Holger's Blog

GitHub codespaces is a great feature by GitHub that let’s me work on an iPad way easier than it was before. It’s also cool for teams to quickly setup a new developer, of switch between branches.

I use it for Ruby on Rails development, mostly. Sometimes a thing happens that prevents me from continuing my work and I had trouble finding out how best to solve this. Here’s what happens: I start my codespace and want to spin up a Rails server, to inspect the website. Once I type bin/rails s the server starts and I get the notification to open up the browser in a new tab. When I navigate there, I see this screen:

It’s a message from nginx that tells me that there is a 502 Bad Gateway error when I want to access my codespace.

The solution that always helps me is to unpublish the port and re-publish it again. Here’s how that looks in the interface:

That should solve your issue and you can quickly access the website.

Changes!

I joined my last client, Edeka, in April 2020. Since then I am not freelancing anymore. My old Wordpress site ran on quite expensive hosting. Which I could justify as a business expense. But since those are gone now, I have to switch to something cheaper.

This site now runs as a GitHub pages site, powered by Gatsby. Which I love quite a lot. And now I am free to experiment with this site more, again.

Tomorrow I will help a new team member onboard at my client. I am the acting tech-lead for the client right now and so it’s my job to make sure that everything is in place for this new member of the team.

The former tech lead onboarded me in September (not so long ago). He had prepared a list of tasks we had to do together. He even created a whole new Trello board, just for the onboarding. Did he do it because it was so laborious? No! In fact, the onboarding mostly consisted of joining the services and Saas applications we use and getting familiar with all the processes for running the show.

But it did help to be able to cross items off the list. We were always aware of which services were yet to join. We also knew what was missing until I was at 100%. That was certainly helpful.

When I am onboarded at a new client, I generally send them my onboarding survey beforehand. In it I ask questions that are relevant to the process and to me, and that come up with every client. Asking them these questions before I arrive, they tend to be better prepared.

I am really looking forward to having the new developer join the team, tomorrow. I bet he’ll do great. And to help him along, I’ll just follow my onboarding sheet. 😉

Do you use something similar?

Yours,
Holger

A couple of days ago I talked about the Akimbo podcast by Seth Godin. It was an eposide about opportunity cost and how that relates to livelong learning as a software developer.

This morning I was on the train to a dear friend who happens to help me with my financial retirement plannings. She helps me choose equity funds and all those things related. I decided to take the train instead of the bike, which is what I usually use to get around Berlin. Taking the train meant that I could write a few words that moved around in my brain. I also meant I could listen to music or a podcast. It just so happened that the latest episode from Seth was relevant to our topics here again. Its title is the same as this email’s subject:

Why is software so bad?

When I saw the title appear in the episode list in my podcast app of choice (Overcast on iOS), I just had to listen to it. In it, Seth compares the evolution of the development of cars to the stagnating evolution of software. I believe you will get a lot out of this episode. If for nothing else, you will at least get one or two ideas for a software startup you could pursue.

Here’s the link to the episode: www.akimbo.link/blog/s-5-…

See you next week.

Holger

Today I heard a recent episode of the Akimbo podcast by Seth Godin. The topic was opportunity cost. As a quick recap, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about opportunity costs:

The opportunity cost, or alternative cost, of making a particular choice is the value of the most valuable choice out of those that were not taken. When an option is chosen from alternatives, the opportunity cost is the “cost” incurred by not enjoying the benefit associated with the best alternative choice

So… about that new JavaScript framework. Or, about the recent addition to React name suspense… have you already taken the time to read up on it? Do you know what it does? It is supposed to change how we render things onto the page and fetch the necessary data to display.

Or did you know that in Ruby 3.0 the handling or positional and keyword arguments will change from the way it was handled in Ruby 2.7 and before? How will your code have to be changed?

And that language Rust… and Elixir/Erlang. What else didn’t you yet learn? All the other developers competing for the best job probably already know at least something about those technologies, right? But I guess, you did watch the latest Netflix series.

Do you feel left behind already? What a shitty feeling. I know I do. About those tech that I wrote above… Every thing I know about those is what you can read in this email! I didn’t yet take any deep dive. I don’t even know GraphQL. (I wanted to add a “yet” but realized how phony that would have been. I won’t learn GraphQL unil I need it on some project!)

So here’s my take on all this FOMO: Ignore it. Learn fundamentals. Learn the basic building blocks of how the stuff works—and worked for last 40 years. It pays to know how a request is handled on the web. Generally. It’s fun to look at the complete request cycle of the Rails framework. But you don’t need it. If you can build a basic REST API you’ll be fine. And if you come across a use case that requires GQL you will be quick enough to adopt it and learn it as you go.

Don’t get freaked out but the lastest trends and what the cool kids think they need to learn. They are usually wrong and have been before.

Learn the basics, practice those “soft” skills like communication, articulating concepts in a way that people understand, practice your story-telling and call you mom regularly. That will help you way more than getting freaked out by the opportunity costs and all the things you might have to learn.

This will be the last email that you’ll get from me sent by Drip. My account will be terminated tomorrow.

I just spent around an hour saving screenshots of my automations and text files with the contents of all emails that I send to my subscribers. What a hassle. And then I’ll have to recreate everything when I’ve found a new home for that.

I would like to go to something like ConvertKit, but they are not GDPR compliant. So that’s definitely not a solution for me. The next best thing looks like Mailjet, but I already know they don’t support everything I’d like to have. ☹

I am still toiling with the idea of writing something myself. But I don’t have time for that.

Work

I spent last week doing my first sabbatical week, inspired by this guy. That’s the reason I didn’t code anything at all for clients.

I worked on my pilot course a bit, but mostly on my website holgerfrohloff.de. I silently launched it yesterday because I figured that I’d already waited for too long. I know it’s not finished and that not everything is worked as it’s supposed to. The reasons for that are mostly a) time and b) Wordpress/PHP. I am still figuring out how Wordpress and PHP work. And it turns out I have a really hard time doing it. Even simple changes to the theme I bought and to Wordpress' logic take me ages—if I am able to do it at all. It sucks.

But I am glad that I launched. Now day by day things will improve. I already know of things that do not work, but if you come across anything, please let me know. You have my email adress 😉

Personal

I used the week to spent quality time with my family, played some video games and read great books. But I also made time for high-intensity running workouts. It was an awesome week. I am already looking forward to the next one. Since I will be at my new client by then, I’ll have to see how and when it will be possible.

One work-related thing I that I want to leave you with is this tweet-conversation I had with the creator of the Lucky framework, Paul C. Smith: https://twitter.com/5minpause/status/1159464579249950721 He responded to my question “When is a class too big”.

See you next week, I hope (if I figure out how to send emails with Mailjet or something else by then).

Work

On Tuesday I did something new for the first time. And I feel like I failed miserably. I hosted a webinar. Back in the beginning of the year, I sent out proposals to a bunch of conferences with the goal of giving a talk. A conference by NAGW (National Association of Government Web professionals) accepted my submission. I was supposed to give a talk in Utah in September. Due to calendar issues I had to cancel that appearance. So they asked me whether I was up for giving the talk as a webinar to their audience, which I happily agreed to.

Turns out I need people with faces in front of me! Once the time came to start the webinar I was so excited/anxious that I was barely able to keep my breath down. It almost felt like a small panic attack. I don’t know how it came across to the listeners (it was audio-only) but I felt like I could hardly talk or speak. Which made me speak so unbelievably fast that I went through the whole material in half the time it usually takes me. And I bet I forgot a whole lot of things that I should have said. I do know that I am excited and nervous every time I start a talk in front of a crowd of people. But usually this nervousness fades after 3-5 minutes, once I scanned the room and felt the (positive) reactions of the crowd. After all, your listeners want you to “succeed” and give a great talk. But I had nothing of that during the webinar. I had no reassurance that people actually understood what I was talking about. In any case that felt bad. I learned something from that experience. The first reaction was to never give a webinar again. The second experience was that I need to have a different setup next time. I need to interact with people and for that I will try to use the chat-tool that every webinar software offers. I don’t know how well that works, but I will do what works for me almost always: Be frank and open and tell the audience about my anxiousness and let me help them through their interaction in the chat. It think that’s at least worth a try before abandoning webinars altogether.

August has started and it’s the last month at my current client. This means that I will begin to do a lot more pairing with the permanent developers, and less writing features/code myself. This way knowledge transfer is increased and the company and the people get more out of it. This will be more demanding than the months before, but it’s worth it.

If you’ve been part of this newsletter community for some time, you might remember that I told you about an online course on testing, that I was about to create and release. I still am doing this, but I got stuck. It is the first course that I am creating and will no experience I hit some road blocks that I couldn’t solve on my own. Thus, I entered an online community/course on course building, how meta 😉. With this help I am absolutely sure that I can solve the issues and create an interesting pilot course. I will reach out to you again, once I am looking for participants for that.

Personal

I bought yet another bike. 😝 I do love my bikes, and I found a great bargain on eBay with a steel frame, only one year old for half the original price. So I bought it. It’s a fixed-gear bike, which means you cannot coast and have to move the legs at all times. Riding home on it yesterday evening I noticed how incredibly a meditating experience this is. As a beginner with fixed-gear bikes like me, you have to be so 100% aware of what you’re doing at all times. There was no space left in my head to think about anything but moving my legs and riding this bike (“don’t stop pedaling”). Because if you, for one second, stop pedaling, the pedal will still move upwards (rotate) and your leg will move and might catapult you out of the saddle. It’s demanding.

In other news, our older daughter will start with school in about one week. We are incredibly excited and a tiny bit afraid 😬.

Thinking

This is getting long already, so I’ll end this quickly soon. Last time I thought about doing scales in my professional development and how that correlates to doing interval training in sports. But that was wrong. Doing scales is not at all like intervals, but more like easy runs/long runs. You don’t do anything technically demanding but you are doing ground-work, fundamentals, basics — whatever you call that. I had a lengthy discussion about this with my mastermind group. They were the ones pointing out this difference to me.

See you next week.

I am writing again. Mostly for myself. As a journal. In the future I’ll try things a bit differently around here: I want to share what I am thinking about, how I work and what I am working on (as far as it makes sense in regard to my clients and NDAs).

Working

I secured a new client for autumn and the first months of 2020. I’ll be joining them as interim tech lead. I am excited. This will let me work a lot with Rails again. The last months were JS/TS only…

Something that I was proud of during the last week was a caching solution I created. Let me describe it briefly:

• We are in a TypeScript project
• There are external APIs we are calling to populate our app with data.
• We display the same value in multiple places on a page or after navigating somewhere else.
• We do not have a global state management like Redux etc. (Why is a discussion for another time 😉)
• Every display of the value resulted in a fetch to the same API resource.

What I built was a cache-aside solution, where I cache the (pending) Promise for the first request. All subsequent requests receive this Promise as return value, without fetching again. Once the Promise is resolved, the value appears where it’s supposed to appear and every requests happens just once. This is possible and makes sense, because the values change very infrequently and using the “old” value until the site is reloaded works just fine. We don’t yet need things like etags and ModifiedSince. But perhaps this will be added in a future situation. Anyway, this was cool and also challenging to find a proper solution. Caching the Promise itself was an idea that was developed together with my co-worker, Franz.

I am redesigning my website these last months. It always takes longer, because nobody pays me for that 😂. It’s progressing nicely, thanks to the help of my designer. She’s great. I am really looking forward to sharing this with you. Also, I need to get back into the rhythm of writing articles. I have a lot of topics planned and see my traffic increase steadily.

I did not renew my subscription to the email marketing service Drip that I used during this last year. They were too expensive anyway. You will receive this mail through Drip, still. But future mails might be sent by something else. I’ll keep you posted and hope to be able to complete the migration without any hassle for you.

Personal

I am in the middle of a training program for my next 10 kilometers race. It’s quite intense, I am running 4-5 times a week. To make the time for that I started to do run-commutes. This means I run to my client in the morning, take a shower there and run home in the evening/afternoon. This is demanding but works out quite nicely. The shortest distance to my current client is about 6km, so it’s fine to run it twice.

I have a height-adjustable desk at my home office now and it is awesome. I love the flexibility. I actually stand most of the time. But after lunch, for example, I tend to sit down more. Ha, just wanted to share. If you are on the fence about getting one, you should!

Thinking / Reading

A quote that still makes me think:

Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?” If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?

It’s from this article: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/how-i-practice-at-what-i-do.html

My current answer is “my side project” I am working on (nothing to share publicly here, yet). But I do know that I am not stretching doing that project. Compared to my run training, this is like a relaxed long run. Important for basic fitness and healthy, but nothing that increases my ability by much. The caching solution I wrote about certainly stretched me and I learned new things there. But this was work and not practice. And not deliberate but a happy “accident”. I should be able to plan for these training sessions.

So this is something I am thinking about.

Holger