Reflections For Lent

Meaningful Work

I’ve always found it tough to work on something that I didn’t think the world actually needed or needed more of. Does the world really need one more undergraduate philosophy paper on Existential Ethics? Does the world really need another to-do app? 🤔 I try to keep my eyes peeled for needs that actually exist.

The Long and Winding Road

I’ve always been a seeker. I try to live by a code, and I take ethics seriously. Very recently I’ve been trying out Catholic Mass. I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out, but as I was looking around I discovered these Medititaions on Lent by St. Thomas Aquinas. It seemed that they were recorded either in weird formats or on ancient websites. I set about putting them in a static site so I could read them easily. Hopefully, others will benefit as well.

Failure to Launch

I really want to like Astro 🚀 . I like the idea of “islands of reactivity”. I like the intelligent defaults and the out-of-the-box functionality. However, while one benefits from these great features, one pays in full eventually.

Astro isn’t really even in beta yet, afaik. I continually hit snags that were fixed in subsequent release. I would upgrade the packages, only to hit other snags. Confusing concepts, like how scoped styles do or don’t cascade, were complicated by documentation that was being reworked as I developed and bugs in HMR that were cropping up constantly and being squashed on an ongoing basis 😠.

On the bright side, I did get to file my first open-source PR!

I really like the project, but…

Choose Boring Tech?

I was listening to this episode of ShopTalk recently, and Dave mentioned a talk I hadn’t heard of before: Choose Boring Technology.

The basic conceit is that there is an adoption cost for every new thing you learn, and an ongoing cost for every different tech you have to maintain in production. Nonetheless, developers like shiny new things, especially when they don’t have to maintain them, and are prone to reaching for new things. Instead, the talk argues, you should always reach for what you already use unless you can make a case that the work of retrofitting what you have will exceed the total cost of adoption of something new.

Ooof. Guilty as charged 🤯

I’m not sure I totally agree, but it’s giving me some material to chew on. I think I’ll fire it over to the syntax guys and see what they think.