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.

Every time I come across an iOS 6 or before UI screenshot I realize that I miss skeuomorphic interfaces so much. Flat and cartoon-ish modern UIs just have no unity or cohesion to them...

I generally try to be polite to recruiters, recognizing they have a difficult job. But sometimes it gets absurd:

Thursday: recruiter sends a connection request with a job opportunity in it. Monday: I accept the request, but politely decline the job. Tuesday: recruiter acknowledges my response, saying they are happy to stay in touch. Thursday: recruiter sends me exactly the same job opportunity.

As the layoffs are rolling across the tech industry, a gentle reminder that:

1. The company is not your family, it never was nor it should ever be.
2. You can be friends with your colleagues, but not with the company itself.
3. The business will do what it has to do to protect itself. Your personal happiness is important for you, but for the business it's just a means to higher productivity when things are going well.

Success recipe:

1. Fuck something up.
2. Heroically fix it.
3. Get credit.

#notLegalAdvice

Probably one of the toughest part of maintaining GopherJS is that you have to run pretty fast just to stay in one place... There is a new Go release every 6 months and if it includes new language features, we have to find a way to support them. And only then we may have a bit of time to improve on the project itself, which is kind of stressful.

For the past 4 month I've been plugging away on generics support and I think there's only one major unimplemented feature. And a fair amount of bugs to fix. And by the time I'm done, adding Go 1.19 and 1.20 support will be due...

#opensource #golang

These are the saltiest papers I've ever read:

• https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p2739r0.pdf
• https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p2759r0.pdf

That said, I understand why the authors feel this way :)

Wrote a new post on self-hosting a Minecraft server at home: https://nevkontakte.com/2023/self-hosted-minecraft.html.

I wouldn't call it a new year resolution, but I'd like to write more blog posts that I have for the last several years. I notice that I learn a lot, never write it down and eventually have to re-learn, which is silly. I ought to stop treating my blog as a serious scientific paper which only accepts polished papers with novel knowledge. If the knowledge was novel to me, that's reason enough to write it down.

#minecraft #selfHosting #linux

Spent a better part of today updating the theme of my blog... For a long time I wanted to replace the cold blue colors with something nicer and warmer, and I'm pleased with the result. At the same time it's a little bit sad because for the first time since this blog existed I completely abandoned the white-panel-over-blue-gradient style I've faithfully carried through 4 different blog engines. For the comparison, I will include screenshots of the same post with 2011 design and one from yesterday.

While at it, I killed a few sources of unnecessary bloat: applied PurgeCSS to the gigantic Bootstrap stylesheet and replaced 300KiB of js with 311 bytes.

Reading https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell made me feel not quite so bad about the poor old GCL. Though I wonder which one caused more revenue loss globally :)