Hello subscribers!
I haven’t forgotten about you but I have been slacking on sending updates. If I want to be more regular at this, I’ll need to get into some sort of schedule. Honestly, time has sort of lost meaning to me in this covid-19 period and the months and days are blending together.
In the last letter, I hinted that I had been mucking around with a silly TypeScript program to resize photos in a browser so they would fit better as my cell phone background. Well, this little program lives on the Internet and is available for anyone to use.
I call it Photo Fit. You should use it on the phone you’re making the background for. Here is an article I wrote with some helpful images and more words describing what it does. Originally, I was going to name this Don’t Smoosh Sweetie since I built it to resize a photo of my partner and me to fit my phone but, while that title was more fun, it didn’t fit as well on the actual page and.
I wrote two other articles in the last couple of months (more will come out later this month). Using Bazel to help fix flaky tests describes how to use the build tool Bazel to help you fix those terrible flaky tests. I’ve already referenced it more than once since writing that article.
The other article is a quick hit describing the command line tool selecta. This tool is a very useful building block for creating enjoyable command line utilities. I’d highly recommend adding it to your tool chest.
I also wrote another web app that I’m calling Default Equipment. Default Equipment was an exercise in learning more TypeScript that solved a very minor annoyance in my life. That annoyance being that Strava doesn’t have different default bikes/gear for different types of activities so when I ride my one wheel and record an e-bike ride in Strava, Strava still defaults to my normal bicycle. Default Equipment receives webhooks from Strava whenever I finish an activity and, if that activity is an e-bike ride, then Default Equipment changes the “bike” used to be my one wheel.
If this type of tool would benefit you, let me know and I can make that happen.
Working on this was a fun exercise in learning TypeScript and really producing an MVP. I thought about how I’d design this for actual production use by many people and then pared it back to the bare minimum to solved the problem for me. It was a good exercise.
Books Read
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel A. van der Kolk
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
It has been a couple months packed with a lot of 4 star plus books. At this point I think I’ve read all or all but one of Adichie’s works.
All of the non-fiction books were good in different ways although some of them are repetitive. I’m also not the main audience for Come as You Are but it was a good book to read.
How to Change Your Mind was an interesting trip down psychedelic research history mixed with the author’s experiences with mind-altering drugs. It was good. There has been a lot of really interesting research happening in the last 16ish years that has potential to change how we treat various conditions. I’ve sort of followed this space since about 2005 but not very strictly. It was great to read this book and get exposure to what is happening now and what had already been done back before this type of research was shutdown.
Tim Ferris has been promoting this space quite a bit over the last few years. His podcast and website are a good resource.
End
There are my updates for the last couple of months. I have a handful of ideas bouncing around for next articles written so hopefully we’ll see those coming out over the next couple of months.
I hope everything is going as well as possible for you.