1. Post-game-night research: did medieval Croatians have shoelaces? Going by the few bits of 13th century art I can find photos of, no — but that could be down to lazy artists.

  2. @|p^): hey @BarnabyWalters thought this might interest you http://t.co/sDMaFLAfea if you don't know about it already of course!

    @w03_ thanks, I have indeed heard of Noflo! Haven’t experimented with it much yet due to their focus on the backend framework. I’m working on a similar thing, focused completely on experimenting with programming UI: waterpigs.co.uk/intertubes

  3. psysh.org is the REPL shell we have been waiting for. How to start an interactive shell with a given context:

    <?php
    require 'vendor/autoload.php';
    $app = require 'src/app.php';
    Psy\Shell::debug(['app' => $app]);
    

    Supports readline, pcntl, registering custom commands, automatic semicolon insertion, clean+concise string representations of evaluated values. Amazing work Justin Hileman!

  4. Looking to join/start a casual recorder consort in Reykjavík — anyone know of one, or people who might be interested in joining? Preferably with a focus on early music, not vital though.

  5. Had many basic software development lessons hammered in by personal experience over the last couple of years: hierarchy bad. side effects bad. many moving parts bad. undue complexity bad. inconsistency bad. SQL databases fragile. always be reducing.

    It’s amazing just how seductive complex, unproductive tools can be. Successfully overcome+abandoned:

    • Codeigniter
    • Doctrine ORM
    • Bootstrap
    • Backbone, Ember, Angular
    • Symfony Security component

    PHP remains productive and speedy (with composer, delightful dependency management), python nice with some irritations. jQuery useful when absolutely necessary, plain with small libraries loaded via requirejs handle most progressive enhancement concisely. node.js nice for some things, preferring go’s approach to async programming but still not much everyday need for it.

    Avoiding middlemen: LESS, SASS, Coffeescript. Unnecessary for most of my work, and more moving parts is bad.

    Now bothering me is the frameworky nonsense accumulating in . Need to cleanse.

  6. Indiereader

    goal: by 2014-01-01, no longer be using twitter.com to read+reply to my friends’ content.

    It’s already possible to use web action toolbelt to add indieweb reply/bookmark buttons to twitter.com and weave to expand POSSEd copies into full posts, but I think that’s as far as the “progressively enhance the twitter UI for indieweb support” train goes. Remaining pain points:

    • Ads and other UI noise
    • Lack of good search
    • Lack of control over timeline — lists, following and blocking are the only ways to control what you see
    • Very weird in-timeline threaded conversation view

    Pieces in place allowing a seamless transition from using twitter.com:

    • A whole bunch of indiewebcampers publishing their notes+articles on their own sites using microformats2
    • An open source microformats2 parser
    • App.net mark up notes with microformats2 h-entry and h-card
    • h-card and xfn for follow lists, e.g. my contact list
    • Shim to parse twitter.com into microformats2 data
    • twitter-activitystreams to consume personal twitter feed as microformats2

    Pain points still to be resolved:

    • How to fall back to subscribing to someone’s twitter feed if they don’t publish their notes on their own site?
    • Whether or not to support ATOM+RSS — sure there’s a lot of it around, but it’s a nightmare, and I don’t want to encourage publishing invisible DRY-violating data. Perhaps superfeedr’s normalisation will be of use
    • What to do about all the wordpress blogs around with half-baked microformats support — auto-detect and use their ATOM feed? Try to find a related twitter account?
  7. Cut a process which was taking 20 mins down to 40 seconds — moral of the story is: building systems which allow you to see the system work in real-time and get an intuitive sense for how long things take is more effective than poring over SQL logs trying to figure out what on earth’s going on in retrospect.