It was my intention to post once a week for 3 weeks, but last week was a write-off so here we are. Still, I think the experiment of "doing a limited run of weeknotes" has been a useful aproach.
Last week I wanted to patch one of our Laravel dependencies to fill in some missing functionality - this is something we would do routinely with Drupal, but it doesn't seem to be core Composer functionality. Fortunately, there's a module for that.
At a meetup a few months ago someone winced when I told them I work with PHP-- they hadn't used it themselves in a decade or two, and that got me to reflecting how much the language and the ecosystem has improved. Certainly NodeJS library developers could learn a thing or two.
Films!
After my last weeknote I went off to a screening of Return to Oz, the deeply creepy yet more faithful sequel to The Wizard thereof, with some fantastic puppetry and stunning visual effects for the era.
This week it was The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, a beautiful Czech semi-animated adventure film from the '60s (and presumably the main reference point for Terry Gillingham's animation style). Alongside other films like The Cassandra Cat it seems like Soviet Czechoslovakia had something really special going on in new wave cinema.
Both of these screenings were hosted by graduates of Scalarama Leeds, the DIY film festival. This Thursday they'll be kicking off the planning process for 2025-- maybe this is the year yours truly ends up screening something.
Any Other Business
Not much has changed
Listening to: still Car Seat Headrest, still Twin Fantasy, this time the 2018 rerecording (on Vinyl this time 🤓)
Reading: still Terry Pratchett - Soul Music - close to finishing this one
Writing: This month I've had my songwriting hat on, as it is February Album Writing Month. I've penned a few rough tracks, nothing special but it's nice to create.
Playing: Echoes of Wisdom
This concludes our latest series of Pauls Weeknotes. It's been fun, we'll have to do this again some time!
We're into February now and I'm still picking up the miscelateous
tasks that 2024 Paul left for me. This week started with dependency
upgrades for one of our API client libraries.
Since we've started using OpenAPI to document our APIs I'd like to try
autogenerating an API client from the same configuration file, but
that's a task for the future.
Elsewhere, we seem to have settled on Astro
as the framework for the next iteration of the digiral guide frontend.
Finally, a note on the positive side effects of using semantic HTML.
The bfi.org.uk RSS feed only contains the title and summary of
each article, but some RSS readers like
NetNewsWire offer to fetch the full page
HTML so you can read it without leaving your feed reader.
We use the following markup for our images:
When this HTML is loaded in a reader without any CSS, we get some
lovely basic formatting that indicates the attribution text
as distinct from the rest of the image caption. On the website
you'd see Above prefixed to the caption, but this is added
with CSS, so it doesn't come through in our reader - a good thing
too, since some RSS readers could well decide to put the image
below the caption.
I currently type from aboard an LNER to Leeds; yesterday I was in London for the BFI T&DT away day.
Having been bitten by the bug for blogging I found Giles Turnbull's
talk on doing weeknotes invigorating—particularly,
the idea that you can write stuff like this in seasons. Deciding I'm going to write three blog posts
over three weeks feels more achievable than writing one post a week forever (-ever (-ever (-ever...))).
More things I learnt:
OKRs are not a recent trend but invented in the 1980s at Intel
I can't remember watching any film that came out in 2024
My new year's resolution is to journal more; more ink on paper. I think manually writing stuff
down that nobody else will see helps me process my thoughts. I also want to blog more,
to combat the rise of auto-generated sludge online.
What's going on at work? I've discovered there's a snooze button in Outlook,
and I'm trying out a new IDE called
Nova - which happens to be made by my favourite video game
publishing company Panic, whose output
includes Thank Goodness You're Here!,
Untitled Goose Game, and the
Playdate handheld console.
I'm also thinking about, as developers, how we teach architecture. It's very easy
to write a blog post about what the latest web platform feature is or the coolest
new library. And it's easy to download an MVC framework or install it as a dependency.
But you can't just download "architecture", and I think that makes it less enticing to
teach about too - there are no quick results.
So watch this space, maybe this year I'll write something about the why's and how's of software.
No major updates this week - except that this blog now sends Update activities, so you might start seeing these posts in your ActivityPub feeds (I still can't see replies though, so don't bother sending them).
Anyway, here are a few links from the last month or so that I thought were interesting:
In A look at search engines with their own indexes, Rohan Kumar takes a look at the search engine landscape, from the big three to the new and alternative engines. A good resource for anyone who's interested in the alternatives to Google and Bing.
I've been really impressed with podcast software AntennaPod's social media presence and blog posts recently. It's a great example of an open source project understanding that communication is an important part of project management. Their recent blog post on refactoring their code structure is quite insightful, and gives me confidence that AntennaPod are here to stay.
Last time I reposted a link to my blog on the fediverse my site went down. It's a small server but it should be able to withstand a bunch of get requests. I realised I probably don't need to verify a user's signature on every request, since it's only relevant when posting to the inbox route.
So now I've reduced request time by 100-fold, let's see if there's an improvement.
Hello, world. I've transcended "Using my blog to post about creating blogging software", now I am doing "Using my ActivityPub site to post about creating fediverse software".
So far it's extremely basic: Actors and Articles are represented, but no Create activity yet. The actor is followable but don't even think about sending me a like, note, or reply yet. If you want to ask any questions probably best to message @paul@hades.town for now.
Last week's design sprint was super interesting and productive, everyone did a great job coming up with ideas and designs, and I'm looking forward to reaching the point that we can start building a product.
Most of my thoughts this week have turned to packing boxes, as we'll be moving house next week. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it - it will be sad to say goodbye to our current home, but as the time gets closer I am getting more excited about owning my own home and creating a place that I know is going to be more permenant than anywhere I've lived in the last decade or two.
Adding to my links collection this week: Storygraph, a promising alternative to Amazon's Good Reads. My own personal boycott of tech giants is not so much to damage those companies in any way (it's only a drop in the ocean anyway), but to support small projects and help ensure there are alternative products and ecosystems for people who want a choice.
I've observed this decrease in result quality happening over the last few years (decade, even) as have many others in indie web circles. As with many problems on the modern web, there is a lack of intelligent curation and moderation that is being exploited for profit, and in my opinion it'll be hard if not impossible for search engines to do anything to remedy it in the long term.
But we are starting to see people experiment again with alternative forms of web navigation: manually curated directory listings, link aggregators like Lemmy, and the resurrection of the webring. I've added a links section to my website and will be starting to populate it with useful and interesting resources as I discover them, but what I'm really hoping for is to see someone create a federated discovery service inspired by StumbleUpon.
Next week I'll be joining my colleagues in a design sprint, which will be an interesting experience. We'll also be starting work on the RSS feed that I mentioned in my last post. And plenty of code refactoring, including dropping our storybook-based design system in favour of a combination of Figma files and hardcoded component demo pages within our main codebase.
With the Christmas period now a distant memory, what is there to look forrward to in January? Actually we have a couple of winter celebrations coming up that our household like to celebrate, in our small ways.
This first is Wassail, an old English folk celebration to ensure a good havest for the new year. It's celebrated on 17th of January, Old Twelfth Night (as it would have been 12th night in the Julian Calendar) by drinking mulled drinks, singing songs, and hanging toast on trees.
The second is Burns Night on January 25th, a Scotish celebration remembering poet Robert Burns. Again, celebrated with song, drink and food. Although since we're not Scottish this is a smaller celebration for us; mainly a chance to try our hand at making a vegetarian haggis and enjoy a glass or two of whisky.
At work this week I've suggested we add an RSS feed to the site. In an era where so many people are becoming fed up with social media algorithms, many users have started to seek ways to curate their own news feeds and digital social networks, and it's a quick win for us to add this kind of open data feed to our site. Plus it's a timely coincidence, yesterday being the anniversary of the tragic death of RSS inventor Aaron Swartz.
The lack of sunlight at this time of year really gets to me. It makes me feel heavy and slow. But we've had nice things to keep us occupied; the dregs of the Christmas period means plenty of snacks to finish off, the jigsaw to complete, and the decorations and tree to keep us feeling cozy... until tomorrow!
I tried a 7am swim yesterday, which left me in a good mood for the day, and remarkably awake. Unfortunately today the tiredness has caught up with me, but at least it's only Friday.
As for work, it's a slow easing in for this week. I'm trying to reduce the quantity of Javascript we send to the client, eventually with the goal of removing our React dependency completely. I think it's possible, and it will be nice once done - but it's going to be a long process!
These both refer to the same data model, but in very different contexts. In fact, the first refers to a keyed entry in a list, whereas the second is a sub-property of an entry in a different list.
So in order to generate a link we need some extra context. For the first URL, we can generate this by knowing "we want the films list, and the entry under batman" For the second, "we want the film data from an entry in the screenings list, specifically the entry for june 2024".
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