Ross Wintle

If there’s one thing electric vehicles are really missing it’s an under-car animal detector.

Tooting my own horn again, but today, I - complete React and NextJS noob (kinda) - reviewed a small-but-mighty NextJS middleware change, found a bug, improved it, and then went and wrote tests for it too!

Go me!!!

(Actually very proud of myself today)

I revisited my “10 things I learned in 10 years of freelancing” posts today.

I’m pretty proud of them. Some great advice and wisdom, even if I do say so myself!

Start here!

FREE WEBSITES!!!

Clickbait? Moi?

Well… No? I actually build, deploy and host my own side-project websites for (virtually) free.

You have to know what you're doing to some extent. But this post goes into how I quickly spin them up.

One of the constraints of being employed (nearly two years now!!!) is that side projects aren't really a thing.

So I'm embracing constraints.

I have a secret little #WordPress project that's SO good and I can see how it could quickly turn into “A Thing”.

But it will remain a little thing just for me. It does what I need it to. And that is enough.

On another project someone asked this week “Is this codebase still active?”

The answer was: “This code is finished”

Constraints are good. 😃

What a wild ride this work week has been. Took responsibility for a lot of things. Got a bit frustrated that I had to. Wasn’t sure I’d handled it right. Then, today, had some glowing feedback and affirmation that I’m doing a lot of things very right.

I talk myself down a LOT so I’m gonna bathe in this.

I’m doing good at what I do. And I’m thankful for those that support and encourage me.

I’m honestly reaching the point with the climate crisis where some kind of protest or direct action on government and corporations is on my list.

I actually did a product search off the back of an ad today.

I’m never impressed by ads.

They finally got me.

(But I don’t think they know they did?)

Random. But brilliant!

C/W EV Bore…

Took the EV on another longer (non urban, mainly highway) drive yesterday. With passengers.

100 miles used 50% of the battery. With A/C on most of the way too.

Amazed that we still get 5+ miles per kWh even on a journey like that.

SO happy with our Ioniq. It’s ultra efficient and fast to charge. Definitely a good choice.

I hate that I like a car so much. 😂

I don’t get why tech people find Mastodon hard.

They understand choosing servers/instances.

They understand the privacy issues of closed corporate-controlled networks.

They’re often proponents of open source.

They usually hate ads.

They like APIs and feeds and nerd stuff.

Confuses me greatly.

My son is now playing Zelda. He’s so much quicker at picking these things up than I am. Making me feel a bit stupid.

A very amateur gamer speaks:

So No Mans Sky was half price in the Steam Store. And I have a MacBook. And it works on Macs now. And their return policy is really good.

So I gave it a go to see if it was much better than the Switch version.

And Oh My Goodness this is why you all have Xboxes and stuff!! 😃

Hah. Nice. Someone built a WASM-based #Laravel playground inspired by the in-browser #WordPress Playground

The second post in my now-I’m-an-EV-bore series.

This one is about which electric cars we looked at, which one we bought, and why we bought it.

I had 100% given up on that cricket match on Friday morning. What. A. Rollercoaster.

I discovered LightningCSS today. Looks like a great replacement for a bunch of build tools for CSS. Built in Rust! Perhaps I can remove a bunch more fragile npm dependencies?!

Oh. But I need to npm install it?

WHY?!

Today I’m thinking about supply-chain attacks in utilities that are written in Go, Rust etc and compiled.

With tools like esbuild and LightningCSS, we only have a single dependency, rather than the hundreds/thousands of dependencies in the tree for an npm-based tool.

But if something is written in Rust and it’s using some off-the-shelf crate/package, would I know about that?

Do all tools dependent on a library get flagged if a package is found to have an issue?

Can I say I frickin LOVE that women’s sport has grown so much these last few years. How it was never such a big thing before I don’t know (*).

But it’s great that it’s a thing now because it’s damn good.

(*) - OK, yes, the patriarchy, I DO know

The previous post, by the way, was a reaction blog to this REALLY FREAKIN’ EXCELLENT episode of This American Life that looks at intelligence - artificial and otherwise - from a number of different creative angles.

I don’t remember who recommend it, but DANG this episode of “This American Life” that tells stories about intelligence - artificial and otherwise - was good.

So good I had to write some thoughts down about it.

"Is ChatGPT clever because it has "theory of mind", or is it stupid because it lacks the instincts that keep a toddler alive.”

The route to death of a social network on my mobile is:

Level 1. App deleted. Try to use just the web app on mobile. Level 2. Ignore on mobile. Only use on desktop occasionally. Level 3. Stop using altogether.

Current status:

Facebook: Level 2.5 - just need schools to stop using it for critical comms

Instagram: Level 1 but only for school stuff. Would be Level 3 otherwise.

Twitter: Level 1

Can you believe I’ve NEVER been on TikTok?

Threads: Level 3 (already!! 😂)

Why are people - governments mostly, but corporations and individuals too - not looking at the climate, utterly freaking out, and making big, serious, fast decisions? Who is leading?!

World's hottest day since records began

There's been so much discussion about the NAME of the #WordPress Command Palette, but I've not seen much discussion of the actual feature/functionality.

Styles are broken right now () but what do people think of it?

Does it look like a useful tool?

I have a website you can visit as many times as you like.

You can even get a feed that you can put in an RSS reader (I like Feedbin) with other peoples website feeds.

And you can check your feeds as often as you like.

Magical.

Am I having a bad day?

Will I regret writing this?

Does it add anything to the converstion?

I don't know. But I feel compelled to write it.

"The web used to be fun and simple and easy to get stuff done with. Now it's discovering that someone who doesn't know what they were doing used a div instead of a button and fixing it involves half a day of poking around files that make no sense and fixing a broken build process.”

I'm tired of web dev!

This is a really excellent article on the pros and cons of EVs. Debunks lots of myths. LOTS of data.

Dave Grohl just flippin loves his job, doesn’t he?

I want a tenth of his energy at age 54.

I feel less “guilty” driving an electric car. And it NICE to drive.

But… in some of my driving it, I’ve still been stuck in traffic.

And being stuck in traffic is awful. It’s complete dead time. It holds me up. It holds other people up. I can’t work or exercise.

Traffic is crap. And EVs don’t fix traffic.

What did I hear on a podcast today?

Something like:

“There are so many great abstractions in web development. React sits on top of TypeScript and TypeScript sits on top of JavaScript.

It’s so easy now to make a button that you click and something happens nowadays”

Yeah, right. It is. And you don’t need any of those abstractions to do it! It’s amazing!!

Did anyone else read this and think of Severance?

For those that know…

I really think “Wayfinder” is a bad idea.

We’re already trying to undo “Gutenberg”.

One issue is the precedent we set by not following convention.

Let’s call the dashboard “Widgetville” and the admin bar “Headspace” or something.

I’m being facetious. But…

I think that from now on my signature social media post format will be the long-compound-adjective-with-lots-of-hyphens one.

Lol. The what-shall-we-call-the-WordPresss-command-palette GitHub issue is about to blow up then!

Reading a car recall notice (not for my car).

Good to know motor manufacturers have figured out that whole-car-dies-when-a-tiny-electrical-component-fails-thing since that dodgy Peugeot we bought 15 years ago!

Someone had commented implying that my battery issue was an EV problem.

It wasn’t.

It was a vehicle electronics issue.

The same thing would have happened with the equivalent ICE or hybrid car.

The irony is that I had 20kWh of power in the car but was not able to use any of it to power the cars electronics!! 😂

So, hilariously, my fancy new EV broke today. Wouldn’t turn on!! How?

Well, the good news is that the 40kWh main battery is fine.

But there’s also a regular 12v battery that powers…well…everything that’s not the motor. Locks, lights, sound, displays, electronics.

And it turns out that everything turns off when you open the drivers door. But this is NOT the case for the passenger door.

So the media display was left on, the 12v battery drained, and the car was dead.

😬

I’m writing an EV (electric vehicle) "cheat sheet” that tries to combine all the different terminology and units into one, independent, succinct, place.

It's in-progress, but nearly complete now.

When researching EV's I found there were lots of articles and videos about the individual topics, but not a place to quickly learn the basics of everything. So this should fix that.

Please send corrections if anything is wrong. Thanks. I hope this is useful for someone.

I’m sorry. I’m really really sorry. But I tried the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin for WordPress and the UI is just getting worse. I don’t know how this is happening. I don’t even know how to start describing the issues. We’re really at sunk cost fallacy time. Maybe block editing is OK (it’s not, IMO)? But the way pages have been put into the site editor and the way the command centre has been plopped into the UI in several places with inconsistent affordances.

I know it’s beta. But…

Did some training today on biases in the workplace. Really helpful.

I reflected that I don’t judge/stereotype people based on race/gender/colour.

But I’ll completely assume who you are from your communication style and tech choices!

Eeek!!

I’m at the point where I want to just round up all the brilliant people I’ve worked with and start some kind of software agency with them.

THAT would be amazing.

I work with and have worked with some completely brilliant people.

What a joy!!

I’m more and more convinced that people are missing out on good coffee because “dark roast” has been marketed as “strong” and people want “strong” coffee.

I’m just loving lighter roasts gently filtered.

(Such a #coffeeSnob 😂)

Testing an integration...

Off to work. Cycling in the sun. Great way to start the day.

Showing omg.lol to my awesome daughter

When was that “Blue Monday” officially-most-depressing-day-of-the-year? And why is it not over yet?

Seems I have decided to properly embrace Blue Monday this year. Weather’s crap. I need sleep. I think I’m going to eat every single molecule of carbohydrate that I come across.

Just got a Black Friday email that made me VERY cross.

A curse for the bad-faith web developer:

"May all your domains accidentally expire without notice. May your database become inexplicably corrupt. And may all your backups not be restorable."

I was on a call yesterday recording for a BBC radio programme and podcast! A little-known thing, but honestly, the producer and host were SO amazingly nice. Such a huge amount of positivity. 10/10 would do it again!

Hang on. What the hell?

PHP comments can start with a '#' ?

Since when?!

😂

#stillLearning #TIL

A nasty cold has hit me like a truck today. Really wanted to try and progress Turbo Admin to its next release but… 😔

Here's my collated thoughts on potential exodus from Twitter. The recce's give me hope. But I don't think it properly happens any time soon:

I have arrived!