Re-reading a post I wrote about going back to WordPress. I’m proud of this excerpt:
“With 30% of the web, we might as well say that it is ubiquitous. And it’s good. Much like Helvetica, WordPress is very seldom the worst choice that you could have made (even if it isn’t always the best).”
That number is in the 40s now.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/switching-to-wordpress-in-2019
I bet if you went back 100 years and described Spotify/Apple Music/Bandcamp to them, they would assume that in the future no one is working and everyone is listening to music all day every day in some kind of utopian paradise.
Prettier just formatted its own configuration file when I hit save. Is this the singularity?
To be clear, though, as much as I can understand the frustrations, my Mastodon experience has been the opposite. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in tech (sup NERDS) or I just lucked out with my instance (https://social.lol).
Everyone is nice. There are lots of creative, interesting people posting art, code, statuses, silly things, serious things—just a good variety of stuff.
When I log into Bluesky, I don’t know who to follow and it looks like mostly just screaming.
This article by @kissane was great but I kept being distracted by the beautiful typography and design (because I’m a nerd, not because it’s distracting).
I also correctly identified the fonts as Matthew Butterick’s Valkyrie and Heliotrope. *chef’s kiss*
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
Who remembers Firebug? ❤️
PHP 8 cost me a new customer. I can see in the logs where they tried to subscribe. But they hit PHP 8’s insidious error, `Warning: Undefined array key…`.
For better or worse, checking an array value using a possibly-non-existent key was a common pattern in PHP code. You could do it in an if statement and count on the result being truthy or falsey. Yeah I know, I know. But still.
This change makes ton of existing code problematic.
Here’s the best fix that I know of: https://www.mattwatson.org/blog/20230716-let-me-live-dangerously-php/
I wish there was a CSS media query for the user’s scrollbar preference. macOS has three options for when to show scrollbars:
- Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
- When scrolling
- Always
I set mine to “Always” (even though many native apps including Setapp and Apple Music ignore it and disappear them anyway).
But it would be nice for web apps to know the user’s preference.
Me: Hey Matt, do you want a Bluesky invite?
Matt: idk maybe later … isn’t that the meth in Breaking Bad?
Me: umm, yes I believe it is
I have had Nothing Compares 2 U stuck in my head all afternoon.
I'm working on an update to my side project, A Fine Start. https://afinestart.me
Brain is fried from designing favicons. They’re hard and I’m out of design practice.
Working on favicons for some NASA apps. Nice little break from coding.
Aaaannnnddd I found a case where the maximum call stack is exceeded. Not a 10x dev after all.
I just wrote a recursive function that worked on the first try. I'm sitting here stunned. Is this what it feels like to be a 10x dev?
My mom’s ancient miniature poodle is the only dog I’ve ever seen that, when given a treat, will just stare at it like “idk what you want me to do with that.”
But then bark if one of the other dogs get close to it.
Just to recap, the three times I glanced at the clock this afternoon went like:
- 12:34
- 2:34:56
- 4:20
If I don’t show up tomorrow, I’ve either won the lottery or the universe took me.
wow I looked at the clock at 2:34:56
ayyyy I looked at the clock at 12:34
Haha my economics teacher in high school had it all wrong. This Free Lunch brought to you by @simplebits. https://simplebits.shop/products/free-lunch
