When we lived in Columbus, Junko and I would meet weekly in person for Japanese conversation practice. She's an awesome, fascinating person, but she also taught me a TON of practical Japanese and wasn't afraid to correct me. She just started giving remote lessons. Strong recommend: popa-japanese-lessons.mystrikingly.com/
Heaven:
Hell:
If you're curious why I decided to retire from public speaking last week, or interested to learn what might have been driving the handful of people who were angry about it, sign up for this month's Searls of Wisdom newsletter! justin.searls.co/newsletter/
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on October 12, 2024.
Hey everyone, have a good September?
Apologies, as most of my top-of-mind thoughts are hurricane-adjacent as I write this:
Anyway, that's October stuff. And I'm not here to talk about October stuff, because Searls of Wisdom is a publication that happens in arrears. It takes a full month for these insights to coalesce and maturate in the nacre of my self-indulged mind.
So, let's talk about September stuff.
The one thing I'll remember about September 2024 is that it was the month I gave my final conference presentation. After 15 years of speaking at user groups and software conferences, I've decided to hang up the presenter remote. End of an era.
Here's a pic of me and my friends Aaron and Eileen at the RailsConf: World Edition afterparty:
It's been strange developing so many impactful friendships over dozens of seasonal pseudo-vacations sprinkled sporadically throughout my adult life. I've rarely ever visited these friends where they live, or met their families, or seen how they operate outside the predictable plot beats of a conference event. Each relationship a vignette of awkward run-ins at baggage claim and hotel lobbies. Strained catch-ups at noisy speaker dinners and sponsor parties. Warm greetings crossing paths in convention center hallways. Hushed critiques shared from the back of other people's sessions.
I can happily live without attending another conference. But will that mean living without most of these friendships, too?
Yeah, probably.
Below, I'm going to discuss my decision to announce my retirement from public speaking, how people reacted to it, and what the resulting dissonance can tell us about weighing loss aversion against opportunity cost.
Great blog post about how to build a Ruby LSP add-on that I'm totally linking to because it uses my Standard add-on as a case study. railsatscale.com/2024-10-03-the-ruby-lsp-addon-system/
Thanks to the broad assortment of folks who reached out to wish us safety today. As it turns out, we bailed outta Orlando and drove to Savannah in order to escape Milton. ✌️
Love that command-shift-D means "Send" in Apple Mail and "Discard Draft" in Gmail.
Get ready for a three-hour-plus Breaking Change spectacular! Why is it special? I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to listen.
Remember, money doesn't change hands when you consume this Content™, but that doesn't make it free! In exchange for downloading this MP3, the license requires you to write in to podcast@searls.co at least once every three episodes. Some of y'all are past due, and I know where to find you.
Want URLs? I got URLs:
iPhone 12 and later contains a barometric altimeter, so it knows when you're at high altitude and the accelerometer knows when you're traveling at high velocity… so why can't the iPhone just enable Airplane Mode automatically? Why do I have to do it?
Maybe I'll start posting more photos.
X marks the spot on this SEO.
This is some real snake-eating-its-own-tail shit by Apple Photos. What the hell am I supposed to click in order to not screw up its training of Aaron's face?
I've hated the culture of asynchronous code review for years, especially as the popularity of GitHub and its pull request workflow lent itself to slow, uninformed, low-empathy, bureaucratic workflows to address problems that would be better solved by higher-bandwidth collaboration between team members.
That said, as someone who's spent the last 9 months building an app by myself, I've really enjoyed having GPT 4o as my "pair". It's still too slow: I get bored and tab away to check Mail or Messages. But instead of waiting hours for feedback I'm waiting for literal seconds. There's also zero ego, politics, or posturing. And while it does hallucinate bullshit, there's far less of it than one can expect from bleary-eyed developers squinting at the GitHub web UI looking for a way to score points. And yes, I have to correct its corrections sometimes, but it almost always catches minor oversights that I (and my linter) would have missed.
TIRED: Spicy autocomplete in your IDE
WIRED: This shortcut that pipes git diff to the ChatGPT Mac app and asks it to critique the code like Justin Searls would
Give it a try. It's another reason that I, for one, welcome our LLM underlords.
Whenever I remark positively to something out of a sense of obligation, I lower the opacity of the text before hitting send.
Not a lot of people know this, but that's actually where the phrase, "damning with faint praise," came from.
I guarantee a non-zero number of people have put their iPhone PIN on their AirPods case.
Starting from scratch with my RSS subscriptions.
Only rules for each feed:
Anything you'd recommend? Let me have it: justin@searls.co
Extremely proud of… how much my posture has apparently improved since I started speaking.
It was a real journey.
I really love eggs but I'm trying to steer clear of dairy.
If you're experiencing persistent issues caused by the People & Pets metadata in iCloud Photos, there is a hidden way to reset it across all devices associated with your account.
The most common reasons you might want to do this:
The reset function is not currently available from any settings screen, and is only triggered by selecting and removing all people and pets in a single remove operation. I only tested this on a Mac (under macOS 15.0 Sequoia), but it may also work on iPhone and iPad. Since it will trigger a full re-scan of your photo library, it made the most sense to trigger the reset on a Mac that has the full library downloaded locally.
Steps, in a nutshell:
Command-A or by clicking the first and then shift-clicking the last)Subsequently, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed for five minutes or so in my case (I have about 160,000 photos and 50,000 videos). Following that, you should see the "Finding People…" status view appear on the People & Pets tab of each of your devices.
Hopefully this fixes whatever ails you! 💜
Update: As promised, the talk is now up! Go check it out if you want.
I meant to be more on top of it than this, but thanks to some day-of turbulence, I failed to do two things before my Rails World talk on Thursday:
Whoops!
Anyway, better late than never. Here are the things I mentioned in the talk:
Of course, most of you reading this weren't in the audience in Toronto and haven't seen the talk. Sit tight, I'm told that Rails World's turnaround time for getting the video online won't be too long. 🤞
There are a bunch of other things about the app's design and architecture that I had to cut for time and which I hope to share in the future, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how I put together the presentation. Stay tuned!