- Last week was the end of a — long for me — nine-month project. It was not
the easiest nor was it working in a particularly exciting to me technology
(React and later React Native) but I learned a lot. And spent a lot of time
in Zoom calls,
- Unfortunately, the client has been badly affected by COVID-19 so the project
ended up finishing much earlier than we’d hoped for (it’s nice to actually
finish the work you start!) and a little abruptly: the last week was
wrapping up everything we could, leaving notes and fixing a load of small
annoyances I’d wanted to for months,
- But that did open up an opportunity to take some time off, so this week
(and also next) I’ve been working on my own stuff. A mix of fixing things
which I’d wanted to, but were much more involved than I could find the time
for plus trying out a few new things,
- I started off by profiling my
zsh configuration; it’d gotten horribly
slow. I started off with 1.33 minutes (!), and got it down to 0.08 seconds
by switching nvm (the main culprit) and jabba to lazy-load.
It was a lot easier to do than I expected, I started off by profiling as
explained in this article and then trying out a few lazy loading
approaches,
- I spent Monday and Tuesday on Administrate and closed 74 issues and
PRs! I enjoy working on this project (when I get the time), but it’s a lot
of work to keep on top of and I usually find I drop behind for a few months
at a time and then the backlog becomes somewhat overwhelming. My goal this
year has been get below 50 open issues and 30 open PRs and as I write this
we’re on 65 and 31 respectively, so it looks like I might actually make it,
- For a long time, I’ve been working on a tool for pulling my bank data into
YNAB (an application which has been fairly transformative for me),
it’s just for me so it works out as a good platform for experimenting on.
It was feature complete about a year ago until the service I was using to
pull UK bank data was shutdown and since I’ve been building out a UI so
that you could log in to it. This is is needed because the (relatively new)
Open Banking APIs in the UK require the end user to click through to
confirm — previously it was a Rails app which just had Sidekiq to run some
background jobs for syncing,
- Anyway, I’ve been working with Tailwind on and off for a while plus
using Tailwind UI, and this week I added Stimulus to do some
interaction. After spending most of the year working on a huge React app,
Stimulus is very satisfying: much closer to the way the browser actually
works so you’re not fighting with someone else’s interpretation of how it
should be and so little unexpected magic (which I always felt with
Redux) and the docs are relatively tiny,
- Like many people, I have a bit of an aversion to the huge amount of
classes you end up putting in a “component” and my first instinct was to
extract these out (in the original version of this project, that’s exactly
what I did). But it took hours of working out naming and revisiting CSS
conventions. I’m building a menu that I’m very likely to never touch agin,
what’s the point? I think the individual component solution is going to be
ViewComponent, which I’m going to try out soon,
- Finally, I picked up a Thinkpad T470s. I have — for about the last
three years or so — been thinking about trying to run Debian and the
i3 tiling window manager and see how I go with it. It’s been good so
far, but my expectations are to use it for messing about with, rather than
anything more; can you imagine having to piss about with
xrandr to get a
presentation to work in a client meeting? nightmare-ish.