I’ve been in a kind of hyper-busy mode before Christmas. Mostly that has translated into work, but there are also quite a few other things happening.

Highlights

• I’m working on a game to predict which posts will reach the front page of Hacker News.
• I’m creating a family photo sharing app out of spite.
• I switched to a keyboard-first window manager.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

In this tutorial, we will see how to build a simple Laravel Application and deploy it to the cloud using Sevalla.

When my wife saw me playing with my new encrypted radio, she asked what it was for.

“Imagine,” I said, “if I could type a message on my phone and send it to you, and the message would appear on your phone. Instantly!”

She wasn’t impressed.

“It also works if phone lines are down due to a power outage… or societal collapse.” Still nothing.

“If we’re not within radio range of each other, we can route our messages through a mesh network of our neighbors’ radios. But don’t worry! The radios encrypt our messages end-to-end, so nobody else can read what we’re saying.” By this point, she’d left the room.

In his excellent talk Get the Core Right and the Resilient Code Will Follow at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this year, Andy Bell showed how to sensibly discuss a coding issue amongst your team. He also did a more in-depth write-up on his blog. The problem that Andy described was having a CSS grid with […]