Posts tagged: dev

Conventional Commits A specification for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages Conventional Commits · conventionalcommits.org I try to use conventional commits on all of my commits, but I often end up only using feat/fix. I need to keep this page handy and get new verbiage worked into my language fix: feat: build: chore: ci: docs: style: refactor: perf: test: Optionally include a scope A bang indicates a breaking change note. For example …

Your Framework is Showing The one where I’ve had enough of the same Next.js error. dbushell.com · dbushell.com Great breakdown of nextjs. I was highly unaware of its performance optimizations before reading this. The smell of vendor lock in from next/vercel has been there from the start, this is the first real claim I’ve seen. I’m out on modern js front ends, complex builds that change every 6 months, design patterns are out of date just as fast. Its hard to keep up, especially when you don’t have the use case for highly interactive apps. Libraries like htmx or plain ol js gets the job done on the majority of sites and everything I tend to work on.

I’m totally with Prime here, there is something about the read only, mouse clicking part of my brain that causes me to be more critical of the code at a different level. It doesn’t hit the part of my brain thinking about the edit or how to do the edit, it hits a part thats thinking about how I will have to deal with the code moving forward.

Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel TBD Omar Abid - Personal Blog · omarabid.com Vendor lock in disguised as performance. Nextjs aparantly now streams all of your metadata on the fly with js. This would obviously kill all seo right, well not if you’re on vercel they automatically detect search crawlers and serve the metadata. Why the f do they need to do this and not just serve everyone the metadata. The Web is this beautiful place where anyone can create and build amazing things with a relatively low skill. Js is meant to be enhancement, not degrade the experience of its users.

Think less, ship more I do too much thinking about what I want to make, and not enough actually making the thing. cassidoo.co I thin a lot of us have this issues, especially on side projects. At work therre are expectations, jira tickets and so on, keeping you shipping. I think there is something to be said about getting that quick and dirty POC to the right group of people early for feedback before you add redis caching, kubernetes, auto scaling, disruption budget, distributed nodes, high availability, backups, disaster recovery. At work you kinda have to have the right person to shoot ideas by that can understand that you probably need some of these complex things for your app and it will take time to get right.

PocketCal Build Log I made a date-sharing app called PocketCal. Here cassidoo.co I love this idea of tiny useful apps for yourself. In fact I’m working on a project to built out tinyapps for myself to replace my common needs. I absolutely love that all of the state is stored in the url bar, nothing is stored server side. As much as I love to hate js, I really appreciate that things like this can be built to just live on the web, be accessible from anywhere, and live practically forever as they require such little hosting demand.

GitHub - numtide/treefmt: the formatter multiplexer [maintainers=@zimbatm,@brianmcgee] the formatter multiplexer [maintainers=@zimbatm,@brianmcgee] - numtide/treefmt GitHub · github.com This looks like a very useful formatting tool to keep in the back of my mind. I do a lot of python and our tool tends to be pre-commit, named after the git hook pre-commit. It specifies a bunch of tools to run, you can run them in ci, manually, and opt into doing it before commit. I like the simplicity of this one not needing a whole ecosystem, but rather just leveraging the cli commands from those tools. This would probably be something that would get in the way of setup for new devs and not something I would throw on one project by itself, its another thing for everyone to figure out how to install and run on every platform, I’m sure its not hard, but being on python teams pre-commit just fits in.

This is one of the greatest pycon keynotes I’ve ever seen, bookmarking this to come back and leave better thoughts on later.

Should I go to college? Was my education worth it? Should I keep going. A question that comes in all too often accross most industries that require some level of education. DHH has such great takes on it, some I had never fully thought about. He starts out with should we have people study niche topics (using Russian Poetry as an example). Yes the world deserves people who can make their life works out of something that brings them and many other so much joy, but no you probably shouldn’t go 100k’s into debt to do it. Should I get a software engineering degree, or become a doctor also have similar answers, it needs to be somewhat justified and not outrageous as has become the norm. We used to listen in to Dave Ramsey on long car rides and he would have people call in and say, they went half a million dollars into debt to become a dentist, only to discover they did not want to do dentistry. At this point it’s too bad, you gotta suck it up and pay that off with something that makes some serious cash, and the only skill you probably got that can bring in that level of cash is … dentistry. They dive into the college experience, learning to have adult debates with classmates about which…

The ethics of README ads I’ve been considering accepting sponsorship again for my projects. Will McGugan · willmcgugan.github.io I’ve long avoided running ads on my blog for the same reason. For a few months I ran an ad above the fold. It was a “Your Ad Here” kind of thing, and in the messaging I was looking for content relevant to my content, not google driven ads. This resulted in nothing, no hits, not a one. I’m kinda with Will on this one beer money is not worth degrading the project for. I seriously thought some of the big projects with a moderate level of success got a good cut for these sponsorships. Some of the companies are big companies, like how do they even go through meetings and decide who gets beer money without spending more than that in decision making resources. Maybe they have a guy with more autonomy than I would expect.

DHH (@dhh) on X You don't need a mentor. There's no secret sauce left inside anyone's head any more. It's all been tapped, bottled, tweeted, and shared a million times. Sample some of that, but also guard your ign... X (formerly Twitter) · x.com I need to find this podcast, was DHH this animated through the whole thing? You don’t need a mentor. There’s no secret sauce left inside anyone’s head any more. It’s all been tapped, bottled, tweeted, and shared a million times. Sample some of that, but also guard your ignorance. You’ll lose it soon enough. It takes work, one on one hand holding is a shortcut. Sometimes one that we need. Sometimes we need to level up quick, hence why your job might pair you up with someone for the first few months, but it is not something you need, you can figure shit out on your own with hard work. These days we have things like gippity to bounce ideas off, and you can generally get the sense of the direction the average of the internet it was trained on. Always add your own experience and make a choice for yourself.

DHH (@dhh) on X NIH: Not Invented Here Syndrome might come from a good place, but almost everything that's good in this world came from people who ignored it. Virtually everything is a variation of something else.... X (formerly Twitter) · x.com I suffer hard from NIH, I’m cheap, I like building things, I hate reading the docs, the perfect recipe for some bad NIH. I really like DHH’s take here. If no one builds anything new we get stuck with the same old shit. I think theres a lot of things that as far as my use case is concerned feature complete and needs no more. I would just build with it or on it, but not re-invent. It’s a slippery slope.

Forrest Knight (@ForrestPKnight) on X you're not allowed to write comments in your code anymore, because if you do everyone will just think it's ai generated. X (formerly Twitter) · x.com Oh, I feel this. I go through the effort of removing dum ai comments so the ai looks less ai. you’re not allowed to write comments in your code anymore, because if you do everyone will just think it’s ai generated.

css if() just landed, I’m struggling to understand what I an do with this that I can’t do with something as old as classes. I can get it if I don’t have control over html creation or js to add classes. The example that Una shows includes data that could directly be a classname with a set of styles in css rather than this crazy css variable unpacking out of a data attribute and an if statement.

Just fucking code. justfuckingcode.com This is great, beautifully captures a modern backend view of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/. I honestly resonate with almost all of this. I have found myself in more trouble than help when trying to fully vibe out a project. It never refactors, it leaves it shit everywhere, it mostly does what you say, until you get to something that seems easy, so you try to do it yourself, but you break its brittle piece of shit into pieces any time you try to touch it. AI coding help is great, mcp seems like it really has some game changing abilities, but hands of vibe coded crap aint there yet for me.

No docs, no bugs If your library doesn't have any documentation, it can't have any bugs. Documentation specifies what your code is supposed to do. Your tests specify what it actually does. Bugs exist … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Bugs exist when your test-enforced implementation fails to match the behavior described in your documentation. Without documentation a bug is just undefined behavior. This is quite an interesting thought, so does this mean that, none of my undocumented side projects have bugs? no I think there is still some implied behavior that naming things covers. a function implies doing something wtih s3, getting stuff from your local filesystem or crashing would be considered a bug. I think the argument here is that if I start mining bitcoin when you call and I have not documented it that this is a feature not a bug. If I were to take this a step further, now do I need to document that this does not also start a bitcoin miner? maybe this is more of an unwanted feature than a bug, I’m convincing myself more and more.

What’s next? Some years ago I had the opportunity to work fulltime on project of mine. This was at a time where I fully intended to take a year off, but being able to make a living off a project of your own cre... Will McGugan · willmcgugan.github.io So it’s back to plan A: taking a year off. I plan on using this time to focus on my health–something I haven’t prioritized while working as a CEO / Founder of a startup. Wish you the best Will, you have given us textual and rich, and from what I can tell left it in some great hands. All I can say for certain is that I would like to write more. Writing scratches many of the same itches as software development, and it is a skill I’d like to nurture. Go get em Will, write to your hearts desire, and resist the urge to make an SSG company this time.

Too much magic A common criticisms of frameworks like Textual is that they have “too much magic”. Will McGugan · willmcgugan.github.io Now “too much magic” is not the same thing as “bad magic”, although they are often conflated. Bad magic is when the implementation details leak out from the level below. This can manifest itself as cryptic errors that reference the magic’s implementation.

Dang Strong takes against markdown here with a strong push for bespoke content models/structures. This idea is completely foreign and wild to me. I get it that markdown has its issues with flavors, add ons and what not, but overall its mostly transportable, its a skill that works most content sites and writing tools. I am so far on the other side that I seek out tools with markdown as an option and lean away from wsiwyg tools with specialized data formats on the backend. I’ll end with, I’m also a dev that creates very simplified content and maybe seeing the backend of a site with lots of custom fields would be very eye opening for me.