A bit late to the party, but hey, it's May! And just like the previous month flew by, I have no idea what actually happened besides the fact that the total and utter chaos at work combined with the naughty pranks of our toddler-to-be completely drained my batteries. I have to admit that I don't really enjoy the cranky person I'm becoming because of this, nor do the people close to me. I guess I write this out loud here as a reminder to myself to Keep It Cool, Man!

In other news, my Software Engineering Radio episode was finally published---and lo and behold, it resulted in a small spike in sales. Yay. Fingers crossed for people not returning their books resulting in negative royalties, which seems to be a Manning thing?

Previous month: March 2024.

Books I've read

I've been amazed by every single chapter that Marcus Chown managed to neatly wrap and serve me in his Never-Ending Days of Being Dead, an older release on the origin and physics of the Big Bang and Big Crunch. As a cosmology newbie, I was afraid that its contents would overwhelm me, and it did, but in a good way.

Next up is Staff Engineer from Will Larson and a Monkey Island retrospective on loan by a friend. The first book provides valuable insights in the why of my frustrations at work and the latter provides comfort food to wind down at the end of the day. How appropriate. You fight like a cow. If that quote doesn't ring a bell, you need to drop everything you're doing and go play the best adventure game ever.

Games I've played

An amalgamation of everything and nothing. I tried getting into Flashback. I finished two simple Turtles GBA carts without feeling satisfied. I then bought the Cowabunga Collection for Switch but most of these retro games aren't a lot of fun without a second player. The last Retronauts Podcast Episode pointed out Dragon Quest VIII's 20th birthday and I still have to tackle the 3DS version. So I bought Dragon Quest VII on 3DS as well, meaning I now have three DQ games I never played. Oops.

The highlight for me this month was definitely the Evercade Duke collection that provided a way to replay the first two classics with modern enhancements (see Remakes And Remasters Of Old DOS Games).

When it comes to board games, almost nothing? At least my friend and I managed to push through two Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion's scenarios. We're kind of over it and looked up how many scenarios to go before we can finally leave it behind: depending on the path you take, four more to go...

Selected (blog) posts

• Manuel Moreale is interviewing People and their Blogs and it's been very entertaining to read their approach to blogging.
• Jim Fisher hands out practical formulas for responsive font-sizes. His blog has more gems like these, do check him out!
• Dave Cheney explains how the functional option pattern is best put to use in Go.
• While Jim Nielsen implements Netlify's Image CDN, I wonder why you'd use a CDN at all for your personal blog...
• Jan Valkenburg writes about your website carbon footprint and how to improve it. Brain Baking scores A+!
• I dug up one of Greg Wilson's presentations on book writing advice: don't write a book. Okay. I think I can relate.
• Centering Things Is Hard says Niki. Judging by the scary looking screenshots, I'd say he's right.
• Patrick Kua wrote Talking with Tech Leads and this is the ThoughtWorks' podcast episode about it.
• Diederick de Vries has a cool blog on retro hardware computing called https://thefoggiest.dev/. What an awesome domain name!
• Luke Harris reminds us that our music taste stagnates, especially after 30. I don't know: I still love hip-hop, but my taste did broaden a lot lately.
• Debugging should be part of an undergraduate program according to the aforementioned Greg Wilson. Yes, yes, and yes!
• Are you a front-end developer? Or a full-stacker? Or a designer? Web designer? UX? Perhaps you should read Elly Loel's front-end dev development crisis post.
• Justin Searls micro-posted an important blurb on testing in code that resonated with me:

I’ve written more tests than just about anybody. Spent years comparing dynamic and static type systems. My life's work is to maximize correctness and minimize maintenance.
All it's taught me: the single most important thing programmers can do to improve their code is to minimize branching (e.g. if statements). Code that executes the same set of instructions every time behaves the same way every time.

Other random links

• If you like the board game Hadrian's Wall, here's a similar (but solo) one by the same publisher: Legacy of Yu.
• Stimulus is Yet Another JavaScript framework---supposedly for the HTML you already have.
• If you want to build a website using Rust, you should use Rocket and this GitHub repo to scaffold things together.
• I wanted to use the Go Gin web framework but then looked at my go.mod file and promptly uninstalled it.
• Tired of JavaScript, CoffeeScript, or WhateverScript? Here's MoonScript that compiles to Lua.