I love bouldering, running and long-distance cycling on road and gravel also, coffee. In my day job I develop web software for samedi in Berlin. He/him EN/GER
When was the last time you needed to display a formatted date somewhere in your applications? Since I work a lot on React (or generally JS) apps these days, I recently had the “pleasure” to format dates in JS. After receiving them from a Ruby API. Which in turn takes the (Postgres) db timestamps and converts them into Ruby (date)time objects. Oh the fun we had. “Of course” standardizations saves your ass in this situation. Usually at least.
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
Two days ago I linked you to an article about Livable Code. Today it’s about reading code. While learning software development I often heard the phrase that you should read other people’s code because it makes you better.
I have to admin, I never purposely did so. Well, one time, I followed through the Rails framework to understand how an HTTP request is handled. But that was the exception. It turns out, I am not alone:
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
My first job was as a software developer at Ericsson in Montreal, working with the mobile switching center that handles calls in a cellular network. There was a lot of code controlling call set-up, hand-offs, roaming etc, but I was pretty disappointed to see that it was all done with quite basic data structures and algorithms. The most interesting part I found was the code keeping track of roaming subscribers currently in the system. It consisted of one thousand binary trees, where the last three digits of the subscriber number determined which tree a given subscriber belonged to. To find a subscriber, you picked the tree based on the last three digits of the number, then traversed the tree to find the subscriber. Apart from that, it was pretty much only linked lists or simpler.
First of all, sorry for not writing to you yesterday. I spent the day in the hospital with my wife. Our second daughter was born on 1:20pm yesterday and we couldn’t be happier. Mother and daughter are both very well.
This is the reason why I won’t be able to continue writing my usual emails for the next few days.
But I will continue sending you emails. The content will be mostly “written” by other people though. 😉
Today I want to share a recent article by Uncle Bob:
Too Clean?
A week ago I mentioned my Automation project: Factory 0.1. During the last week I managed to get it to a point where it works. Today I wanted to tell you a bit about it.
This will be a lengthy, nerdy post about details and automation.
You walk into a room. You haven’t been here before but you need to find something. Your friend told you, that you’ll find it there: “It has to be there somewhere. Please just take a thorough look around!”. You find old snack boxes , papers upon papers and stuff that you wouldn’t want to touch because it looks like it might already be alive. A distinctive smell permeates the room. You don’t want to be in here for too long. But you want to find the thing…! After looking around for 10-15 minutes you notice that you lost track of where you’ve already searched before. The whole mess is just too much for you.
Yesterday I told you about our struggles with the new door bell. While, sadly, this state is still unchanged, there’s another story there that relates to software development:
The new door bell needed some power. The old one did not need this much power (230 volts), so there were no appropriate power cables laying around. That’s why we cut a different cable that lay in the vicinity but usually powers the automatic gate for the car. The plan was to have something like a t-shaped connection between the cables. So the gate would still have power, but a new cable would lead to the door bell and everything would be fine™. So I cut the power cable to the gate. What I did not know at the time was, that there are literally t-shaped connectors for power cables (not an affiliate link, just for reference. Don’t buy it! 😉).
Over the course of the weekend we tried to install a new door bell for our house. The old system is really old, falls apart and works only some days. So we bought something from a respectable German engineering company named Gira. They make high quality products and we had prior experiences with their parts. We also happen to really like their clean design language. The reviews online spoke about easiness of installation, “connect just a few wires”, nothing can go wrong there.
Where I sit writing this email, today is Friday. So tomorrow the weekend starts. Do you already have plans for the weekend? Perhaps we’ll go to the lake, because it’s scorching hot in Europe these days. But I will also continue with my “Automation project: Factory 0.1”.
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.
“When did you reach the point where you didn’t need to read another research report, didn’t need to absorb another scouting analysis, didn’t need to stop by the bookstore… because it simply wasn’t useful or efficient to learn another thing about your field?”
This question was posed by Seth Godin. Seth is big in marketing and entrepreneurship. Perhaps you already know him.
This morning I was visiting the hospital with my pregnant wife. She’s in the 39th week and over the course of the weekend we had some concerns regarding the health of the baby. So we went to the hospital to have everything checked. They made a CTG for the heart and vital signs of the baby.
In this enlightening article from the New York Times, Charlotte Graham-McLay reports about a company from New Zealand that tried something out. They switched all their employees to work only 32 hours per week instead of the regular 40 hours. All of them still received the same salary for 40 hours though. What they found was that their productivity increased and the employees got the same amount or work done. Sometimes even more.
To reach this level of productivity, they reduced meeting times, didn’t leave early or took longer breaks.
I am currently reading a very interesting book: “Principles” by Ray Dalio
It was recommended to me by several sources, most notably by Sebastian Marshall. Sebastian focuses a lot on personal improvement in his work. I value his ideas and ideas very much. So it made sense to me to follow his recommendation to read this book.
A few days ago, a friend told me about the construction site that is located right outside the window of his living room. He was, understandably, complaining about the construction workers starting their shifts at seven in the morning. They make all kinds of noises and it’s costing him his nerves.
perhaps you remember one of my last newsletters, back when I wrote them from the 5minutenpause.com domain. I told you that I switched the content format to plain text and that I do not track click and open rates anymore. Well I do again.
