Fabian's public notepad

Is it really possible that half a decade just flew by?

Recently a bugfix at work reminded me of a story from ages ago, and a small, yet important lesson on the importance of defaults in API design, that I took away from it.

On the 9th of April, the CSS Naked Day takes place, its intention is to promote good web development standards, like proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words.

In some scenarios I prefer to use a lookup table instead of a dynamic dispatch (or a switch statement / if-else-cascade).

I recently reread David Parnas classic paper On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules.

Since a few weeks the blog question challenge is making rounds, and some days ago Lars-Christians answers popped up in my feed reader and he tagged me to participate as well.

V.H.

The indieweb carnival for June 2024 is hosted by Andrei, who has dealt out the topic DIY — Something from (Almost) Nothing, which I think is a brilliant prompt.

The Pew research center recently published an estimation that 38% of webpages from 2013 are no longer accessible.

As I reviewed my bookmarks from the weeks 20 and 21 of 2022, I noticed that a recurring motive were neat old ideas.

So, half a year has past since I wrote the last weeknote.

In an age of silos and centralization, trying to curate the web may seem like a folly.

I am using nginx as reverse proxy for a handful of small applications.

Manuel host this months indieweb carnival on the topic of Digital Relationships.

As my family and I are looking forward to move into a new home in January, the next weeks will be filled by throwing out junk that accumulated over the years, packing up our belongings into boxes, looking for new furniture etc.pp. and I'll likely be hard-…

I've recently made a few accessibility improvements for the site.

Since this week my parental part-time is over, I'm back to working my standard 40 hours.

...and then your tools start to shape you.

I've wanted to replace the scripts with which I create this website for quite some time now.

In Gregor Hohpe's book The Software Architect Elevator there is a chapter with the beautiful headline: If you never kill anything, you will live among zombies - And they will eat your brain.

I spent a good deal of the work week convincing myself that multiple layers of data mapping from one anemic domain model to another were indeed soundly and safely removeable.

Hillel Wayne wrote about educational codebases.

There is this saying, that when you aren't embarrased by the first version of a software, you have shipped too late.

Sometimes engineers have a tendency to solve problems with people by solely technical measures.

Weeks pass frighteningly fast.

A little bit over a year ago, I published the last weeknote.

I recently experimented a bit with lunr.js, because I wanted to learn a bit about information retrieval techniques, by trying to read the codebase in depth.

Something that I regularly think about, almost everytime I select something to read through for furthering my knowledge in my field, is if there is something like a canonical set of reading material.

No website is guaranteed to exist for ever, not even for a timespan that significantly outlives its original author.

Since I started my website, I published 38 posts (this one not included), which means on average a little more than once a month, but my publishing cadence is far from being that regular.

Last year one evening my whole family was asleep unusually early.

Picking colors for elements on a website is not merely an aesthetic detail, it also matters for accessibility.

At the risk of losing a lot of nerd cred: I, by and large, prefer light mode.

As often, I am somewhat late to the party, but on the other hand, maybe you are one of today's lucky ten-thousand...

Manuel has expressed some strong objections against internal links.

In one lecture of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course, a student asked Hal Abelson how the technique of deferred decision making through abstraction he taught relates to the axiom of 'do all your design before any of your code'.

I've just added a blogroll to my website.

In a recent email conversation with Manuel, I mentioned this artifact from my youth: This book was was edited, printed and marketed by a reputable German publishing house and bought by my mother in 2000.

I recently wrote about the technological barriers against writing on the web.

So, even though I'm using the web for more than a quarter of a century, I only recently tumbled over Bill Beaty's website Science Hobbyist.

At the end of last year I came across the Bring Back Blogging initiative of Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam.

I am a big fan of reading websites via a feed reader.

Many REST-APIs deal with collections of domain-specific objects.

New year's resolutions tend to not really work out for me, so I consider the following to be a resolution I only incidentally take on the first day of this new year.

I have to admit that I'm a bit late to the party.

Sometimes a single week has more things packed into it than a whole regular month.

Leisure time is a luxury.

One of the things that courses and books on software development generally do not teach is how to pick and vet dependecies.

This week I was pondering the question why the trade of software development seems to be ever more digressing to be a Red Queen's race.

Consider the following scenario: an engineer demonstrates a problem and sketches a simplifying solution.