I finally gave up and recorded a podcast. And now I'm writing show notes. I tried not to let this happen but here I am typing this and it's happening. Forgive me.
This is a podcast for anybody who shares my interests and likes passing the time with a friendly, opinionated voice in their head. I have done thousands of hours of chores and errands over the years listening to mostly agreeable, sometimes interesting 1.5-3 hour podcasts to keep my mind busy. Now it's time for me to give back, I guess.
Here's the deal: e-mail me at podcast@searls.co and I'll talk about whatever you want me to talk about. Write whatever you want into that e-mail body: ask a question about video games, ask for my take on a new technology, ask for relationship advice, tell me my podcast sucks. You write it, I'll read it.
Okay, here's what I covered in version one of Breaking Change:
- What's new:
- I made a massive pot of Japanese curry rice for my buddy Len, who hosts his own actually real podcast
- I'm building a couple apps for my better half's business, which makes Becky my product owner and me her developer—what could go wrong?!
- Weather in Orlando has been freezing so please pity me and my inability to deal with temparatures below 65º F
- Follow-up:
- I made a video about speaking: Secrets of Great Conference Talks
- I wrote a post about careering: Only you can give meaning to your career
- I shipped a newsletter about the book The Courage to Be Disliked: Searls of Wisdom Newsletter
- I exhorted my fellow Rubyists: Why you should come to this RubyKaigi in 2024
- Pun break:
- I asked and @tenderlove agreed to write me a pun for each episode of Breaking Change that I will read for the first time live as I record to the camera
- If you want to know the pun, you'll just have to listen to the podcast
- Actually, I'm going to rate the puns, so I've decided to (extremely inadvisably) share this Numbers spreadsheet publicly
- News:
- I am currently wearing the XREAL Air 2 glasses when working in public to prepare everyone around me to get ready for the Vision Pro landing onto my face next month
- I paid for GPT Plus and it's just uncanny sometimes how good it is compared to Google Search, thanks in part to how much worse Google Search has gotten. There's no other way I'd have found these tweezers
- The original Workflow Team is angling to be the first group to sell their company to Apple twice by forming a new AI desktop automation startup
- Standard Ruby might have made it into Rails 8, but it didn't, and I basically completely agree with DHH that it shouldn't:
- David's original issue
- The new bikeshed David built
- David's blog post about style guides
- I revisited the whole POSSE meme for web sites and how I'm building another app to integrate with my feed2gram gem to help people escape Instagram
- I started using ActiveStorage and this thread was absolutely vital to figuring it out (the Rails Guide could probably use a few updates, but the real issue is the API is probably due to be pruned a bit)
- Tailwind still feels like the Correct™ approach to styling web sites, but Rails needs a better answer for rendering forms with it. In lieu of an official solution, Daniel Huss described an approach I've been using since late 2022 with a custom FormBuilder subclass
- Speaking of correct approaches, I'm convinced Stimulus and HTMX are basically the right way to handle JavaScript in most apps, but I'll be damned if I don't have to totally relearn Stimulus's API every time I use it
- I think I forgot to mention it, but Stimulus Components is a neato project that I'd love to see more of—little modular, prepackaged actions that are (mostly) free of gnarly dependencies and import-map friendly
- Entertainment
- Playing Harvest Moon 64 and immediately falling for min-maxing the hell out of it instead of just playing the game
- Bullets and Blockbusters is a great YouTube channel on films, especially "what if" scenarios
- Searls After Dark is less great, but also on YouTube. Please subscribe to my channel so I can hit 1000 followers and disable ads on all my videos!
- Foundation is fine, but slow
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is… bad, I think? I'm muscling through it
- Letterkenny and Shoresy never disappoint, however
- Mailbag:
- Empty! Nobody knew I was going to start a podcast, least of all me, so nobody e-mailed me. Get featured on my next installment by emailing podcast@searls.co
Phew. Until next time, I guess.