markjgsmith

home > archives > everything > 2022 > 03

2022/03/28 #

  • What I love about loud guitars

    I’ve been listening to loud guitars for about 40 years. That’s quite a long time.

    I took a bit of a break from listening to music recently. It was for about two years. It wasn’t something that was planned, life circumstances arranged themselves in such a way that listening was more difficult than it had been previously, I was very busy with other things, and I just sort of stopped.

    I was still listening to podcasts, but not music. At some point I listened to a podcast that reminded me about my love for music. It was a strange feeling, like oh-yeah-I-used-to-really-love-music, in that moment I realised that I had basically forgotten. It was the strangest thing, similar to remembering a dream.

    I’ve since started listening to all sorts of music again, electronic and band / guitar based. Not loads, but some. I’m so glad that I remembered.

    I was listening to some great punk/hardcore/indie/metal recently and was moved to try to put into words the way it makes me feel. The following are extracts of what I wrote.

    That thing where you feel like you’ve just been plugged into the mains, and all you want to do is shout YES over and over and over again, really fucking loudly.

    It’s like you’ve just been injected with the adrenaline of 1000 horses.

    And then the bit finishes and you’re like…"God damn".

    It’s odd because the feeling doesn’t happen in your physical body, you can listen to a whole song and not have any physical change, but the feeling is like it’s in some sort of virtual body, that’s somewhere there in the background, that’s momentarily become very very alive.

    It also feels like you are inside the sound, which is odd because it’s the sound that’s inside you, but when you hear that guitar none of that matters anymore, whether it’s you or the sound or whatever, because you’ve just been plugged in, that part of you is alive again.

    It’s all the music you’ve ever listened to, all the music videos you’ve ever watched, all the live shows you’ve been to, all the late nights, and all the people you’ve shared those experiences with, in that moment of guitar electricity, they are all there alive again.

    It’s such a strong feeling that it’s really bizarre to me that some people can listen to the very same sounds and feel nothing. It just sounds like noise or something.

    Those were the bits I wrote. I also love listening to quiter music too, but in that moment, it was all about the loud guitars.

    I don’t drink alcohol anymore, it’s been about 3 or 4 years now. I’ve noticed that the music is even better, the drum sounds are crisper, the guitars are more alive, for electronic music, everything is much more hightenned. I notice so much more, it’s like the sound is now in HD when before it was SD. I didn’t expect that at all. It's awesome.

Today’s links:

2022/03/27 #

  • What can web developers learn from the industrialisation of farming?

    Stuff You Should Know published an interesting episode all about the chicken farming industry. It’s a really great piece, I encourage you to go and listen to it.

    The truth between Cage-free and Free-range (Stuff You Should Know Podcast)

    I was appalled to learn about how horrendous the conditions are for those animals. It’s shocking to learn about some of the practices that we have developed while industrialising farming, that are normal in our societies. It’s good that people are reconsidering some of these norms.

    It also got me thinking about our future with the forward march of technological innovation. We are building ever more complex technologies. Here’s the thought process I can’t seem to shake:

    1. Anyone can write software

    2. We can build virtual environments

    3. There exist people that have industrialised extremely cruel animal farming

    4. Those people will use similar techniques on other people, it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of time

    It might not be as visually obvious as chicken cages, in fact it’s likely that it would be designed to fit in our societies and appear normal.

    How would we detect instances of people being raised using battery farming techniques?

    How would we get out of such a situation if we were already in such a situation?

    What about related concepts like bullying? How will that be in the future?

    Very relevant and really worth listening to, especially if you are into psychology:

    The Dangers of Concept Creep (The Art of Manliness Podcast)

    I think it's worth trying to imagine this sort of thing because ultimately the thing we are farming with the world wide web and the metaverse is ourselves.

    Let's imagine a better future for everyone.

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 New Post: What can web developers learn from the industrialisation of farming? blog.markjgsmith.com #

2022/03/23 #

  • Reading and memory issues I sometimes have

    Difficult to talk/write about this.

    Firstly because it’s not something I’m particularly happy to admit, but also because I’ve only recently become aware of it, or at least aware enough to be able to describe it. It’s something I’ve been in some way aware for years, and it might be getting worse, I can’t tell. So what is it?

    Sometimes when I read, I lose the ability to read consistently and with ease. It doesn’t always happen. It seems to happen more when I’ve had a turbulent day, something that’s been happening a lot lately. I get into a state where instead of words coming off the page, so to speak, going through my eyes and being perceived by my brain, in a mostly consistent flow, it feels like there is some sort of buffering going on.

    Instead of the words just streaming into my thoughts and brain, my brain seems to change into a mode that operates a bit like that quiz show where the contestants answer questions and have to bank the money at the right time or they loose it. I forget the name of that show, it’s with that dreadfully scary red head woman.

    Anyway what happens is this. I read several parts of the sentence and at some point a hole chunk makes it through to my consciousness, all in one go, and on to the next bit that gets slurped in the same way. I have to speed up and slow down in just the right way, or bits start to get missed.

    I become aware that it’s happening and I kind of feel when the next chunk is going to be ‘let in’, and that screws up the rythm, and so some chunks get skipped or only partially comprehended, and I find that I have to constantly go back and re-read passages to fill in the gaps.

    Perhaps it’s got something to do with being tired. But I’m thinking it might be something else. When it’s not happening, when I’m feeling uncluttered and fresh, the buffering thing doesn’t appear to happen, reading is as smooth as ridding a hover board. When it’s happening it feels like someone is turning a tap on and off.

    Something that I’ve noticed, that is very different the past several months, is that I see a lot of people swinging their arms. This sounds really weird, but at some stage a few months ago basically everyone everywhere started a new exercise routine, where they swing their arms backwards and forwards. Some people do it standing still, others do it while they walk. Sometimes they are doing it while walking backwards.

    It’s the new trend where I am. I see literally hundreds of people doing this every single day. That wasn’t always the case. I’m not sure exactly when it started happening. Anyway it’s something that people do, a lot, fair enough, but I wonder if it’s affecting my ability to read smoothly because I’m visually seeing this repetitive up down motion over and over again. It might be completely unrelated, but I think it’s worth mentioning.

    I wonder if it’s happening to others without them realising. It’s quite subtle, easy to brush off, especially if you operate day to day with things like caffeine and alcohol. I don’t consume alcohol (it’s been 3-4 years now), and caffeine relatively rarely.

    I’ve also noticed my memory at certain times isn’t as good as I expect. I’m trying to remember something, I almost remember it, I can just about feel the thought poping into my head, and then it’s gone, sometimes this happens several times before the memory finally makes it’s way through to my conscious mind.

    Occasionally I have to get on with something else, to distract myself from myself, and the memory comes back randomly like a callback function that just got delayed by a very slow internet connection, and a temperamental firewall.

    Depending on where you are, you might find people around you that know about this will try to ‘hack’ you. That’s something that definitely happens. It’s a good opportunity to practice keeping calm under pressure, or just to surrender and move on to another place.

    That’s my best description of the reading and memory issues I sometimes have. Just putting it out there in case it helps someone else that might be having similar problems.

    I haven’t found many ways to improve it apart from just not doing anything for a few hours. I guess meditation can be good too. I do that occasionally. These are not always possible options, sometimes you just have to soldier through to get what you are doing done.

2022/03/21 #

  • Creative Economy vs the Cruelty Economy

    Some thoughts on these two concepts, don’t take these as fact, just some observations, might lead to something interesting, or maybe not.

    In the cruelty economy you are rewarded for receiving and disposing of cruelty. People optimise for not being hurt, not getting angry, for catching the purpotraiters of cruelty. Things tend towards a imprisonment.

    In the creator economy you are rewarded for receiving creativity and releasing it. People optimise for maximising the creativity, even bad stuff can be good. Things tend towards anarchy.

    Things go bad when your capacity to process is exceeded. Creativity turns to cruelty, but perhaps also cruelty turns to creativity.

    Real true anger is a capacity problem, it’s the group mis-managing capacity.

    It’s a sort of symbiosis, perhaps similar in concept and behaviour to other natural phenomena like the El niño - La niña weather system. In the case of the creator-cruelty economy, ultimately it’s all based on chemical fluctuations in our brains.

    It’s a really tough problem to think about, because we are all in the map so to speak, whatever actions we take, including thinking about the dynamic, affects the dynamic, and the balance.

    A potential danger is that you get caught in one extreme or the other, without enough capacity to switch. And then you are probably in for a bad time. Smashed against the rocks, over and over again, in plain site.

  • Typescript makes function declarations difficult to read

    I’m not a massive user of Typescript, though I see it could be very useful in some situations.

    The main issue is that I think the additional cognitive load isn’t trivial, and so code that you could easily skim through to get a good idea of what’s going on becomes full of little hurdles. Perhaps it’s something you get used to, but I fear it would seriously impact my ability to read and understand code. It decreases visibility.

    Having said that, I really like that you can specify the definitions in JSDoc. That’s cool because the code remains regular, fast to read javascript code. If you are wondering about types, just look at the JSDoc, which is always right next to the function declarations anyway.

    Though you don’t get the full power of Typescript using it that way, only the type checking. I’d also like to be able to use interfaces and other object oriented features that come with Typescript.

    Which brings me to the point of this post. If you are using full fat Typescript, IMO the way to define the types in the function arguments sucks. Reason being that it uses the colon (:) character. 

    function equals(x: number, y: number): boolean {
    return x === y;
}

    I don’t like that because the colon character is for objects declarations. Following years of writing javascript objects, my brain’s muscle memory visually associates that character with objects, so when I’m scanning a page I can easily jump to places on the page without having to fully read the code. Using : in function arg type definitions breaks that for me. I find it’s much more difficult to quickly get my bearings in Typescript code.

    I’m also not a fan of long function argument lists and Typescript doubles or triples the length of function argument lists. I feel that function declarations need to be short and to the point. It makes reading code much easier. I don’t find that having the return type is very useful in the function definition. It just feels like clutter to me.

    Some people say they like to know the types before they get into the function. Personally I find that once you start reading the code inside a function, it’s usually very obvious to differentiate between objects, arrays, strings, numbers etc. If I want to know the type, it’s preferable to glance at the JSDoc for the function.

    There’s a proposal to bring some Typescript syntax to javascript. Personally I’d like it if the type definitions were kept separate, keep function declarations readable! But I would like javascript to have interfaces and additional OO features.

Today’s links:

2022/03/18 #

  • My unsophisticated view on whether we have free will

    People are always talking about this in podcasts and around the internet, and I suppose it’s all quite interesting, but I just wanted to have some clear thoughts about it myself. So I spent a few minutes thinking about it and this is what I came up with.

    It’s probably completely wrong. I wouldn’t take this as life advice.

    Do we have free will?

    Yes. Because…

    1. You have a sort of biological choice algorithm in your head, implemented from neurons organised in neural networks, and it develops in your brain over time, and at any one time that choice algorithm is used to make choices that act on the inputs your brain is receiving. The choice is independent from the inputs, rather than being somehow packaged up and smuggled into your brain along with the inputs

    2. We have the ability to introspect, so in principle we have the ability to observe and see instances of unfree coercion, and change our thought processes accordingly - YMMV, every person's situation is very different, some have a lot more external pressures than others, which isn’t always bad, but it definitely can be

    3. If you remove everything, so you are an astronaut floating in the emptiness of space, you can still make choices

    Therefore humans have free will. In this view, free will is very similar to independence of thought.

    Feels kind of good to have that written down, at least I’ve got something I can point to now.

  • Cool things that were in web2.0

    Last week I listened to a John Gruber interview with Tom Watson and Daniel Agee, the founders of the photo sharing app Glass. They talked a lot about what it was like during web2.0, including some of the cool things that got developed in that period.

    I enjoyed the brief trip down memory lane, an oasis of calm amongst the current madness all around. I spent a few minutes making a list of some of the things I remember, and enjoyed wondering how some of these types of technologies and trends could blend with things in web3.0.

    Here’s that list:

    • Rocketboom, Ze Frank, and videoblogging
    • Citizen journalism
    • Creative Commons licensing
    • Crowd funding
    • Community events and meet-ups
    • The Maker movement
    • 3D printing
    • Photo sharing
    • Video streaming
    • Online maps and navigation
    • Blogging and RSS
    • Live photo feeds from events with photos displaying on your desktop as they are taken
    • Journalism integrated with data analysis tools
    • Social media
    • Newsrooms integrating social media into their broadcasts
    • Wikipedia
    • APIs everywhere
    • Web services - AWS, Azure etc
    • Podcasting and podcast tools
    • Open source hardware
    • Open source software
    • Github repos and actions
    • Bit torrent for sharing assets with listeners to collaborate on
    • User Generated Content
    • Live video streaming mixed with forum/chat rooms with bots that trigger video and audio overlays when events like tipping occurs
    • Gifs
    • Memes
    • Newsletters
    • Weird one offs that never took off like Chat Roulette

    Some of these were around before web2.0, but got very popular during web2.0 and arguably some were developed more recently but IMO feel very web2ish. Nonetheless when I think about web2.0, these are some of the things that come to mind.

  • The cruelty economy

    The Creator Economy has been pretty great.

    So many things to watch and listen to. But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming down the pipe: The Cruelty Economy!

    Creative Economy + Web3

    Crypto, blockchains, memecoins, DAOs, cosplay, algorithms, Anon, AI, brain-computer-interfaces, WOW.

    War and peace…AT THE SAME TIME!

    Some of you are gonna love it! At least some of the time.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    With our patented starvation&thirst algorithm, nothing!

2022/03/16 #

  • Offline

    Yesterday I wrote about the idea of offline pull requests. It wasn’t a fully formed idea, more of an observation that the current git tooling could improve the offline experience. In the modern, always on, always connected world, the idea of offline might sound a bit strange or out-dated. It might also seem a bit weird for a web developer to be interested in offline because developing for the web is all about being connected.

    I like the idea of being able to move relatively seamlessly between online and offline. I’ve found though, that the offline experience is often lacking.

    For example, Safari has a feature called Reading Lists. It’s cool and I’ve been using is a lot recently. With a couple of clicks you can add a page to your reading list. It’s s bit like a bookmark, but in addition to saving the url, it has the ability to save the entire page, so you can read it later offline. When it works, it’s amazing.

    I’ve found that my workflow has changed significantly. Instead of endlessly infiniti scrolling, I can spend 10-15 minutes in the morning, skimming through stuff in my feeds, adding what looks interesting to the reading list, then disconnecting. At a later point in the day, or maybe the next day, when I have some time, I can read through the articles, make notes, have ideas, write blog posts etc. Awesome right, so what’s the problem?

    There are a few. First and foremost it doesn’t work on all websites. I have no idea why that is, I guess websites have to be written in a special way for it to work. I haven’t had time to research this yet, I’d like to know why it only works for some websites. Another issue is that there is no indication that the site isn’t “offlineable”. You click “Save Offline” and it looks like it saved. Later you try to open the site while offline and you just get an error message, I forget the actual wording, but it feels a lot like “You can’t read that because you are offline, idiot”. You used the feature as advertised, and you still got a slap in the face. You keep calm, and carry on with your life. It happens a lot.

    I found an option, buried deep in the app settings, that automatically saves each item you add for offline reading. Nice feature, definitely makes things better, but you still get slapped in the face witch the error messages a lot, because loads of sites just aren’t “offlinable”.

    I wonder if website owners just don’t like offline because it blocks the click info they get when you are online, maybe it somehow affects their add revenue. With better tooling that’s an issue that could be solved.

    It would be great if in addition to the saved page, each linked item in the saved page was also saved for offline reading. And wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to click a button to get the current page, as well as a selection of other popular articles on that site.

    Matt Mulenweg when in Antarctica, prepares for his trip by downloading portions of Wikipedia. Cool idea. I wonder how he does that, I guess he’s got a special Wikipedia reader tool. I’d like to be able to do that sort of thing in more places. Like when browsing a Github repo, save the site, but also save the associated documentation site. I wonder if Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) might be in some way a solution here.

    Reading Lists are useful but they don’t work with video. I miss watching Youtube videos. With an offline workflow, there’s no way at the minute to watch video. In the early days of podcasting, people often put videos in their feeds, that was what videobloging was before Youtube. I’m not saying that’s better, I still like watching on Youtube, but I’d love it if there was a “Watching List” similar to how Reading Lists work.

    Online experiences are great, but I like offline too. Podcasting has shown us that offline is worth considering, that it’s beneficial to our lives. Let’s imagine a future where offline and online are complimentary.

2022/03/15 #

  • Nginx and the Ukraine-Russia war

    With the war in the Ukraine unfolding, I started wondering about tools and libraries that might be affected by the crisis. What happens to open source projects that are caught in the cross fire of war?

    The first such item that sprung to mind was Nginx. It’s used by an enormous amount of the modern web as a reverse proxy and load balancer.

    Nginx is one of the biggest open source successes in recent memory, and as far as I know it’s developed by russian based developers. Looking at their website it appears they self host all development rather than use a git SaaS platform like Github.

    Nginx has already been in the news in the past couple of years for similar issues. Thankfully the code is open source, but it’s clear that developing safe and reliable software for a world wide ecosystem is not very straight forward.

    With the US and many countries imposing sanctions on Russia, how will that affect the open source communities online?

    I don’t have an answer to that question, but it’s something I’m looking out for.

    My best wishes to both Ukrainian and Russian developers, I hope you aren’t caught up in the madness of war.

  • Exploring iOS Creation Tools

    I recently had to re-install most of the main Apple iOS apps as the previous versions were all crashing on startup. While I was doing this, I took some time to look at the feature sets of these apps, most of which I never use. I was pleasantly surprised, there’s actually quite a lot you can do with these default apps that look like it could be very useful. A lot if the apps are quite minimalist, and have enticing design.

    However functionality is not obvious straight away. I find that most of these apps don’t seem to follow typical conventions for where features are or how they are implemented. Each one appears to do things in a sort of unique way. The first 20-30 mins of playing with an app, I was constantly taping the wrong place, opening the wrong menu items, getting stuck and having to close the app and re-open it just to get back to a place I recognised. It’s way too easy to delete things in iOS apps, and there’s no undo. I’ve lost / nearly lost loads and loads of stuff accidentally deleting something when the touch UI started miss-interpreting my gestures, or accidentally making an unintended gesture. So it’s not obvious and learning is very frustrating.

    Having said that it looks like the following things might be possible with standard Apple apps:

    • Publishing ebooks (Pages)
    • Recording and editing audio (GarageBand, Voice Memos)
    • Recording and editing video (iMovie)
    • Some basic automation (Shortcuts)

    Being able to do all these things from a mobile device would be awesome.

    The design of these default apps have a very “Apple” look and feel to them which is great. However I’m a bit disappointed that documentation and marketing pages are a very scattered. The default selection of apps is actually quite good, but I don’t get the impression that Apple is taking them very seriously. Each one should have a canonical page on the website and there should be downloadable documentation. The whole offering feels more like a shabby patch work than a suite for creators. It’s like they did all the hard work of building the restaurant and then gave up right before creating the menus.

    Anyway, in my experiments with GarageBand, though making music is probably a bit optimistic for me currently, recording an audio podcast might be possible. I’d like to be able to record audio segments and drop them into some form of template, and render out an episode, complete with intro and segment audio jingles.

    I’m guessing the whole template thing probably isn’t possible, but having a rudimentary way to put together a podcast from some audio clips might be.

    Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could add annotations in the Podcasts app while you were listening to a podcast, and a way to easily crop out short clips, so that you could insert them into a podcast you were creating?

    I like the idea of being able to have an async conversation via the medium of podcasts, for fun but also could be very useful in a work setting too. Anyhow just wanted to mention briefly my recent experiences with iOS apps, frustrating, but I can see potential possibilities.

  • Offline Pull Requests

    Aside from being a phenomenal version control tool, git’s ability to work offline is one of it’s best features. This is especially true if you move around a lot, but even if you don’t, sometimes you just need to disconnect from the network, avoid distractions from things like social media and email, and do some heads down focussed development.

    Once you’ve made some progress, it’s trivial to sync back up with the repository remotes. Pull in the changes since you were last online, merge with your code, resolve any conflicts, and push your changes back up to the remote. This is possible because when you clone a repository, you have an entire copy of the repository on your local machine.

    This way of working is standard with the command line git tool. It’s how it was designed to work. Each developer has a complete copy and can work entirely independently. This worked really well for many open source projects, but as git hosting platforms emerged, they added new features. One of the most praised has been the Pull Request (PR). It’s become so central to modern development, that most developer workflows in some way revolve around them.

    They are essentially a way to co-ordinate ongoing feature work. They take the form of a web page that has a discussion thread where contributors can talk about the changes they are making to the code. They make many code commits to a feature branch on their local machine, push those commits to the remote, and at some stage a PR is created. Discussions then happen, more code commits can be added, and when the feature is deemed to be complete, it can be merged into the main branch and the PR is closed. At that point all the commits that were pushed to the feature branch will be in the main branch.

    The PR has become more that just a discussion area. Many integrations with 3rd party tools enable running of test suites, with results displayed in the PR page along side discussions. There are other neat features like bots that can scan code, and post results to the discussion, code reviews, analysis of comments to see mentions of other PRs, and for example to trigger workflows. The automation features can help speed up development, and maintenance of the project. Overtime PRs become a key place where knowledge about how the code was developed is stored. It’s very usual to spend some time browsing through closed PRs to get a sense for how things are moving along, or how a particular bug was fixed. The PR has been very much a successful feature and has been adopted by most git hosting services.

    It’s not to say that PRs don’t have their downsides. Some of these were highlighted in a recent episode of the Changelog podcast(~20:00). They speak about many of the pros and cons. It’s an interesting discussion. There has also been a “PRs are bad” meme making the rounds the past few weeks (but I can’t find it right now), and much has been written about the pain of PRs. We love PRs, but some of us, at times, find them an impediment to progress.

    In my personal work I often want to be able to work entirely offline, but I miss the ability to write notes as I develop a feature. There isn’t much point in using PRs since they aren’t accessible offline. PRs are entirely provided by the platform, standard git has no such feature. Making PRs available offline would be an incredible feature, but it probably doesn’t make that much sense, because the threaded discussions would get all out of sync. I’d be happy to be proved wrong on this though.

    Offline PRs would make moving between providers feasible. If you have ever tried to do that you’ll know that it’s not at all straight forward. Moving the repo is easy, moving the PRs and all the accumulated knowledge within them, not at all easy.

    However with PRs acting more and more as a place to combine the results of many tools, I wonder if there couldn’t be some form of independent notes that couldn’t be written offline that could then be automatically attached to a PR along with the pushed code commits.

    If I were developing git based tools, enhancing the offline experience would be something I would spend some time on. Working async is becoming the norm for remote teams, and though it’s great to work together and essential at times, the ability to drop off and work offline is something that is very important in order to be able to keep a healthy work/life balance, but also so that when you do get together with the team, that time is even more beneficial because you’ve been able to make much progress offline, without all stepping on each other’s toes.

Today’s links:

For enquiries about my consulting, development, training and writing services, aswell as sponsorship opportunities contact me directly via email. More details about me here.