Yesterday I did two things I did not expect to find myself doing:

1. I switched my code editor and terminal to a light theme.
2. And of all light themes I went with Solarized.

The main reason I went for the light theme in the first place is my eyes were getting tired of constant switching between a dark terminal/editor and light web pages. I know people use browser addons to darken/invert web site colors, but more often than not I found the results aesthetically displeasing. Seemed easier to change a couple of apps that I can control than to attempt repainting the whole web.

I also always found the color combination Solarized offers a bit odd. Can't put my finger on why, but both dark and light versions never set quite right with me. Still, after trying a bunch of light themes and not liking any of them, I decided to give it a shot. To be honest, I begin to appreciate its warm color scheme. I'm still not 100% sold on the low-contrast aspect, but it's not as bad as I always considered it to be.

I'm giving up no Twitter mobile app, it's utterly unusable:

• Won't even talk about the "for you" timeline, madness lies that way.
• Following timeline is sorted from old at the bottom to new at the top, but threads are not! They are in reverse, so you end up reading in a zig-zag pattern.
• Threads longer than 3 tweets are collapsed, so you need to click in to read them.
• If you haven't opened the app for more than 2 days (, I know, who does that!), then it just hides everything but the two most recent days of your timeline. If you click "show more tweets", it will, of course keep your scroll position at the 2 day old threshold, not where you actually stopped reading Good luck finding the place.

So I have two questions:

1. Am I the only fool who reads twitter chronologically?
2. Is there anything that could let me continue doing it that way? It certainly doesn't help that they killed off all third-party clients.

#twitter #ux

What would you call a weird neighbor? Sus tenance.

As I was writing first paragraphs on a new design doc today, I realized that I used to suffer really badly from the blank page problem, the one where you agonize over a few first words or sentences of a new text for way longer than it's worth. And these rays I rarely experience it anymore - at work at least.

I think this comes down to two simple things:

• We have document templates for most stuff we write: designs, proposals, incident comms, etc. The template is not a blank page, it has a list of things you should consider writing, you don't need to spend mental effort figuring out your own structure every time.
• You are allowed to write the doc in any order: I often start with the design itself and come back to background/motivation parts later. You are also allowed to edit the template: it's just a prompt, not a law.

#technicalWriting

So I wanted to use ChatGPT to generate some getting-started tutorials for GopherJS, and it did pretty well! it explained how to install it, wrote a simple hello-world and so on. Then I asked it what is the license for the text it generated and, well,... I guess I'll write the tutorial myself.

If you need to play devil's advocate to someone playing devil's advocate, what's it called? Pagan gods' advocate?

I think I learned with a surprise: a good, catchy title is really important for a design doc or proposal success. Even though it doesn't necessarily improve its chances of getting approved in the short-term, it makes it easy to remember, find and reference in future. Which means your ideas may have (hopefully positive) impact beyond your own projects.

#softwareEngineering #technicalWriting

@dev@microblog.pub has no native iOS app (at least yet). But PWAs are a thing, so I spent some time today, optimizing my microblog theme to the mobile screen. Most of the effort went into dealing with overflows and making sure nothing causes horizontal scrolling (very annoying on a touch screen) or wastes screen space too much.

As a bonus, threw in a PWA manifest, so it really behaves a lot like an app, and easily accessible from the home screen.

Overall, I'm pretty happy, except with the markdown editor I plugged in. On safari autocorrection doesn't work properly for some reason, but it’s usable.