Projects & Work
Iām going to be in Paris for React Europe this week!
I also got accepted to Strange Loop to teach my React Native workshop, so that should be fun.
My first sweater is going to be ridiculously lumpy. Last week I knit the body; this week I finished a sleeve! Now I just need one more sleeve, then the yoke.
Because I need a project thatās not a massively warm pile of scratchy wool, I also started a cotton shawl for travel knitting. Alsoā¦Iām just bad at not-accumulating projects.
Languages
If youāre reading this, youāve probably caught on to the fact that I have a lot of languages on my plate right now; Iām not learning any new ones (yet) but Iām trying to maintain my current ones. I did a better job of language practice this week, with significant practice time in for German, Japanese, and Esperanto.
Speaking of German, have you seen the Rhabarberbarbara video?
Reading
How about a moving screen made of plants? Sensitive Screen looks like a neat project.
Replacing Relay with Redux - thereās clearly a lot of different evolution happening in this space, and the React / GraphQL / etc ecosystem is still pretty immature. I definitely agree that Relay is too heavyweight for most people, and too tightly coupled to React; Iām curious to see more approaches.
Iāve added ProPublica to my RSS feed. This was a good decision. See: Machine Bias, an article about how recidivism-predicting algorithms are biased, and this article on the problems with drug testing and pregnant women.
A peek at A/B testing in the wild, by my friend Dillon Reisman on Freedom to Tinker, is a really cool look at real-life A/B testing experiments. I guess I shouldnāt be surprised that news orgs do A/B testing of headlines, but it is interesting how far theyāre willing to change their editorial tone to (presumably) optimize for clicks!
Why I go through so many Arduinos, by Donald Papp on Hackaday, talks about how Arduino has changed the kind of freelance work he does.
My clients today still include startups and other small businesses, but more and more theyāre artists, hobbyists venturing into entrepreneurship, or people who make one-offs like the interactive displays you find in museums or science centers. The type of people I work for has changed, and because of this, the right tool for their job is almost always an Arduino.
Forests have social networks, too. I am looking forward to this book coming out in English! (I guess I could try to read it in German, butā¦Iām not quite there yet.)
A friend shared the super tiny compiler with me! Itās super cute.
Googleās blog post on flaky tests feels ā¦ simpler than their self-aggrandizing language (āstate of the artā, āworld-class engineersā) suggests, frankly. That being said, itās still a good overview of some solid strategies for handling test flakiness.