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Weeknotes: 17 February to 21 February 2025

a painting of a beach with trees
La Plage De Saint-Clair (1896), Henri-Edmond Cross (French, 1856 - 1910)

What I have found gripping

  • There are advantages to doing rather than outsourcing one’s skills to AI

  • Getting out of one’s comfort zone leads to new learnings

  • Asynchronous code reviews can facilitate progress

  • Returning to a generative art project and considering what to add to it for the sake of it

What I have read

#53
February 21, 2025
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Weeknotes: 4 February to 7 February 2025

Orange And Violet Sky at Sunset in Grasse
Sunset At Grace (Grasse), Orange And Violet Sky (1918), Félix Vallotton (French, 1865-1925)

What I have found gripping

  • Converting a JavaScript project into a TypeScript one through going through error messages and asking for feedback
  • Adding acceptance tests to a project with RSpec
  • Emerging alternatives to softwares one might be used to seem promising. The teams shaping them also matter, especially those bringing together folks from different backgrounds with complementary and (at times) rare skillsets

What I have read

#52
February 8, 2025
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Weeknotes: 20 January to 24 January 2025

View of a green field and a snowy Mount Kilimandjaro in the background
Kilima-Ndjaro, 22 VI (1909), Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finnish, 1865 - 1931)

What I have found gripping

  • In Ruby programming, the class Struct creates a class that can store and fetch values. See an example from irb below:

Book = Struct.new('Book', :title, :author, :year)
Book = Struct.new('Book', 'Sula', 'Toni Morrison', '1973')
Book.inspect
=> "Struct::Book"
Book.members
=> [:Sula, :"Toni Morrison", :"1973"]
#51
January 25, 2025
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Weeknotes: 13 January to 17 January 2025

Yellow sun setting over a blue lake with green pines on the right side
Sunset Over Lake Ruovesi, Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finnish, 1865 - 1931)

#50
January 17, 2025
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Weeknotes: 16 December to 20 December 2024

Sunrise over the sea and cliffs.
View of Northern Head at Sunrise in the Bay of Fundy (1862), William Bradford (American, 1823-1892)

What I have found gripping

  • The following terminal command outputs a detailed list of files and directories including hidden ones. It means list all:

    ls -la
    
  • Parsing a URL using Ruby then extracting a domain name with different approaches before choosing one that will allow for code readability

  • Bouncing ideas off other people is thrilling

  • In Rails, the debug helper will print out variables

debug
#49
December 20, 2024
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Weeknotes: 2 December to 6 December 2024

View of mountains, grass and a green blue lake in Yosemite
Mirror Lake, Yosemite (1874-1875), Hermann Ottomar Herzog (American, 1831-1932)

What I have found gripping

  • Diversifying one’s sources of learning is wonderful

  • WSGI is an acronym for Web Server Gateway Interface

  • This line of code in Python will initialize a Flask web app

    app = Flask(__name__)
    
  • The Flask class handles all the web requests, routing and responses

  • The Pylint error message Missing function or method docstring means that a docstring (short for a document string) needs to be added to the function. Once a docstring is included, the error disappears. See the example below:

    def print_python_version():
        """Function printing python version."""
        print(sys.version)
    
#48
December 6, 2024
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Weeknotes: 18 November to 22 November 2024

Orange path in green grass along the Seine river
Seine at Tournedos (1922), Félix Vallotton (French, 1865-1925)

What I have found gripping

#47
November 22, 2024
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Weeknotes: 28 October to 31 October 2024

Mount Saint-Michel with a pink and orange sunset
Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun (1897), Paul Signac (French, 1863-1935)

What I have found gripping

  • Logging what’s done well helps maintain perspective

  • Making contributions visible leaves room for celebrating them and providing actionable feedback whenever necessary

  • A team’s health influences its outcomes whether they be positive or negative

  • Identifying what is missing in a process before amending it to improve it further is exciting

#46
October 31, 2024
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Weeknotes: 21 October to 25 October 2024

Yellow and orange Autumn leaves.
Automne À Jeufosse (1884), Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

What I have found gripping

  • Simple and elegant technical solutions are easier to maintain

  • MatchData is a class in Ruby programming

  • RDoc specifies that MatchData encapsulates the result of matching a Regexp against string

  • Local-first software allows folks to work offline and collaborate across devices

#45
October 26, 2024
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Weeknotes: 7 October to 11 October 2024

a sunset over the ocean
Sunset in Split, Menci Clement Crnčić (Croatian, 1865-1930)

What I have found gripping

  • Refactoring code requires a rationale

  • Keeping code readable and tested helps reviewers

  • Tools can help or slow down processes

  • Having just enough information makes a difference

What I have read

#44
October 12, 2024
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Weeknotes: 23 September to 27 September 2024

a painting of cliffs and a beach
Beach formation on Bornholm. Scene from Rø (1843), Vilhelm Kyhn (Danish, 1819–1903)

What I have found gripping

  • Context matters and enquiring about it too

  • Pairing in addition to listening to different perspectives can lead to exploring problems through new angles

  • EDA stands for Event-driven Architecture

  • CEP is an acronym for Complex Event Processing. It’s an event-driven technology to aggregate, process, and analyse data streams

#43
September 27, 2024
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Weeknotes: 9 September to 13 September 2024

Mountain landscape in the orange evening sky
Mountain landscape in the evening sky
Maria Wiik (Finnish, 1853 – 1928)

What I have found gripping

  • Sifting through information before using it through hands-on practice makes a difference

  • It takes a team to create a welcoming and collaborative environment

  • Asking questions can be a way to manage cognitive overload

#42
September 13, 2024
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Weeknotes: 2 September to 6 September 2024

View of a blue lake in Lucerne with mountains in the background
Alexandre Calame (Swiss, 1810-1864)

What I have found gripping

  • There are 8 categories of variables in C#: static variables, instance variables, array elements, value parameters, input parameters, reference parameters, output parameters, and local variables

  • It’s possible to turn code into sound using certain programming languages

  • Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive innovation

  • Inner source is the use of open source practices within organizations for proprietary software development

#41
September 6, 2024
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Weeknotes: 26 August to 30 August 2024

A green field on a summer day. The sky is blue but cloudy.
August Jernberg (Swedish, 1826 – 1896)

What I have found gripping

  • Returning to a new UI for drafts on Buttondown and getting onboarded to understand how to navigate it is a smooth experience

  • Revisiting technical concepts across projects yields new insights

  • Super in Ruby can be used to call an earlier method in another one

#40
August 30, 2024
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Weeknotes: 24 June to 28 June 2024

A view of the beach at Kororareka in New Zealand
Kororareka Beach, Bay of Islands, New Zealand (circa 1856), Thomas Gardiner

What I have found gripping

  • Setting up a project in Ruby with a different browser-based tool is possible

  • Big O notation can be used to determine the efficiency of algorithms

  • Doing one’s part as a citizen at any level contributes to collective efforts whatever the outcome(s)

What I have read

#39
June 29, 2024
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Weeknotes: 17 June to 21 June 2024

The evening moon rising over a field
Abendstimmung, Marie Egner (Austrian, 1850–1940)

What I have found gripping

  • Talking through a different way to solve a coding problem leads to new insights

  • One can use Minitest to benchmark Ruby methods

  • Learning from folks from other contexts and in more senior roles allows one to make new mental models for new technical concepts. Thankful to everyone I spoke to this week

What I have read

#38
June 21, 2024
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Weeknotes: 10 June to 14 June 2024

Waves crashing over rocks
Waves, Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)

What I have found gripping

#37
June 14, 2024
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Weeknotes: 3 June to 7 June 2024

A dirt road in a green field
Sommerlandskab, Baldersbrønde (Summer Landscape, Baldersbronde) (1900), Laurits Andersen Ring (Danish, 1854 – 1933)

What I have found gripping

#36
June 7, 2024
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Weeknotes: 20 May to 24 May 2024

Damiette (circa 1890), Armand Guillaumin (French, 1841-1927)

What I have found gripping

  • Active Storage in Rails allows for different cloud storage options in production

  • Clean architecture is not only a mindset, it’s also about deliberate practice

  • According to Peter Loshin, an object has three characteristics: identity, state and behaviour

#35
May 24, 2024
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Weeknotes: 29 April to 3 May 2024

Painting of a lighthouse coloured in red and white near the sea.
The Lighthouse, Leontine von Littrow (Austrian, 1860–1914)

What I have found gripping

#34
May 3, 2024
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