that hard to find a place for it along with the work you’re already doing. Once your software is more…
I always like reading about what media other people are enjoying, so I thought I’d give it a try myself! These are some things that come to mind from the first half of 2022. Watching In terms of TV shows, the two that really stuck out recently were Severance S1 and the first part of Better Call Saul S6. Both of them are incredibly well-made and I can’t describe a whole lot about them…
What’s An RSS Feed? An RSS feed is an XML file that you can publish on a website that describes a collection of items and where to find them. So if you have a blog, for example, your RSS feed can be a list of all of the blog posts on your site with some amount of metadata describing each post. You can also get more granular if you want and offer feeds for different categories of posts.…
I saw the idea of a “personal CRM” pop up again recently and wanted to jot down some thoughts around software for planning and operating online meetings. This isn’t a fully-considered concept by any means. It’s more of a sketch of the kinds of things I think would be interesting or useful for a tool or tools like this to provide. I’m thinking of this as something that…
Ingredients 1 egg 1 cup milk 3 slices of thick-sliced Italian bread 1/2 Tbsp sugar (or to taste) 1 tsp vanilla extract 1/2 tsp cinnamon Pinch of salt Instructions Whisk ingredients (other than bread) until combined. Dip bread in the liquid mixture until it has absorbed enough. Spray skillet with cooking spray. Cook on medium-low heat until golden brown, flip and cook other side. Serve with syrup,…
Intro A few years ago, I was thinking about the idea of mob programming and how there must be an equivalent for code review. I then thought this was such an obvious idea that someone must have thought of it before. After a few minutes of searching, I found a blog post from Akeneo Labs that linked to some slides describing their practice. I found myself nodding along with the pain points they…
Intro to Exquisite Land Exquisite Land is a project of Buzzard.life , a “publishing collaborative” (and I have met most of them through previous online conversations). More about the history of the creation of Exquisite Land can be found on the game page and numerous design and build sessions posted on their YouTube channel . When I saw that this group was working on a project involving…
Playlists I made a little playlist over the last few days with some music that is in a style I enjoy. It got me thinking a bit about the different ways that I use playlists and how the Some Things I Do With Playlists Atmosphere My friend Jon mentioned that playlists can be part of the solution when you’re trying to focus and I definitely agree. Sometimes adding in the right music is exactly…
Missing Travel Travel is one of my favourite ways to spend time with friends and connect through shared experiences. While the amount of travel happening right now (in the age of COVID-19) is dramatically reduced (or completely eliminated), I look forward to meeting up with old and new friends as soon as it can be done safely so that we can build new memories together. The experience of…
Context In March 2020, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic , grocery shopping got a lot more complicated. While some stores where I live offered pickup or delivery options for groceries, most people had been getting their food by going to the store in person. Almost overnight, we entered a public health emergency which dramatically changed how people interacted with retail stores and especially…