ntietz.com: Hot takes about Firefox and logging, and gaining some new perspective (literally)
Hello, and happy Friday! I almost didn't get this out today because I was sick, but I'm feeling much better now so this is going to squeak out just before my bedtime.
A few blog posts this month, and some minor work on my side projects. I have a little time off in May, so I'm hoping for more share-able updates soon, something demoable.
As always, I'd love to hear from you! Enjoy something, have a question, or have a quibble? Hit reply and it'll reach me!
Blog updates
- It's getting hard to use and recommend Firefox, and I'm afraid for the free web: I've run into issues with using Firefox a few times and I can see why people don't always reach for it. If it doesn't regain prominence, what happens to the free web? Nothing good.
- The origins and virtues of semicolons in programming languages: I'm working on a programming language and was trying to pick what statement terminator to use, and I ended up with the old trusty semicolon because of what I learned.
- The only two log levels you need are INFO and ERROR: This one is quite a pile of "hot take", but came out of real frustrations in my work. Read it with an open mind and remember that I am not dogmatic about this (and it's also situational).
- Gaining depth perception: Purely a personal story, but one where I literally gained a new way of seeing the world. A friend told me I should write this up after I told him the story in a Seattle coffee shop and here we are. It's a bit out of what I normally write, and one of my better pieces of writing I think.
Personal projects
At the beginning of April, I presented at SIGBOVIK in Pittsburgh. The video isn't up on YouTube yet, but the proceedings which contain my paper are available for your perusal on their website!
Last month I said I'd work on some chess programming. I absolutely did not, because the chess coverage didn't inspire me enough to derail me from my other projects :)
I've nailed down another iteration of syntax for my language, Lilac, previously called Heart. I'm happy with where it is! It needs some more work, and I'll revisit it soon.
My other project, Pique, is a project management web app. Not a lot has happened with it, because life has been a lot, but I've setup some better styling and started on the basic design for a few pages. I'm going to use some time off this month to flesh out the functionality I need to make it usable for myself, then I might open it to early users to try out. Let me know if you're interested (mainly curious about what you use today and where does it let you down).
The last update I'm going to just bury down here at the bottom: a colleague and I got accepted to an ethnography conference where we'll talk about documentation in software engineering! This is going to take up a lot of my May.
Thanks for reading and subscribing! Please consider sharing my posts or newsletter with someone who might enjoy it, and have a great month. I'll see you again in June.
❤️ Nicole