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.
Writing this to demonstrate it's not "literally never" that application developers would benefit from the non-obvious data structures one might learn in a computer science program: I'm two days into a challenging feature and just realized it would have been way easier if I'd used a linked list.
First time in maybe a decade.
The Crowdstrike thing was such major news that it was the first time in a long time that non-technical family and friends texted me about software.
Do you have any takes on Crowdstrike or stories about disasters (averted or experienced) like this one that you'd like me to read on my podcast? If so, write in! podcast@searls.co
Experience seems to be the only way for a product manager to learn the profound difference between "Never" and "Almost Never" (or "Always" and "Almost Always").
I have two speeds:
Write automated tests for everything and achieve ~100% code coverage
Write automated tests only for things that can break without my noticing
And when I'm the lone developer, my top design priority is minimizing the latter risk blog.testdouble.com/talks/2017-05-11-how-to-program/
Just me or is universal <video preloading=none> support a lie? macOS Safari is downloading the entirety of 36 (hidden!) videos in the DOM on page load.
Having to resort to waiting to set the <source src> with JavaScript after user action. imagekit.io/blog/lazy-loading-html-videos/
A Breaking Change listener replied to v16 asking to see my new pool drain hose, and since it happened to rain today, here you go, my dude: youtube.com/shorts/Pq2NK-8hNqs
I've been using iOS 18 for 1 day and the reviews are in: full color tapbacks in iMessage are the worst design decision since the 737 Max.
I wasn't happy with the Faker gem's Lorem and Markdown modules, so—for anyone who might need it—I wrote a silly function to generate more realistically sized paragraphs with Markdown bits gist.github.com/searls/2859ad7e8941872edb9561eb965b7c76
I was today years old when I realized that when The Youngs say "LFG" online, they don't mean "Looking for Group."
Granted, I'm less online than I used to be, but I haven't heard a single Weekend at Biden's joke yet.
Not mad at any of you. Just disappointed.
There's been a bug in the Apple Watch app ever since multiple watch support was added: if the pairing process fails on an additional watch and the phone begins unpairing it, ALL paired watches will be unpaired.
There is no way to recover short of setting all watches up all over again. Today marks the sixth time this has happened to me.
I tried to redeem a free year of Peacock I received via my Universal Studios annual pass, but it failed with an ambiguous 500 server error because I apparently already had Peacock Premium via my Instacart+ subscription.
Nothing about anything makes any sense anymore.
Over and over and over again, the same lesson: the most valuable thing a programmer can do for themselves is to invest in faster, safer feedback loops.
Forced myself to spend two hours this morning not building the thing, and the resulting script empowered me to make such aggressive and rapid changes that I accomplished a day's worth of work in the subsequent two hours.
Just got this email about my inadvisably authentic podcast, Breaking Change:
"Feels like you're burning a lot of bridges with how you talk on this podcast, but I find myself… liking you more than I used to?" justin.searls.co/casts/
When people ask the "secret to my success," I like to respond with any of the many attributes that set me apart from my peers.
Here's one: whenever someone says anything remotely hurtful, think about it several times every week for the next twenty years and get very, very sad.
TIL you can force a browser to print backgrounds of certain elements with CSS print-color-adjust: exact;
Can't believe it Just Worked developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/print-color-adjust
So long as you promise to vote for "Standard (gem)" as your preferred quality tool, I encourage you to take this year's Ruby on Rails community survey! railsdeveloper.com/survey/
I like to show off my progressive bona fides by exclusively drinking Bud Light.
My friend Eric is a painter. Here's a quick video showing of his process to produce a commissioned painting of Mr. Toad – impressive! youtube.com/watch?v=-jBN5ykqutY