Week 30 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.

Last weekend of this summer's 6-week summer holiday is on and tomorrow it's time to head for new adventure. I moved to Berlin this month and have been spending the last 4 weeks exploring the city, meeting great people and getting ready for the new job.

Here's this week's collection of interesting stuff I read online.

• Pico PlayStation MemCard | The MagPi #120 by Rosie Hattersley

  I love customization projects like these so much. I don't have the skills myself to create electronics and stuff but I love reading or watching videos of other people's work, especially in the console modding scene.

  This project in which Daniele created a custom PlayStation memory card with Raspberry Pi Pico is such a great example of what hardware like Raspberry Pi can do. Not only is it a cool tinkering project but also a great way to keep old hardware usable and playable when the original accessories and parts disappear from the market.

• 3 tribes of programming by Joseph Gentle

  Joseph wrote a very interesting article about three different categories of software developers based on how they approach their craft: poet/mathematician, hacker or maker. While I think this kind of categorization usually leads to no good as any kind of categorization based on people's personalities is way too simplistic, it is a good article.

• The Fictional Liveability Index by Kasper Ledet

  Liveability Index is a way to rank different cities in the world via various metrics to see how good they are to live in. Kasper took the same concept and applied it to 20 different fictional places, ranging from Lord of the Ring's Hobbiton and Matrix's Zion to Simpson's Springfield and Twin Peaks' Twin Peaks.

• There Is No Bar — But Having One is Good Too by Jim Nielsen

  One thing I like when I'm reading other people's blogs is when I see multiple people from the blogs I follow having a discussion of ideas across multiple posts. This one by Jim is part of a discussion about personal preference for setting a bar of standards for your own blog writing.

• Semantic Line Breaks by Mattt

  Semantic Line Breaks and Derek Sivers' Writing one sentence per line are both explorations of an idea that if you're writing your content in formats like HTML or Markdown where single line-break doesn't matter in terms of output, it can be beneficial for the author to add more line breaks: in Mattt's concept you add them in semantically interesting spots and in Derek's concept after every line.

• Contempt Culture by Aurynn Shaw

  This article by Aurynn popped up on my radar as part of an online discussion of different programming languages and I wish I'd have ran into it earlier because it's a really good one. Ever since I got more into education and started teaching/coaching/mentoring new developers, I've been very vocal about the fact that we as experienced devs might have our opinions of different languages but it's important to not bash the other languages.

  She writes about the topic so elegantly and through real experience and I'll definitely add this to my list of "must reads" when I talk with people about the topic in the future.

• Progressively Improving a Ball of Mud by Anna Filina

  Working with legacy code can bring up its own challenges. I've got a fair share of mine in the past too. I loved this story by Anna of one case and how she approached the case and implemented improvements piece-by-piece to make the code easier to deal with.

• Soft Deletion Probably Isn't Worth It by Brandur

  When a user wants to delete something, how does your system deal with it? Do you delete the data from the database or just mark it as deleted – aka. soft delete – with intention that it can then be recovered easier if the user decides otherwise?

  Brandur argues that soft deletion might not be the best approach and how it makes certain parts of the codebase harder to maintain/develop further as you need to remember to track those deletions and how the database loses certain advantages with losing the foreign key constraints.