Notices by Michaël Ball (michaelball@mastodon.social), page 5

I'm listening to A Fine Day to Exit by Anathema.

This album holds a lot of memories for me. I remember seeing them play Graspop the year after this came out and being utterly caught up in their show.

I love how music can take you to places like that.

@pinkprius put a few pegs on it and you have a handy coat stand!

I woke up at 4:00 with an idea of how to fix a bug that's been an issue for months.

On the one hand: yay!

On the other: zzzzz.

So that's why I hate writing documentation. I feel like it gets in the way of doing the fun part, but it's a necessary component in producing good, usable software.

So when you're writing documentation, if you find that you can't explain how to perform a task with it in (relatively) simple terms then that's a good indication that your design isn't optimal.

If you leave writing your documentation until the end of your project, then you're risking coming to that realisation after you think you're already done.

Recently there has been a lot of discourse about producing documentation for software projects, and I want to make a confession.

I hate writing documentation.

But I know that I hate it for all the wrong reasons. Like how it's boring, or it doesn't trigger that same reward response as solving a problem or fixing a bug.

When it comes to writing documentation, you're confronted with explaining your design choices, either implicitly or explicitly.

@vfrmedia those dogs have good taste

Yeah! The new A Perfect Circle album came in the post!

@david_ross that's the thing, it's clear from your engagement here that you put a lot of effort into community outreach and evangelising for users.

So I really don't see the value in berating you for "working for the man".

I've been working on reimplementing a web application at work, using nothing but HTML and hot damn this is fun.

It's forcing me to think "what information is critical on this page?".

It's forcing me to think "how will users, who may be using a variety of different browsers (not necessarily GUIs), interact with this page?"

And finally it's forcing me to rely on well-tested standards rather than whatever's shiny and new.

@publicvoit "don't use integers over 2**53 in JavaScript" 😑

@officialcjunior have you looked into DNS-over-HTTPS? Might be a way around your ISP proxying/blocking regular DNS requests.

@officialcjunior nasty, and you're left wondering what it servers them.

@yogthos haha the one dependency is on the package "is-odd"