I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. They're also cross-posted to my Mastodon account. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.
By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.
I keep encountering bugs in popular open source projects like libxml, Rails, etc., but I’m just one man—I don’t have the time to chase down root causes and submit pull requests.
I don’t need GitHub Sponsorship money, but what if someone else was sponsored just to follow me around and fix all the wacky, deep-seated bugs I find?
Not a big fan of the two big three-letter acronyms to emerge in the Apple blogosphere so far in 2024. To recap, these already have robust definitions in online discourse:
My useless superpower is the ability to accurately predict in advance exactly how miserable something will be, and with no ability to do anything about it but to wait in lucid anticipation for said misery to unfold.
Decided to “treat myself” and pull in a third party dependency to render breadcrumb links in this new app I’m building. Apologies to future me for when this inevitably breaks someday! I was being lazy.
I had an app exactly like this in my backlog of projects: an on-device social network where your posts don't go anywhere and you get random (fake) likes from names of people in your contacts. Perfection apps.apple.com/us/app/palmsy/id6478816320
Proof that you can lofi anything if you put your mind to it. I feel like I’m in a Windows 95-themed spa right now youtube.com/watch?v=DrmpZtxr0kY
I received a lot of questions on my syndication strategy for justin.searls.co, so today I published the first edition of my POSSE Pulse explaining exactly how I’m doing it justin.searls.co/posse/
I don't get why people complain about how long my podcast is. The latest one was barely 5 minutes longer than Oppenheimer. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-change/id1725165751?i=1000648680970
When I finally isolated and reproduced this bug today, I will admit I let out a very loud, "oh for fuck’s sake!"
I’ve had even lousier-than-usual luck recently stumbling onto obscure and bizarre bugs in extremely well-used libraries github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/3147
The Breaking Change mailbag is starting to run low. Email podcast@searls.co and ask me literally anything and I will maybe possibly answer it in the next episode! 🤞
In hindsight, when I was under a lot of pressure to drop CoffeeScript a decade ago in favor of "modern" JavaScript (defined as using tools like babel and webpack), I wish I'd held my ground.
Without a doubt I'd be better off today if I'd just gone straight from CoffeeScript to real ESM and import maps. Just spent three hours dealing with bitrot in a webpack config with no end in sight. The JavaScript Dream was always a house of cards.
Just used my Apple Vision Pro for anything other than screen sharing in over a month because my Mac was installing an OS update.
This isn't how I expected DHH would declare 2024 the year of Linux on the Desktop world.hey.com/dhh/vscode-wsl-makes-windows-awesome-for-web-development-9bc4d528
Spent all morning trying to figure out why every postcss plugin that has anything to do with color conversion can’t handle CSS Colors 4 rgb() calls (even the two that claim to do exactly that).
Now I have my own custom postcss plugin named 'these-colors-dont-run’ that I have to drag around until the end of time. Great gist.github.com/searls/d9ca494792736f94d765223c6ba98d33
A weird consequence of Japan spanning a single time zone is that lots of apps stop working outside business hours for "maintenance".
I lost an hour today freaking out over error messages that my account was locked right around 11pm JST because (I now realize) their servers were only partially shut down.
Feels weird knowing—100%, not a doubt in my mind, knowing—that humanity will have cured cancer before it creates a system that can autonomously maintain an accurate inventory of the food available in one's kitchen.
This month’s Searls of Wisdom newsletter just went out — it’s all about how to travel well in an era of high prices, poor service, and crowded destinations. Sign up now and you'll get it: justin.searls.co/newsletter/
Just realized it's much more acceptable to say I'm too busy writing to have time for reading than it is to admit I'm too busy talking to have time for listening.
I started a new Rails app in January and I’ve now been hit by damn near decade-old bugs in 3 of Ruby’s most popular gems. Who did I piss off? github.com/paper-trail-gem/paper_trail/issues/1464
Until yesterday, I had never heard anyone but me in the Ruby community express confusion over the fact that Rails produced both paper_trail the audit log gem and Papertrail the logging SaaS.
But seriously, how the hell did everyone else keep these straight in conversation? (My bet is that they didn’t, actually)