Ross Wintle

I struggle to get started sometimes. I don't think it's perfectionism. Bit I've realised it may be what I've decided to call "craftsmanship". Here's my thinking...

1 year ago

Right. PHP 8.4 is out later in the month. Time to stop procrastinating and get updated!

Let’s see what’s new!!

1 year ago

This is a cracking little book on web sustainability. I love that Tom got to keep the rights. And I love that he’s making it available again.

1 year ago

Ugh. Though I’m testing negative I’m pretty sure I have caught my wife’s Covid. So it was very much a rest day.

But when my brain was working I was watching Laracasts and playing with FluxUI again and OH MY GOODNESS the stuff in the Laravel ecosystem JUST WORKS!! It’s fast, it’s intuitive, and it just makes sense. Such a delight!

1 year ago

Also good, from @sarah@phpc.social:

“Developers all love to hate legacy code. It’s ugly, and it’s gritty, and it’s hard to work with. But do you know the one thing it has going for it? Most of the time, whether it’s beautiful or not, it works.

That’s right: legacy code in production is more valuable than the most beautiful, well-tested code sitting in a repository somewhere. It’s producing value today, rather than hope for tomorrow.”

1 year ago

I occasionally dip into James Clear’s weekly email. It’s so good.

"Compete externally and you compare.

Compete internally and you improve."

🧐

1 year ago

Oh my actual goodness! Never!! It can’t be!!!

WhatsApp FINALLY made a MacOS App in Apple Silicon!

🤯

1 year ago

Seriously - I’m really churning through books. This one was short and for good reason. It’s an excellent book of information and strategies for ADHD adults. I often feel like I’m non-neurotypical despite not having a diagnosis of everything. There’s definitely stuff I relate to in here and definitely some great tips and strategies!

1 year ago

Weird how I’m reading so many books all of a sudden.

Blake Crouch’s Recursion was fun, though too long and ended with a whimper.

My notes contain mild spoilers, but probably nothing you couldn’t figure out from the blurb.

1 year ago

I am sort-of liking the new Reeder app. I’m missing either integration with Feedbin or an email-to-RSS feature.

Thoughts:

1 year ago

As well as all the other books I’ve written about today, I should make a note of the epic I finished earlier in the year.

Thank you Brandon Sanderson. Your work is excellent!

1 year ago

A third book! I got a Humble Bundle of Cory Doctorow novels as ebooks. Down and out in the Magic Kingdom was a weird and wild ride.

1 year ago

Second book I’ve read recently: Alastair Campbell’s “Living Better”.

Which wasn’t what I expected. And was also disappointing as a result.

1 year ago

I’ve actually FINISHED some books recently. Starting to write them up!

First off, Seth Godin’s “Tribes”, which was disappointing. I had high expectations!

1 year ago

When I come out the other side of this very intense phase of life they call middle-age, I’m going to be more of a nerd than I’ve ever been!!!!!

1 year ago

I very much have a chill day off of everything.

I have lots to write.

I may blog a lot.

1 year ago

I don’t mean to be trite or dismissive of all the bad stuff in the world, but we need to laugh more and be excited about small things.

I love Dave and Chris on Shop Talk Show podcast. They just sound like they’re having a good time chatting.

I love The Vergecast. They’re enjoying hanging out.

So much “content” is stale and boring and safe.

I want to hear more people enjoying themselves.

1 year ago

Finished my day by picking back up my series of Readable Code Tips.

Today: Use “is” or “has” for Boolean variables/functions

Find out why I’m sharing these tips at the introduction page:

1 year ago

I’m on a blogging roll!

I want to talk (again) about friction. Things that slow us down. How some friction is good, and some is bad. And how this relates to decision you make while coding.

1 year ago

More new things... here's some more on my new job that I started today!

1 year ago

In case you’ve not heard enough about it already…

I have just moved out of my old "proper office" and into a new garden studio. Here's why and how!

1 year ago

Lots of new things! (Why I’ve not been writing much)

1 year ago

Oh no! It’s the school holidays. I’m on DadOps duty. And I’m down to my last two coffee filters!! What do I do? Eat the beans whole and raw? Use a tea strainer or muslin cloth?!Grind them and spread it on toast?!! SEND HELP!!!!!

2 years ago

Remember Wordle? I LOVE puzzles, and we've accumulated quite a few fun things to do each day as a family. We generally do some of these over the breakfast table. It's AMAZING that all this stuff exists and is so accessible. Here's our favourites.

2 years ago

I made a(nother) static site generator!

What? Why?

(FINALLY got this written and published. It’s not a great piece of writing. My thoughts are all over the place. But this was fun to make.)

2 years ago

I'm not a big end-of-year/start-of-year post guy. But 2023 did become rather chaotic, and I want to start 2024 with some energy and discipline. So... how?

2 years ago

There's a lot going on right now and I've been having a lot of thoughts about what is going on. In some cases I think I've expressed these thoughts well. In other cases, other people have expressed things that have helped me.

Here are some quotes and thoughts...

2 years ago

I’m using AI. This tech is amazing. Especially when it enhances human productivity rather than replaces it. But gosh I can see how it breaks the web.

2 years ago

With PHP 8.3. out tomorrow (can you believe it?!), "Can I PHP" is a great reference of the important new features, and allows you to see at a glance what is new and deprecated in each version:

2 years ago

Is it just cos I’m old that I want things to be simple.

Simple code.

Simple (or no) dependencies and build processes.

Simple user interfaces with good error messages.

Simple tech with actual buttons and switches.

Simple retail experiences.

Everything is so damn complicated!!

2 years ago

Am I allowed to celebrate Diwali? Light over darkness? Good over evil?

I’m in. Let’s celebrate that.

Might put some lights up.

🙏🪔

2 years ago

The third (and - still can't believe it only lasted so long) last edition of my Beyond WP newsletter on “Tinkering Tools" is now in the archive covering Tinkerwell, Playgrounds and “REPL’s”. All great tools in a PHP developer's toolbox:

What do you think? Should I do more writing like this? Maybe scale down my ambitions/standards?

2 years ago

Well today I learned that my parent’s EV charger that we borrow show a weird error when you first plug in…

… because it does a random pause of between 1 and 10 minutes before starting to avoid everyone starting a charge at the same time and overloading the grid! 😎

2 years ago

This Cloudflare outage is really something. I’ve worked alongside data center operations and I’ve seen multiple-redundant systems fail in chaotic ways like this. It’s so hard to predict. And yet, stuff like “they needed to be physically accessed … access control system was not powered by the battery backups, so it was offline” is such an obvious design flaw with hindsight.

2 years ago

Finally getting round to putting the archive of my Beyond WP emails online.

I’d sad it had such short a run.

I think I set my standards too high.

Perhaps I will pick it up again someday.

I like writing.

2 years ago

Yay! NASA released another issue of their educational graphic AR comic thing about the first woman going to the moon.

The first one was good.

2 years ago

Have added upcoming #PHP v8.3 features to now too. 🙌

2 years ago

Yay!

now has a complete set of PHP 8.2 features/functions/methods.

On to PHP 8.3 in time for next month's release.

(I'm doing this because I'm ill and I'm in bed doing boring things. Not so yay! So send hugs/sympathy, or if you like Can I PHP? you can also buy me a coffee/Lemsip):

2 years ago

Remembering.

If we don't remember, we don't have empathy.

2 years ago

I’ve always said I’d like to go and study something like philosophy of maths.

But sometimes I think I’d love to study psychology of computer programming.

Is that a thing?

2 years ago

There was an interesting thing recently where, in a group of developers, the younger/less experienced ones were the ones that liked using Git on the command line. And the older, more-experienced ones shunned the command line for GUIs.

A small data set, for sure. But is there something to learn there?

2 years ago

This resonates so much with me. It’s nice to see a really clear justification for using boring, well-understood and slow-moving technology.

2 years ago

So nice to be working on a little greenfield Laravel thing. 😃

2 years ago

A really restful day off today.

Recorded a podcast with some great folks.

Got a flu jab.

Worked on my secret CLI dev tool project.

Watched some YouTube.

Feeling nice and calm.

2 years ago

Programming: Fun, interesting, creative. Also: pays well.

Community/family: Relentless, exhausting, emotional. Also: pays nothing!!

2 years ago

I keep finding myself in jobs where I can see a lot of things going on, and I feel a responsibility to make connections.

A quick blog post on how, sometimes, the view from the “Bottom of the Pile” is uniquely broad. And that comes with opportunity, and maybe responsibility too.

2 years ago

I've been hanging out on other social medias today. There was ONE interesting post from... my kids secondary school!!! And one REALLY good interaction with someone that I know.

But mostly is was boring, aimless scrolling with occasional conspiracy theorists.

I get back onto Mastodon.

Two amazing, funny, interesting posts shared in the first few minutes.

I genuinely appreciate the good stuff on other socials, but gosh it's impossible to curate.

2 years ago

Played this a few days this week. Like Boggle. Quite the challenge!

I played 09/29: *77/77 words (+30 bonus words) 📖 In the top 17% by bonus words Play streak: 2

2 years ago

Ok. It’s not perfect. But it’s here.

For all you The Rest is Politics listeners: Trip Bingo!

Randomly generated bingo cards to enhance your listening.

Enjoy!!

2 years ago

Just realised was featured in Jetbrains PHP Annotated newsletter.

That explains the influx of PRs!!

😃

2 years ago

Just added me a “/now" page. Might be of interest. Or might not. Complete vanity.

2 years ago

Every time I go and do stuff on omg.lol I'm reminded of what a brilliant little place it is. Long may it live!!

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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)

2 years ago

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!

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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. 😃

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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?)

2 years ago

Random. But brilliant!

2 years ago

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. 😂

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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!! 😃

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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?!

2 years ago

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?

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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.”

2 years ago

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!! 😂)

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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?

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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!

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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

I want a tenth of his energy at age 54.

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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!!

2 years ago

Did anyone else read this and think of Severance?

2 years ago

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…

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

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!

2 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!! 😂

2 years ago

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.

😬

2 years ago

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.

2 years ago

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…

2 years ago

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!!

2 years ago

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!!

2 years ago

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 😂)

2 years ago

Testing an integration...

2 years ago

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

2 years ago

Showing omg.lol to my awesome daughter

3 years ago

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

3 years ago

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.

3 years ago

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."

3 years ago

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!

3 years ago

Hang on. What the hell?

PHP comments can start with a '#' ?

Since when?!

😂

#stillLearning #TIL

3 years ago

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

3 years ago

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:

3 years ago

I have arrived!

3 years ago