Archives: Notes

Good lord, I’ve found a decent photo of me while giving a talk. My mouth doesn’t look like a dog’s bum, my eyes are open and my arms are in a normal position.

Work scam email of the week: “Dear git-commit-by, I came across your resume on LinkedIn and was…”

The local pub is doing a beef cheek special. The bad news is that I only discovered this after we had bought tonight’s dinner.

Today, we optimise for “DX” – developer experience. Not user experience. Not performance. Not outcomes. […] The more comfortable we make things for developers, the more abstraction we add. And every abstraction creates distance between the thing being built and the people it’s for.

Jono Alderson – JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

No, Peter, you’re never a wet nerd.

Come on, people, it’s not a big ask.

I’m at my wet nerdiest when it comes to variant Sudoku (once you go variant you won’t go back). I got in to it doing the daily Genuinely Approachable Sudokus (GAS), which for many years where hiding out in a Discord for the most part.

But now GAS’s primary home is the open-web and I couldn’t be happier.

In a throwback to my youth, I’m making curried sausages for dinner tonight. This is either going to be very good or very bad.

The 2025 award for making legitimate services, notifications and everything else look as scammy as hell goes to… iwantmyname dot com.

Spokesperson: plaese see our typo ridding statment at iwmy dot third party tracking domain dot com

[BTW: I’m not clicking any links in case they are scams but I think they are legit]

The Tony Awards are taking their sweet time putting up the official footage of the Hamilton reunion. They’re going to lose so many viewers to fan-cams.

I’ll write the LAPD investigation’s summary now: the officer was unaware the woman standing in front of a camera crew describing the situation was a journalist.

I’m just a few hours from heading up to Zurich to catch my flight back to Melbourne. Switzerland is a lovely country but it’s been a busy week so I’m looking forward to getting back home.

The nice local who helped out with the photo told me this was a recent addition to the banks of the Rhine. It’s intended to be temporary but he is hoping they keep it.

I started my morning in Basel with a short walk around the city. There are some subtle signs that Eurovision was in town a couple of weeks ago.

A little proud of myself for making it through to 9pm last night with only a 75 minute nap. I was not expecting that after landing at 7am.

The customs agent sympathising that I’d have to do all this travel again next week was both lovely and Not At All Helpful Right Now. But mainly lovely.

Friends I am hanging out with at WordCamp Europe this week, your job is to make sure the idiot Australian doesn’t step out in front of a vehicle because I’m looking the wrong way.

Just when I thought there was no way international travel could be more stressful, they started testing the emergency alarm systems. All of them.

Apparently it’s acceptable to make phone calls on speaker in cafes now. Fortunately I was only getting a takeaway when I learnt this.

I will never get bored of opting in to mailing lists that allow me to do so with @example.com email addresses.

There’s nothing like receiving an email addressed to “Dear git-commit-by” to make a company look respectable.

Last night I watched a YouTube last night about the creation of Lemmings. A working copy is pretty much the only thing I want right now.

Peter’s very helpful guide for catching up on a busy Slack workspace:

1. Open the Slack App
2. Most messages sent overnight will not display at this point
3. Help > Troubleshooting > Clear cache and exit
4. Re-open Slack App
5. Catch up on all messages
6. As you navigate, Slack will display read channels as unread.
7. Press escape on these channels
8. As you navigate, Slack will return to the wrong point in the timeline
9. Help > Troubleshooting > Clear cache and exit
10. Re-open Slack App
11. Wistfully remember when Slack was simpler and worked.

I’m just waiting for bug tracking tools to introduce AI features to detect AI slop and generate a reply that is also slop.

At which point the original reporter will reply with further slop and recursion becomes a feature not a bug.

Steps for completing a BAS statement:

1. Procrastinate for at least three hours
2. Spend about 20 minutes doing BAS

bugs

are the worst.

Race condition

Forgot myself and started adding breakpoints attempting to debug a race condition. The race condition does not occur without a race. ?‍♂️

Remember that time the LNP thought they could win an election with this guy. Good times.

I feel so bad for Antony Green suffering an IT failure on his final federal election. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the ABC’s post election retro.

Election night is super weird because it’s a weird twilight zone in which some politicians are moderately honest for hours on end.

I had queue management opinions (yes multiple) at the voting shop. I kept them to myself because the staff Do Not Need That Kind of Shit.

Election coverage drinking game:

• take a drink every time someone compliments Antony Green
• two drinks if the person is well known to be a massive c—
• three drinks if the person does so on a non-ABC broadcast
• four drinks if the person is hosting a non-ABC broadcast

Looking up where to vote and it turns out our house is the boundary of the electorate.

I want in on this activity.

I think journos are failing to cover the most important issue of the election: why do Albanese and Dutton both wear such terrible glasses.

They’re the wrong shape for their heads.

I’m just waiting to find out that they stole the car, the handbag and the television in the anti-piracy ad. I give it days, not weeks.

Apparently there are good times and bad times to launch a new feature. I wonder where about 11:30am on a Saturday falls on the scale.

I’ve added a page to my website to show a history of a person’s contributions to WordPress Core and the props they received in each release.

Insert very, very middle class complaint about booking international travel here.

Breaking news: still dead. Follow our live blog for further updates.

A few days ago Wordle made me realise that inbox/sent is inconsistent and it should be either inbox/outbox or sent/received.

Thanks New York Times, this is going to bother me for the rest of my life.

I’d love to know how big a spike iView is getting as Australian nerds rewatch Blink.

There’s something very important to realise about the USA denying entry for the thought crime of criticising Trump.

It’s not a problem for the next few years or entering the USA.

There will be a turn back flag on your passport making it difficult to cross ANY border for the rest of your life.

I’m one of those people who can’t give up on a book part way through unless it’s really, really bad. This decade’s book is The Bourne Identity at about a third of the way through.

It’s really, really, realllllly bad.

It didn’t have the name at the time but all the examples of insecure code in this talk were Vibe coded. When I included the instruction to securely process form data, I got the suggestion // your code here.

Shook Ones, Part 2 includes what sounds very much like the Slack DM notification sound throughout the song. Very distracting.

Mr Bump is the new Pam the Bird.

I’m about to start slow cooking a lamb roast (Nagi/RecipeTin Eats, of course) so am preparing for an afternoon of stomach rumblings as it makes the house smell amazing.

When I start manufacturing computers, I’m going improve floating point calculations by offloading them to a Casio computer watch. https://3v4l.org/q89Es

We’re only two episodes in but Am I Being Unreasonable? on SBS On Demand is great. None of the characters are remotely likeable, not even the nine year-old.

Not only is 4Jk2WrCFR2BWMKYCwWFqQFNy9aPmbVLhPBNyMEwauvJoC4HY88 my eldest nephew, he’s also my favourite. I’m glad we’ve got that stored in a financial services account recovery questions.

(Obviously that’s not the answer I gave them for a question only marginally better than mother’s maiden name.)