current

When I first heard of the Godhart’s Law it resonated with me, as I believe it did with many people, because it describes a common pain developers feel. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that that’s all it does - describes the problem. It doesn’t in anyway help you identify the core issue, nor solve it in any way. That’s why when I ran into this article I was glad that someone else felt the same way and even provided a more useful formulation:

When people are pressured to meet a target value there are three ways they can proceed:

1. They can work to improve the system
2. They can distort the system
3. Or they can distort the data

Thanks, Cedric Chin!

These collapsible trees/lists which only use HTML & CSS might be something interesting to consider implementing for the Markdown parsing for this app…

This “Atom” from brandur nicely summarizes the exact feeling I felt when I created and started posting here on current:

I’ve been writing [Atoms] for a few days, and the biggest takeaway of the experiment is how comparatively freeing it is. In the distributed world of RSS there are no likes, favs, quote tweets, or replies – no numbers to minimize or maximize.

A great post on why just being motivated isn’t enough to be productive, we need to be prepared:

Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.

A rather specific bit of information, but if you are deploying to Fly.io and want an easy way to access data stored in your Volumes, fly ssh sftp get is a great little command just for that!

Spring ‘83 is a very interesting idea for something which might come after we move on from timelines, RSS and newsletters. As stated in the narrative description of it:

• Twitter’s timeline is a muddle. It’s too uneven; when a user stops speaking, they disappear, and, by corollary, as a follower, you mostly encounter the users who are speaking nonstop…
• RSS is too stark. I follow a lot of RSS feeds, and I appreciate them, and I almost want to leave it at that; nothing’s more boring than re-litigating RSS.
• Email is a retreat. … The thing is, email inboxes have been algorithmic for a long time, and publishers struggle with Gmail’s caprice almost as much as they do Instagram’s.

Definitely still in the draft/PoC phase of its life, but definitely hitting some of the issues I’ve had with alternatives I saw presented so far. Food for thought!

Even though I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, there’s something to be said about the feeling of potential that can be felt during this time of the year. Drawing the proverbial “hard-line” in my journal, starting a new clean slate, the opportunity to do better. Coming off of more than a week of vacation, batteries fully recharged and ready to tackle what’s ahead!

This soft deletion alternative really speaks to me as it keeps the code data layer code clean, provides the same functionality and helps keep the production data tables smaller. Definitely worth checking out!

Moonfall was probably the best worst movie I have seen in 2022! It definitely falls into the so bad it’s good category for me. It’s virtually a high (~140M $) budget B-movie and I’m here for it.

Let’s enter 2023 gently, with hope and good intentions. Let it be a year of improvements, however big or small.

Happy New Year 🎊!