I picked a hell of a time to start my once a decade reread of Jurassic Park. Which, unsurprisingly, was the first “adult” book I read & checked out from my local library at like 10-11 years old
I know that the economy is actively in freefall right now, but I am glad that after 4-6 months of chewing on the problem; I’ve written an 8.2K word guide on overhauling the view layer for a Rails app. It should go live by the end of the week, still getting reviews on the first draft.
I’ve figured out the atomic core of my next music project; which will be a full LP. I’m still hammering out the details, but I’m excited for its potential.
I just glanced at someone’s screen to see what I think was a Canva doc open, with “GROWTH TARGETS” in Office 98 Word Art.
This feels on par with the infamous “BUSINESS” whiteboard scrawl
Later this week I’m going to recap this talk in a blog post to cement it in my mind, but it’s extremely good and you should go watch it youtu.be/vLzYhaMtp…
1 month of Musora
After a long stint with Melodics, researching alternatives, and trying out Yousician, I ultimately settled on Musora; which is a vastly different service! It’s not a gamified app, but instead an immense library of learning resources.
The main reasons it won out for me are:
Teaching a man to fish
The emphasis on learning methodology; notably unlocking the skills for improv, reading theory, and mechanical skills.
Musora not being app-based a-la Rock Band (which I love and was a foundational part of my musical journey) forces you to actually learn the pieces and skills to work outside the app. It’s a subtle but importance difference!
If you’re playing a game, you’re learning the skills to complete levels (songs/lessons, in this case). But if it’s a traditional class structure with assignments done “at home”, you’re learning the skills to perform, read music, improv. And you’re building the systems for how you develop those skills.
In essence, along with the nuts & bolts, Musora subtly makes you decide how you want to approach music. How much time & effort you devote to it; what your goals are; where you’re going to focus.
The breadth of material!
There’s quite literally years of solid, valuable material to learn from. The price/value proposition is ridiculous. And not just songs or the guided course, small mini-lessons about techniques, physiology to improve posture and avoid pain, style lessons for different levels of experience.
Their songs approach works better than covers
Musora takes a great approach for building out a song library: they embed YouTube videos with backing-tracks alongside digital sheet music, with custom playback & practice controls.
This means that rather than the sheer scaling problems Melodics, Yousician, etc. face of filling out their libraries; Musora has less work and cost by transcribing their music and relying on the real tracks. It makes practice much more dynamic and fun; and again, you’re learning the skills to read sheet music & practice through it for contemporary music!
Control is such an uneven game, but I love it. The random spawns, checkpointing, and overall progression system are a mess, making it sections randomly infuriating; but then you get a random superpower and it all becomes worth it
Turned this on mainly to have background noise that wasn’t football so Kira wouldn’t get riled up by the dogs next door, but turns out it’s just a great documentary youtu.be/yjpYzFtxf…
Y’all, I can’t believe this is finally happening.
Little CRM’s initial alpha is finally live!
Little CRM’s early alpha is almost ready! The plan!:
- Get this alpha ready to ship
- Write a blog post explaining what’s in the early alpha currently, and how it works
That way folks can see what the ethos is, and talk about signing up! So far the reaction has been excitement
The form for adding someone important to your account is coming along! I've been trying hard to add realistic, fun placeholder values. Hopefully it'll guide to less transactional convos. I want people to actually think about the people most important to their endeavors, and view them as people first & foremost, not a resource to extract
Look at this astounding header illustration that Wren made!! I’m floored, it’s perfect
One of the thing I’ve prioritized with Practical Computer is making sure things look great. It’s important, because we have these displays that can truly show off beautiful work. That polish & care pushes you to make better stuff.
That’s why I work with Wren, who consistently knocks it out of the park! Truly some of the best investments my business has made.
More proof of CableReady’s resilience
Mrujs and CableReady are so great together. After using Turbo 7 on both serious and hobby projects since it was released, I’m more and more finding out that it creates a lot more problems than it solves for me. Especially frames, which encourages bad controllers (imo), but drive too.
I haven’t used streams much, but from what I can gather I can recreate the features I want more elegantly with CableReady. I haven’t tried Turbo 8, but I don’t see the point as long as this combo exists. Mrujs has all I want, and the CableCar 🚡 integration is chef’s kiss.”
I saw this and dropped my networking stack guide, obviously.
It’s funny, I’d researched if CableReady and mrujs would make a good stack for my project, and I’d just started when your post happened to came along the same day, as if by divine providence. I took the fact that someone who, unlike me, seems to know what the hell he’s doing chose the same stack as a sign that I was on the right track. I’ve read your post twice since then, thanks so much for writing it! ❤️
I’m so glad that I’ve maintained being a stickler about:
- Doing the work to systematize things, especially design assets
- Adhering to using Mac-ass Mac Apps unless absolutely necessary
I broke my wrist during Helene cleanup, so I’ve needed to get a Stream Deck to make up for lost time due to one-handed typing. Elgato’s default icon sets are very minimal, making it hard to get something readable quickly.
Buuuut because I’m using Sketch and I did all the work to make a design system around Wren’s branding work for Practical Computer, I was able to:
- Open a new sketch document
- Use the design system’s library
- Make a 96x96 icon artboard
- Plop a Sketch symbol in there
- Use overrides + Font Awesome’s local fonts to quickly churn out icons
They’re not perfect, bad even! But they’re readable, and it was a trivial amount of time, and shows the power of systematizing.
Nanoc continues to be one of the best tools I’ve ever learned. I built out a whole chain for Postmark template emails (mustache) using:
- Cerberus
- plain ol ERB for templates & layouts
- premailer to prep the pages for Emails, and generating plaintext versions
- unlimited previews using static JSON files, rendering the results for each variant
All with like, maybe 200 lines of code?
This gives me "checking the blinking lights on my Linksys router back when they still had the blue front face" nostalgia, thank you
I'm trying my best to make systems understandable. Years ago I read about how macOS (and software writ large) got rid of status bars, syncing/activity windows, and it stuck with me. So for Little CRM, I’m adding status lights to show if JS appears to be working, and if the Web Sockets connection was successful.
Every day is further proof that we simply need to use UTC across the board. No more timezones.
They have played us for absolute fools
I’ll have more to show and a proper writeup soon, but it’s extremely cool that LittleCRM has replies & threading, with realtime updates. And because it’s CableReady/mrujs, I was able to reuse a ton of code & keep the cognitive load to a minimum
JavaScript provides developers with a way to emit custom events that developers can listen for with the Element.addEventListener() method.
We can use custom events to let developers hook into the code that we write and run more code in response to when things happen. They provide a really flexible way to extend the functionality of a library or code base.
Another example of why UJS is so powerful: you start thinking in events.
Fixing the Rails networking stack is published
I just published ~3K words + diagrams + code samples + demo videos on the frontend networking stack I’m choosing for Little CRM, and all my apps going forward.
I know that’s a ton to dig into, but I believe this is a very strong path forward for resilient and maintainable web apps.
The idea of throwing out Turbo & going to CableReady + Mrujs might feel like it’s a step “backward," less tested, or that you’re forging your own path by not sticking with what Rails ships with.
But I’d argue the exact opposite. It uses what the browser gives us! The concepts & protocols are universal, not a bespoke framework! And it tees up your app to be resilient by default.
I am honestly worried about the cargo-culting around Turbo and how that’ll cause this to either be ratioed or downright dismissed. 🫣 I think there should be multiple options. I have philosophical disagreements with Turbo & see clear technical shortcomings that are hard to work around. But I’m also human, so I know I’m fallible.
I want a frontend stack for our community that can ultimately grow the ecosystem at large, help us attract & keep new blood, and build significantly better apps. From my perspective, this approach accomplishes all of that. I don’t need everyone to adopt it (I want that, because I believe in it 😜), but the overcorrection to “don’t do anything outside of what the framework provides” worries me. Especially on the frontend, given Rails’s history of jettisoning multiple iterations while never having sat down and truly thought out how the code lives on the client side.
I’m not saying this is the option, but it is an option. And it’s my strongly recommended option—the one I believe to be the most robust and easy to use.