Weeknotes: 2024-W48

Published: 2 December, 2024, updated: 2 December, 2024

Summary

Since it’s a short week, I’d taken it as PTO at the beginning of the year. Definitely a bit weird having a week off after being back at work for only a week.

Refactored my log-taking to use separate notes per device (to prevent concurrent edits and weird merges) and to reuse “libraries” in each shortcut, fixing the major annoyances I had with the system.

Start of the annual Advent of Code puzzle, which is a great excuse to write some code every day.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Enjoying

• Reading:
  • Dragon Keeper (The Rain Wilds Chronicles #1) by Robin Hobb
• Watching:
  • 📺📅 Shrinking season 2
  • 📺🏃 Castle seasons 4 + 5
• Playing:
  • Nothing

Newly discovered

Scriptable

Scriptable is a JavaScript development environment for iOS useful for automating your life, including widgets you can put on your home or lock screen. awesome-scriptable has a bunch of examples of such widgets. It unfortunately wasn’t able to do the thing I wanted to do, but I’ll be back to make some widgets.

Highlights

Storing times for human events

It’s surprisingly common for countries to make decisions about DST with very little notice. Turkey and Russia and Chile and Morocco are four more examples of countries that can often cause short-term chaos for software developers in this way.

If you’ve stored your event start times using UTC this is a big problem: the new DST rules mean that an already-existing event that starts at 6pm may now start at 5pm or 7pm local time, according to the UTC time you’ve stored in your database.

– Simon Willison in Storing times for human events, highlighting how storing dates in UTC doesn’t magically solve timezone issues for events.

Recommended

Advent of Code series by HyperNeutrino

There are a few people publishing Advent of Code videos, but HyperNeutrino is probably my favourite. While some do live-solves on video which is useful in some ways, she streams usually just after she submits, and recreates her solution. Since she doesn’t have the time pressure of live solving, she can spend more time explaining, often assisted by whiteboard drawings.

Why 100% Speedrunning Cookie Clicker Is Almost Impossible

For some reason, I’m not attracted to either speedrunning or clicker games myself, but apparently I enjoyed watching someone talking about speedrunning a clicker game…