A collection of technical, management and other thoughts from this week.
I’m on vacation this week and having mixed success disconnecting from work. Mostly I’m still going down rabbit-holes of interesting tech which at least gives me something to write about.
Thinking
I’m slowly poking at a couple of new things. The first is building progressive web apps in Vue, using Vuetify and Cordova. I’m fairly convinced that this is the stack I would use to build a new frontend today, but only if it needs a mobile app or offline support. I’m now stuck needing a real project to experiment on before I can get any further.
The second thing is Phoenix, a web framework built in Elixir. I love the promise of super fast requests, built-in support for web sockets, easy scaling. At first glance, it looks like the early learning curve isn’t too bad, although it’s clear there’s a lot of complexity to uncover eventually. My biggest worry is the deployment story. It’s just not as well supported as something like PHP or Python. You can deploy Elixir to Heroku but lose some of the great features in the process.
Reading
The 4 ‘Attachment Styles,’ and How They Sabotage Your Work-Life Balance. An interesting and possibly useful bit of psychology context.
UX Design For Startups. I’ve only just started this. So far it looks like a nice overview, but I haven’t seen a lot of depth. Not surprising for a free ebook.
Timestamps and time zones in Postgresql. Time is hard.
One Neat Trick To Avoid Rewriting Your Software Product. Yet another take on why you shouldn’t rewrite, and how better alternatives. I particularly appreciated the points about the need to limit a new products runway. It’s too easy to let a new spin-off product kill the old one slowly without actually proving itself.
Listening
I had a long drive by myself recently so I caught up on Welcome To Nightvale and got through a few more episodes of Good Morning Nightvale. If you don’t already know about Nightvale you should really start listening.