Roman the Kat

Well, recent news mean that Stack Overflow Jobs gonna be discontinued on March 31, 2022. I liked this one. Kept looking from time to time what’s interesting out there, how do vacancies look like. For me it had kinda intuitive interface. Lots of things on the page, but most of things I would need are just right there, ~1 click away. Pretty straightforward to my taste. I also gathered ‘statistics’ of opened vacances per languages. It’s no way representative, but just as an example for myself “what’s currently in look”. Sadly, seems like overall data trend is decreasing jobs postings. ...

It’s a big thing for me to have an endless canvas for note taking. Sometimes it’s really useful. For example if you want to be able to easily look on the whole picture, just zooming in/out. Or if you have no idea how big the result will be, having no limits calms - you won’t run out of space, you can fit everything on one page, somewhere nearby. So I’ve being checking infinite/endless canvas apps available at the moment. ...

tl;dr It’s worth having ’notes’ and ’todos’ separately, probably in separate apps. They are too different. If you search for ‘productivity tools’ being used in a wild, you usually see apps for note taking/making. But it often comes in pair with some todo-lists app. For me it feels the reason is - vastly different lifecycles: there are ’notes’, made as a ~long-term thing; and ‘action items’, a ~short-term things to execute. ...

I rely on several apps for reading, mostly offline ones. Probably the main app for me is Pocket. There are a lot of great articles you can find, and most of them will be saved in there. Some will be tagged (top priority/first to read things, usually). On the other hand, I’m kinda curious in wallabag (self-hosted open source solution with mobile version). As a data source I often use RSS, for quite a set of blogs. I like the idea of ‘pulling’ information, rathen than ‘being pushed’ (as in email subscriptions, for example). Currently I use Reeder: it has mobile, desktop, native, blazing fast, apps. ...

Fun thing about JSON - it doesn’t have dates or time support, as per RFC. So whereas you see something like 2021-02-18T21:54:42.123Z in JSON - it’s still just a string. Some languages firmly follow that, like nim stdlib parser. Some try to parse as if it were ISO 8601 time. Which is actually nice - it’s human readable, sortable, portable, well supported and precise. Though such support sometimes causes extra fun, like java’s jackson lib and JSR 310. If correspondent parsing module is not added for java 8+ datetime classes then marshalling result will be bizzare. ...

An interesting and predictable happens with note taking during scaling. Once you have about 400+ notes ‘plain’ structure becomes not efficient. Seemingly it’s become harder to keep the context of everything you are writing about. The whole idea of note writing is to not trying to keep everything in your mind all the time. That’s the place where outlining works - it adds structure. There are numerous similar terms - outliners, structure notes, index notes, hubs. As for me I don’t make any real difference between them. The idea is to create a summary note, like a table of contents in a book. It provides high-level perspective, links to related blocks of information. ...

I like listening to podcasts. That’s a great way to use, to spend your time. There are tons of good and different podcasts on various themes. Some are useful, some are entertaining, some are both. Of course, with whole pandemic situation one of the main timeslot for listening podcasts (for me) is lost - commuting to work, but there are still options when to listen, like routine things, house chores, and so on. ...

There is an open-source programming language called Nim. It is a statically typed compiled language, looks a lot like python (small amount of syntax noise combined with spaces for identation/code blocks). Example from official site: import strformat type Person = object name: string age: Natural # Ensures the age is positive let people = [ Person(name: "John", age: 45), Person(name: "Kate", age: 30) ] for person in people: # Type-safe string interpolation, # evaluated at compile time. echo(fmt"{person.name} is {person.age} years old") A ‘bigger’ example, reading json from file and mapping it to an object: ...

As usual new major update for Ruby lang was announced on 25th of December. Cool thing about this year - that’s a release 3.0, aka Ruby 3x3. Main things are: performance (x3 in certain benchmarks) new concurrency primitives (actor-like abstraction called Ractor and Fiber#scheduler for async event pool) optional typing (RBS files for types hinting and typeProf tool for types inference) As for me, things I somewhat missed in Ruby were type hinting and more convenient concurrency primitives, especially once same ideas were added in Python (with async syntax and type hints). Gonna wait for ractors leave experimental. ...

One of little details left behind with feature branches - the moment code reaches release. Popular branching models approach it mainly in two ways: once feature development is finished, and code review passed, one shall merge the feature branch; e.g. merge before feature validation feature branch deployed separately to conduct testing procedures, bugfixes if needed, and only after that you merge the feature branch; e.g. merge after feature validation So it’s a tradeoff whether we deploy features faster, or more reliably. ...