Week 24 of 2022

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

• hTime - the Global Clock

  I ran into this idea that adds letters to the clock in a way that rotates based on where you are. It means that for example T:30 is at the same time everywhere which means booking meetings across timezones could become much easier. I'm eager to test this out at some point.

• Write documentation first. Then build. by Matthew Guay

  Start your projects with documentation: usage references, manuals, landing page or press release and you are forced to think about it from the perspective of your users even before you start building and implementing it. I've been a big fan of this approach for the past few years.

• Don't pick the best tool for the job by Atte Juvonen

  Atte wrote an interesting blog post about choosing the tech stack for a project. He invites you to consider three Cs: competency, continuity, and consistency.

• Write Your Way Out by Rachael Cayley

  "If you find yourself with a sore leg, it may well be that avoiding walking is a sound strategy. If you find yourself unable to write, might it be a sound strategy to avoid writing? The answer to that question is almost always no."

  Rachael wrote a great piece about writer's block and how often the best way out of the block is to just keep writing. I've been maintaining a weekly blog post (and now weekly Weeklies pace as well) rhythm for a long time exactly for this reason: keeping momentum even when you don't have inspiration or don't feel like writing, is a great way to get words on the paper or screen.

• Helsinki, the happy city? by Jose Maria Echave Sanz

  How would you approach the question: "is a city happy place to live in?" from a data perspective? In this newsletter issue, Jose took a bunch of data about Helsinki and analyzed the city in terms of closeness to nature (95% closer than 140 meters away!), convenience of moving around the city and social interactions.

• Adding a dunder to an object by Ned Batchelder

  In this blog post, Ned walks us through how to add dunder methods to objects on a runtime entity level instead of classlevel. In Python, there are special functions that are surrounded by double undescore, dunder, that are used under the hood.

• Developing Java Applications in NeoVim by Matsuu

  Continuing from his previous NeoVim videos, I really enjoyed Matsuu's style of explaining through his setup of using NeoVim to develop Java applications. There's so much one can learn from seeing how other professionals work: what tools they use, how their environments are setup for productivity and so on.

• The importance of release stage in deployment by David Dahan

  When building a deployment pipeline for your web project, it's important to have a release stage, says David and I agree. Having a intermediate stage where built project version gets deployed for testing and then promoted to production is so valuable.