steerpike

Oh my god. A Jeremy Morrell sighting in the wild.

Every time I share your blog (and I share it a lot) I tell people:

"This guy started a blog in 2024. Wrote three posts and all three of them would still make my top ten list of 'greatest posts on observability' today".

'A practitioner's guide to wide events' especially is still my number 1.

That seems a very strange claim that it's a reference to one minor use of a vastly larger tragic cultural phenomenon [1] without any other contextual indications that's the case?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_ate_my_baby

Australian flag. The black, red and yellow flag he replaced the Union Jack with is the Australian first nations flag

Yeah. 100% agree here. The Pandora algorithm was an absolute breath of fresh air relative to every other recommendation system. Just constantly surfacing new and interesting music that I had never heard of but was exactly what I liked. I spent so long hunting for info on how they achieved it and if their taxonomies had ever been open sourced.

In a recent thread talking about Flickr URLs I mentioned a couple of interesting technical features that Flickr had also done that I thought were worth celebrating. When gwern mentions that you should write in more detail about those things I feel you have to take that seriously. This is that attempt.

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It's still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn't expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).

They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -

namespace:predicate=value

Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.

Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.

If you join HN and immediately start posting links to your own site you'll almost certainly be flagged by users.

It's just a question of ease. Where we lived in Bristol (Hotwells) we were exactly 28 minutes walk from Queen Square in the center of the city where I worked and 29 minutes in the other direction to Ashton court estate which is a deer farm and 340ha estate owner by the City of Bristol.

So I'll caveat this by saying we were a couple of Australians living in the UK and one of the big differences we noticed between Australia and the UK is just how damn clearly delineated the seasons are in the UK. In Australia they all kind of smudge into one another while in the UK it's really very clearly 4 very distinct phases of the year.

One of the byproducts of this is that we found UK winter in London to be pretty damn hard to get through. London is an incredible city and there's a lot to love about it, but the winters are honestly a fucking slog. We discovered that UK winters are way more tolerable if you have the opportunity to get out into the countryside with proper gear and just enjoy the natural beauty as much as possible. It a cliche, but there is something delightful about a big walk in the cold that ends at a country pub with a good meal and a roaring fire.

Bristol in particular is a beautiful city for a number of reasons.

Decent sized - so there's always something to do and jobs and conveniences are available (at least pre-Brexit)

Amazing music pedigree - still good for live music and some incredible bands came out of Bristol and surrounding areas.

University town - so good nightlife and fun things to do.

The river Avon - it's a river town which allows for lovely walks and natural beauty

Decent hospitality - Coffee in the UK is often seen as a fucking crime scene by Australians but there are decent independent cafes here and there in the city

Engineering history - The man with the best name in the world Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an incredible engineer from Bristol who left his mark in a number of ways (not least the extraordinary Bristol suspension bridge which we lived almost directly under)

It's just really beautiful - things like the pastel painted houses along the hills of the city make it incredibly picturesque

When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London.

Could also have been that Bristol is just a crazy beautiful city to live in, but where's the fun in that, right?

Jeremy Morrell apparently started a blog in 2024, wrote 3 posts for it, and each one of them would make my "top 5 blog posts of 2024" list.

https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/

100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.

Honestly, in an industry that talks about how important collaboration is and then places the most authoritarian minded individuals as our lauded CEOs (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc) I just find Charity such a fucking breath of fresh air in terms of communication style and the way she talks about and clearly lives her principles. Honeycomb may not be FAANG-sized, but I'd genuinely give more to work under her than any other current CEO I can think of.

Site Reliability Engineering.

I believe the most common definition for this context of "production" is "mass produced commercial vehicle"

One of the fun things you can do is using the set of places API methods.

flickr.places.findByLatLon returns a placesId based on a supplied lat/long of somewhere you might be interested in.

You can then use that placeId to get photos around that location with a call to flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic

Even more amusing is that you can get the actual shape co-ordinates for that place (for example the shape values or the polyline values of your local suburb or city).

I can tell you that I didn't expect to be able to access the shapefiles, bounding boxes and polylines for essentially every suburb I needed for a location based app I was building 10 years ago from a photo app API.

Flickr's API is still the best.

Does everything you want it to.

Has a few fun surprises that you didn't expect that make it even more fun to make things with.

Simple to use.

Well documented.

Test playground at your fingertips to experiment with any call you like.

One of the first APIs ever released and you can still count the number of other available APIs that positively compare on one hand.

It's probably not that complicated nor really that related to an agency. The simple fact is probably more that for a certain type of nerd with a literary bent Kate Beaton and Hark a vagrant hold a similar place in our heart as Randall Munroe and XKCD.

Coming to grips with the hidden influence of my own physicality has been a long term struggle for me. I realised over a long time that the fact that I was over six foot, male, white, bearded, broad and articulate meant that people inherently saw me as significantly more capable and tended to defer to me in a multitued of situations. This wasn't something that naturally gelled with the way I viewed my own competencies, but it's also really, really, really hard to get people to stop doing. Basically I have a significant 'self discrepancy gap'[0] between 'Own Actual' and 'Other Actual' that I constantly need to work at. Years of experience have taught me that these kind of gaps are pretty common in our industry.

Yes it exists and think it's incredibly important for people to be aware of the power of their own physicality and not to abuse it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discrepancy_theory

Flickrs API still hasn't been beaten and it was one of the original APIs ever released. Frankly I thinks it embarrassing for us as an industry that it's still one of the simplest and best APIs I've ever used.

Wikipedia Current events page is great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events for an overview of major global events.

For a lot of other topics around general knowledge it can be very interesting to browse the various levels of 'Vital articles' on Wikipedia (ie, there are 11 Level 1 Vital articles, around 45K Level 5 Vital articles and around 1K Level 3 Vital articles). I like browsing the Level 3 Vital articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles when I'm looking for something to read.

I feel like this post just reached into my head and pulled out all my current thoughts about web development and the dominant architecture paradigm. I love it when someone articulates my thoughts better than I do.

Rock climbing and bouldering - often feels like the physical equivalent of trying to gracefully solve puzzles in much the same way I think about programming.

Pretty awesome experiment by jevans. This blog post details what she's trying to achieve and links to the two current games she's made so far about debugging problems.

This is the case for some accessibility issues, but at the edge cases the differences between screen readers is significantly more apparent than with browsers and it's also significantly easier to hit edge cases with screenreaders. This is almost entirely due to screen readers each having their own idiosycratic solutions to what they do when they encounter a section of a website that sends them into 'interaction mode'. WAI-ARIA was designed to help in this regard, but the actual implementations don't seem to be help to the same strict standards that browsers are. This is the case for pretty much any complex frontend widget and can really only be solved using a specific screenreader to determine exactly what it's going to do once it encounters and needs to interact with your complex UI.

Most accessibility shops and devs tend to use the free NVDA screenreader[0] for accessibility testing because of the costs associated with JAWS. There are differences between the two (and the other well used screenreader VoiceOver) but NVDA is a damn good product with a decent user base that certainly helps in finding potential hiccups in complex frontend applications. Usually this happens when one of the screenreaders hits something on a webpage that triggers 'interaction mode'[1]

Edit: Interestingly the most recent data I found[2] seems to indicate that NVDA has passed JAWS as the most used screenreader, so might be worth using as the default for testing

[0] https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/ [1] https://tink.uk/understanding-screen-reader-interaction-mode... [2] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

I can guarantee it's something companies need. I've worked for multiple consulting companies that do exactly that. It's also basically Thoughtworks model of developer engagement.

Why pick a niche? Why not be the specialist team that embeds in a company to help launch products the company doesn't have the resources to currently deliver? Offer yourselves on a time and materials basis rather than a project scope basis (which helps a bit with client money Vs deliverables convos) and if you strike on a product idea you can white label yourselves work on it in your spare time.

You absolute legend. That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

I strongly believe that if I could go back 20 years and tell my younger self what technology to focus on it would be SQL. I think in terms of bang for buck it would be hard to beat deep understanding of SQL in terms of usefulness across just about any job in tech you take