luke.b//blog

I’m feeling pensive this evening so I wanted to capture something that I’ve been thinking about recently. I keep thinking about these imaginary ticking clocks counting up from several different moments of my life, each significant in that they represent a change in direction or job or location or relationship.

hi. I want to write about me for a minute. Mostly because I never do despite my self-obsessed nature. I mean look at all these other posts about the cool techy stuff I’m thinking about all the time. I’m such a show-off 🙄

It’s a whole year since I first started developing nomad! I recently made some changes that I thought were worth highlighting with a blog, so here it is! New control sequence parsing I decided to re-implement the logic that nomad uses to parse control sequences from program output.

I’ve been working as part of a product team for a while now and I’ve started to pick up on a pattern. It comes back to whether development is focused on building what I’m calling features or functions. These terms are quite similar and are quite frequently used interchangeably in software engineering - they’re very similar in definition.

Last year I started journaling a bit more seriously than I had before. Up until January 2019, I’d only journaled specific trips. Most of the time I wrote about what I was doing but between these logs I would sometimes write more personally about how I was feeling.

I keep on having this recurring idea that would allow people to host their own app data in their own personal data silo, maintaining control over it and importantly privacy by potentially encrypting it. Technically, this is doable. But what are the advantages of being able to do this and would things actually be better than with centralised so-called “Walled Garden” apps?

When our teams turned vertical a few months ago, we held a meeting to discuss how to keep the front-end part of the system progressing effectively. There were three front-end developers (including myself) who were moving to three separate, vertical product teams.

I used to complain a lot whilst doing my job. Not because things were actually bad or worth complaining over, but because my ruthless perfectionism caused me to notice things that I knew could be improved, and, to their dismay, the whole team had to hear about it.

It took no time at all to set up and deploy a Hugo instance to my VPS. It’s currently hosted at lukebarnard.co.uk/blog. It provides a lot of the features I was missing with journal such as support for tags and storing the post date in the metadata (“front matter”) of the blog post file.

I’ve decided see what Hugo has to offer in the way of static blog site creation. I wanted to do this so I could focus more on creating content and less on debugging issues. I’ll most likely continue to develop other projects in React and host them alongside personal site.