What's it all about, Alfie?

Over the course of the last few weeks, we've seen the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank, and the Feds stepping in to reassure the depositors that everything will be OK, every deposit will be made whole, and the only losses will be to the stock holders of SVB. It's something that they didn't have to do, by regulation, but they did to return confidence to the smaller banks, and keep the deposits from being moved to the top-10 banks, and cause a real problem in all the smaller banks.

Still, it's faded from the headlines, and while The Journal is still covering it, it's not USA Today anymore, and that means that the bulk of the crisis is over - that of the lack of confidence in the system. People are no longer concerned, and that's really very good news.

The job market is still a mess... and it's going to take the financial markets to stabilize and start to head up, for the job market to return. It's confidence that drives good hires, not desperation. Still, this is just another cycle, and we'll weather it.

There are better days ahead. 🙂

I have been using the iPad Pro for two generations now, and my current model is the M1 iPad Pro, and during the pandemic, it has really proven to be a great Zoom, Meet, etc. box. It has a nice camera, and with Front and Center in iPadOS, it really makes it easy to have a good presentation, or meeting. But it's really so much more.

With the GitHub app, I can get PR notifications, review them, and merge them. With the GitHub Workflow Actions, we have continuous deployment, and that is really quite amazing to me. Of course there are the shells to boxes, and that is great, but even offline, there is so much to like about this machine.

It's rugged - compared to my MacBook Pro, and the screen is a lot easier to clean. I'm not saying my MacBook Pro isn't nice... it's just that in some respects, the iPad Pro is nicer.

What a really amazing device. 🙂

This morning I was thinking about the move to the upcoming M1/M2 MacBook Pros that are supposed to be coming out later this year, and I decided it was time to move off my old screen capture and annotation tool, Annotate, and move to something that's: 1) Supported... 2) Going to be built for Apple Silicon. And when I read a review about CleanShot and SnagIt, I decided to look into both - SnagIt first.

The reviewer had it right - SnagIt has way more than what I need, and the increased feature set means complexity that I just don't need. Annotate was great... simple, easy, it did all I needed. SnagIt is just too much. But CleanShot is right what I was looking for!

I needed something to make nice screen shots - both area and window-based. I also wanted to be able to draw arrows from the head to the tail, as several of the screen annotations I've used had used that, and my arrows are so much more precise because of it. Also, I wanted to have the white-outlined text so that it was easy to read - regardless of the image below.

CleanShot does all of those. It's just exactly what I was looking for. So I got the basic app, with the 1GB of storage, and we'll see how it goes. If I want to get more updates in a year, then I'll renew then. But I didn't need the "Pro" features like unlimited storage, and I really don't want to pay a monthly fee for software like this - it's not critical to what I do.

So here we go... and we'll see how this works out. I have high hopes. 🙂

I just got off the phone with a very good friend that helped me see something in a way that was always there, but I wasn't extending myself to see it from that point of view - and it really got me to thinking: How wrong was I really?... and the answer was: A lot. 🙂

We all live our little lives, and it's unusual to meet someone that can really see life from a few completely different perspectives. The most common way I know of is profound loss - someone recovering from the loss of a close loved one will have the ability to see life with that person, and without that person, and their perspectives will be entirely different. Grief changes most people. But that's not the only way people can have different perspectives.

I was talking to my friend, and mentioning that I was going through a tough time with some folks, and she suggested that I had it all wrong. And proceeded to tell me how wrong I was.

She pointed out that life really is what we make of it, and that I could choose to see things as how they effected me, or I could see it from a different perspective, and see that there were other ways of handling the exact same thing, and in a different way, not make it an us-vs-them situation.

I'm thankful for my friend, because it was what I needed to hear - even if I didn't want to. I need to change how I approach things... life doesn't have to be kind... there's no rule about that. But we can choose to insert kindness in what we do, and not let the kill-or-be-killed be the way we live our lives.

Sometimes I am really wrong. By a lot.

And I'm glad my friend was there to help me see it.

Today is the first day at the New Shop, and I'm a bit nervous that it's all going to be Node and React - they are tools I haven't done a lot of work in, but thanks to some help from a good friend, I feel I have a good start, and the Pragmatic Programmer's Simplifying JavaScript really is a good book to get up-to-speed on the latest changes to the language.

There's going to be a lot of learning, and it's going to be a little stressful at times, as I try to come up to speed as quickly as possible... but it's working with some very fine people, and this is the path I'm on... I need to learn all that I can - regardless of the circumstances.

I'm reminded of the chant: The King is dead. Long live the King! Life is a lot like that, it seems... and off we go! 🙂

Today is the first day at a new Shop, and I have to say... I'm really looking forward to getting back to creating again. Writing code... running it - seeing the results... this is what really fuels my soul. It's what I have always loved about working with electronics and computers. You don't have to wait for the pain to dry... or the adhesive to set... it's there - it's an expression of what's in your mind - and it can be run as soon as you can type it in. 🙂

I learned a lot at the last Shop, but this new opportunity was just too good to pass up. So I didn't. I'm excited for all that this means, and it'll unfold as it should in the days to dome.

It's always good to be kind to the "Next Guy" who has to pick up your code. Writing clean code, and making sure it's readable and understandable is very important, but there's really far more to it than that, and I was reminded about that in Slack this morning, and I wanted to write it down so that I wouldn't forget about it.

When a project gets so large that the tests take more than, say 15 min, to run, often times, a developer will disable the tests because it really gets in the way of making progress. This makes perfect sense. But then you get into a problem that the more you do this, the more likely it is that someone will check in code that fails on one of these disabled tests, and then you have a broken build.

Sure, some will say "That's OK... that's what the CI/CD Pipeline is for." which could be true, until the tests are long enough that multiple people are submitting pull requests and they don't want to wait for the full set of tests to run, and so they move on. But then there's a failure, and another team member has more changes that need to go in, and their tests passed, and so the first developer has to let the other dev go through, and then update their pull request based on the new code, and that's frustrating to them.

So now, developers don't want to add tests, because that just makes the situation worse, and now there's less coverage on the code, and less reliability on the system overall, and it just starts to slide downhill. But there's more... if they are waiting too long for tests, they could be skipping writing good docs or commit messages because they know they have a long wait ahead of them, and they aren't thrilled about that.

Take away good tests, complete tests, and good docs, and now we're really starting to erode the quality of the code - simply because things take too long to be comfortable, and it's perfectly understandable. But we each need to push through that initial response, and work to make the tests faster, and the documentation better, and make sure that the "Next Guy" who works in this code gets the best possible codebase they can have.

We are heading into week 5 of the lock-down, and things are really settling in to a routine with the isolation. There is a lot of material to read - some is good, some is fluff, and some is outright dangerous. But that's the purpose of being a critical thinker. If you believe what you read from one source, and don't hear it repeated - ever... well... then it's likely something someone wanted to be true, but wasn't. People make mistakes, and that's fine - but we can't get carried away these days.

I've really enjoyed finding Gitpod - it's the web-based development environment where you can build your own Docker containers for development, and you get a pseudo-VisualCode editor to work in. It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for to code Clojure on my iPad. There's no way Apple would allow a real JVM-based environment on the iPad, and as long as I have some kind of network connection, which is pretty universal these days, so it's not bad. And the ability to customize the Docker image is really very nice... so that's a great find in the last week.

There is an understandable increase in pressure at The Shop - people are seeing that this is going to last a while, and they need to make sure that things that were planned for 2020 need to get done in 2020 - even with the pandemic. It's understandable... companies make plans, and those plans are decades-long, in some cases... and so having to throw away 2020 would be a real issue. So the pressure ramps up. I get it.

But things aren't changing just because you increase the pressure. Everyone responds differently, and if we're all going to make it through this, it's better to show a little kindness and compassion, and take things a little slower.

So we fumble along, one step at a time... staying indoors as much as possible, hoping that the numbers fall off quickly, but knowing that's not really how this is going to end: quickly... and hope for the best.

In most regards, things are settling into a predictable routine. I'm not saying things are normal, but they are becoming a new normal, and while there is a lot to be concerned about, it's something that we all seem to be settling into... most of the time.

Today I had an exchange with some folks, and their nerves are clearly a little frayed, and they aren't handling the stress very well. It's hard to remember that in these times of stress - for whatever reason, people need to be given a little more tolerance. They don't realize they are lashing out at the people trying to help them. They aren't doing it on purpose - they may not even realize they are doing it at all.

I went to write a little code at repl.it, and I could edit the code, but it wasn't runing my Clojure projects. Probably something they've added lately, and I don't have to have it today, but it sure would have been nice.

Some day this is going to end... and we need to be clear with ourselves "What kind of people will we be?"... I hope to get better at that answer.

It's been a wild start to Week 3 of the shelter-in-place/WFH time, and things are slowing down to achieve a new normal that we'll have while we are all respecting the social distancing, and slowing the spread as much as possible. It's going to be a while yet, as the number of confirmed cases still appears to be accelerating, and the hospitals are still struggling, and the isolation measures are being extended. It's going to be a while.

Still... in the midst of all this, there are some really nice things to see. Some folks at The Shop are trying to keep things as "normal" as possible, and while I may not love every Pet Pic, it's nice to see people sticking together, and still having a sense of humor. And work is trying to be done, yes... slower, but still moving.

This is going to be a change for a lot of things, but it's going to get better.