Work Journal

  • Work

    • Figured out a solid abstraction for rendering activity feed text in a way that plays well with internationalized text.
    • Researching other activity feed designs. Trying to see what ideas we could pull in to enhance the experience.

    Side Projects

    • Deployed fixes to work-journal page. Removed card swiping on non-touch devices to allow for text selection. Plus a few other minor fixes.
    • Start on revamping my personal website’s homepage. Finally getting rid of that “in progress” placeholder! Made some good progress on the design, but have some tweaking left to do. Gonna keep this first iteration simple.

    Interesting Things

    • Fortnite kicked off the App Store and responded with epic in game video. Link
    • Fall Guys is riding the hype train right now.
    • Support for gradients is coming to Tailwind. Link
    • CSS trick to avoid jumpy numbers. Link
  • Work

    • Ember 3.8 upgrade passed QA.
    • Found a great use case for the {{compute}} helper—you can use it inside the yielded block of provider components to access the data before using it in your template.

    Side Projects

    • Discovered a way to handle auth for LM iOS app.
    • Published “Adding interactivity using the Knobs addon” on EmberMap. Link
    • Started planning for next video in Storybook series.

    Interesting Things

    • Tool for customizing your shell per environment. Link
    • Use the Lobotomized owl selector in CSS to automate the layout of flow content. Link
  • Work

    • Start work on a new “activity feed” feature. This is the second time I build one of these in my career and I’m excited to tackle the new set of requirements and challenges this time around.

    Side Projects

    • Deployed blog to my personal site.
    • Published “Getting Started with Screencasts” to my personal blog & to Dev.to
    • Recorded video for episode 5 of the Storybook series.

    Interesting Things

    • Bit tech antitrust hearing. It was entertaining to hear these companies talk about how much “competition” they have. Ironically followed up by massive earnings call. Link
    • GitHub Codespaces beta invites started going out.
    • NASA astronauts who launched with SpaceX return to Earth in splash landing. Link
  • Work

    • Starting Shape Up. I read most of the Shape Up book last week and although I’ve only spent a few days with this new process, it feels like it’s a major improvement. I feel like I’m collaborating more with my team and focusing my time on the work that matters.

    Side Projects

    • Researching how to build App Extensions for iOS.
    • Wrote a post with tips for doing a screencasts. I’ll need to edit it some more before it’s ready to publish.
    • Started working on building my blog! Adding it to my existing Next.js site was easier than I expected. I’ll get this deployed at some point within next week.

    Interesting Things

    • A interesting take on using syntax highlighting to display more information. Link
    • Get the best content from your favorite sources, in a daily email. Link
    • 18 popular CSS easings. Link
    • Code fixer 🤯 This would be a game changer for learning new programming languages. Link
    • Houdini custom props are coming to CSS. Link
  • Work

    • Tech debt week: clean up deprecations and upgrade addons.
    • Started to learn how to use BaseCamp.
    • Read up on Shape Up product development methodology. Link

    Side Projects

    • Record “Using our first Storybook Addon” video for Storybook series.
    • Write up video summary + great writing feedback from Sam.
    • Start code and planning for next Storybook video.
    • Testing and bug fixes for LM iOS app.

    Interesting Things

    • Native relative date formatting in JavaScript. Tweet
    • Found out about the <wbr> HTML tag. Tweet
    • Inline property switching with custom props. Tweet
  • Work

    • Fixing deprecations from Ember 3.8 upgrade.
    • Deploy Storybook project to Netlify.

    Side Projects

    • Planning video order for the rest of the Storybook series with Sam.
    • Proof of concept: setting up DocsPage/MDX with an Ember Storybook project.
    • Built out transactions view for LM iOS app with Tulio.

    Learnings

    Interesting Things

    • Neat effect using hover and clip path. Tweet
    • Yehuda’s take on people giving up on classes for “largely religious reasons.” OG Tweet Dan/Sophie Respond
    • Notion workflow for publishing videos. Looks neat, gonna implement some of these ideas into my workflow. YouTube Video
    • Thread on how to write a great cover letter. Tweet
    • Robot doing gymnastics. Tweet
  • Side Projects

    • Recorded and wrote summary for "Working with Context" video in EmberMap Storybook series.
    • Deployed a placeholder for darindoria.com using Vercel.
    • Started sketching out UI for work journal feed.

    Learnings

    • You can set up insensitive attribute matching with i in CSS. Link
    • Started using Next.js for the first time. Having established patterns is great. I feel way less lost compared to using create-react-app.
    • First time using React hooks. It was odd at first, but having seen so many talks on it I at least had an idea of what hooks were available and which one to use.
    • Creating a new component is as simple as returning html from a function. This makes splitting out multiple components in one file super easy.
  • Hello World