My current desk setup. Went back to one monitor + laptop screen.
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚 I liked this a lot. Gamers and people born in the late 70s/early 80s have much to relate to.
This is new (to me) in Apple Music. Animations!
Das war der Beginn…
So sehen vier Stunden Arbeit aus. Gut voran gekommen, aber noch viel zu tun.
Eben waren wir im Baumarkt und haben die Fliesen abgeholt. Außerdem Fliesenkleber und anderen Kram. Jetzt leerräumen und vorbereiten. Nachher werden die ersten Fliesen fallen. 🏗️👷♂️💪
Dev note for catalog 2023-10-20
What I was able to achieve
Today I continued work on the catalog. I streamed for about 90 minutes to Twitch while working. I continued work where I had left it the last time which were the tests for the route /entries. The goal was to get a passing test where the entries are rendered with their titles.
It took me longer than I care to admit but in the end I noticed my error and was able to get a passing test.
Next I talked a bit about the architecture decision records that I use to document my decisions on how to build things. I used a new ADR to document my decision about integrating the Pinboard.in API. Since a lot of my entries will come from Pinboard, I wanted to include the API access early on. That way I am able to get content to display “quickly”. At least that was the plan. I decided against using an existing Gem for Pinboard and will write my own API wrapper. While reading the docs for Pinboard I noticed that there is a new API v2 in development. I will use that new version.
I had to quit the session just as I was about to make a successful authenticated API call. Since I develop in a test-driven development style I had written a test that tests for the unauthenticated access. That test is successful in checking the 403 return code of the response. The successful/authenticated test case is not successful, yet. This is were I will continue next time.
My plan is to get started with that rather quickly, and then fetch entries from Pinboard and display them on the site.
About the streaming
I believe no one watched. I am not sure, Twitch told there was one visitor, but I believe that was I, monitoring the stream and watching for chat messages. So yeah, speaking into the void — but it was fun. I definitely need to improve my stream game. Switching between the VSCode and browser window is annoying. Don’t know how to do it better, yet. I will try to watch some other software development streams to get some inspiration how they do it. And my VSCode was probably too small to read. Well, next time!
Starting my stream now. Be gentle I am a beginner with streaming twitch.tv/holgerfro…
Really happy that I’ve discovered Lofi Girl for background music. Their streams really hit my mood on most days, depending on what I need. Jazzy vibes or more electro thingy. Today it’s Synthwave Radio
I went to YouTube with the goal of finding and watching a video for a specific topic/question. Then I saw thumbnails of other videos and clicked. 20 minutes later I returned and completely forgot about what I wanted to watch & learn about in the first place. 🤦♂️ Hello brain. Time to wake up.
Developing React Native apps really is a major PITA.
I use Macs since ~2008. I work as a professional programmer since ~2011. Since then I wasn’t able to use AppleScript (and recently Shortcuts.app) to automate my Mac. I don’t know whether this is due to me being stupid or because AppleScript and Shortcut syntax are really strange.
I hate computers. Maybe I should become a baker.
And now cache.ruby-lang.org is down for me. But only me it seems. I just want to go back to bed. Nothing works. This is frustrating.
I really hate what they did to MacOS. Everything is so confusing now, you have a bazillion system settings entries but nothing is easily found anymore. Right now I am trying to disable some app from auto starting on reboot but I cannot find where to edit those entries anymore. It’s so annoying!
I switched from using Docker Desktop to Colima. Won’t look back. Really happy with Colima’s simplicity. Docker Desktop was buggy for me, never was able to update itself properly and I didn’t like the direction they took.
It took a few days (no idea why!) but now I can use ChatGPT-4’s browsing feature. This changes a lot of things for me and makes my life wayyyy easier. Costs $20/month but as a business expense it’s fine.
Yesterday I tried my hand at something new: Streaming on Twitch.
You see I started developing (again) on a side project. It’s called Catalog for now and I will write more about it once I am ready for it. I want to use it to develop something that I always wanted to have and what could be useful to others. The second reason for the project is that I need to try out all the new features and things that Ruby on Rails brought along with their latest versions. I didn’t really get into Hotwire and Turbo and all those things. So now I can use it in my side project. After all that’s what these are for, right? Right?!
The Twitch stream went ok, I guess. Took my a while to set everything up and learning how the Technik works. At one point I even had one visitor watching me (briefly 😂).
I’ll post here, once I stream again.
Safari profiles. A nice start but not done well enough
I tried to use Safari for a week now. The new PROFILES feature lured me in. Unfortunately it is still not what I need from a browser and Firefox just keeps ticking almost all of my boxes. What turned me away from Safari again: Once you close a window with a profile, Safari doesn’t remember the tabs you had open. So closing a window means you need to reopen all of them once you want to continue your work. My clients all get a separate profile in my browser, but I tend to leave tabs open for later. That doesn’t work with Safari. In Firefox I use the extension “Simple Tab Groups” and it works nearly perfectly. I can even change between groups in the same window. Sadly, the compartmentalisation doesn’t work quite as well as in Safari. The tab’s context is shared between all tabs. So to separate those as well, I use another extension “Multi-account containers”.
It adds the mental overhead of choosing the right container. But it’s doable.
What drove me to try Safari again was the idea that the profiles would be synced to iOS and iPadOS as well. Since I don’t like to use Firefox mobile because it’s simply a mobile browser with really bad UX, I have to deal with using Safari on mobile and not being able to share browsing sessions between my Mac and my mobile devices.
Maybe there exists a Safari browser extension that reopens closed tabs? Maybe I should create one myself? I don’t know. 🤷♂️
Reviving and working on an oldish MacBookPro with Touchbar. The fan noise is really loud. Almost forgot how it used to to be with these things. Still, I need access to an old MacOS version and x86_64 arch today 🤷♂️
