Life is hard and full of challenges so when I want an uncomplicated belly laugh, I just open up the Gulf of Mexico programming language docs. Here are some gems in the language: Add pizzazz by ending each statement with an exclamation mark or three Are keywords a problem? Delete them Unsure? Use the boolean maybe Text looking boring? Use rich-text (italics / bold / underline) to differentiate variables Want to add 3 + four? No problem Who needs loops? It’s a hilariously cursed language that should never be used in production, but I love that it exists! ...

For this to make sense, I’m assuming that you have accounts with both Cloudflare as your DNS provider and SendGrid as your email provider. If not, hopefully some of this translates or is food for thought. This was honestly a pain in the arse, mostly because of the feedback loops for seeing if DNS has worked is measured in days and there are no good error messages other than ’not working’ in SendGrid. This leaves you guessing and trawling the internet for things to try to get it working. ...

Yesterday London Property Pulse went live. Launching is a euphoric and satisfying moment where you feel ‘Hooray, I’m on the Internet 🎉’! Here’s to launching early 🍻 The site is definitely far from ready, with bare-bone BE and FE but this way I can see how my changes affect the site’s performance and build in public. It also helps my motivation: now it’s real and in the world 🌍. Learnings Getting familiar with Linux I’m trying something new by hosting on a virtual private server (VPS) - aka Linux box in the cloud - and had a few things to learn along the way but got there in about a day. While I’m familiar with unix environments, working without the bells and whistles of my comfy and configured environment was a bit of a shock but relatively easy to work. ...

Reading a couple of books on launching products made me think about boldness. Learnt or innate, sometimes the difference between starting, permission, adventure, change and possibility is boldness. Some wonder, think, turn over, want to have others make decisions for them or are paralysed by in action to make a decision. I believe the main factor of change is boldness. It leads you to launch yourself in a direction that is only partly known, where the path is lit by a torch beam. ...

Seems like on the socials people go over the top with ’the BEST way to be productive is…". In large groups, more complex systems arise depending on a project’s needs. However, working alone frees me up to get things very lean. The reality is that 6 things are needed to ship a project: Todo app (Todoist): Kanban board with project tasks + notes Calendar (Apple Calendar) Notes app (Obsidian / Apple Notes - previously used Evernote and Notion): Thoughts + resources + diagrams + documentation Email client (Apple Mail / Gmail web) Code editor + terminal (VS Code) Browser (Edge …on Mac!) Tools come and go, I prefer to use a system like Getting Things Done (GTD) to stay organised and Shape-up as a development framework. ...

Challenge: for a week, don’t use a debugger and only use the tools you can use to debug in production. What did you notice? What workflow changes did you make to get to the same level of productivity as before? Why abandon the debugger? The debugger has it’s place, but it can be a crutch to crafting well-thought-out software. As useful a tool as the debugger is, not being able to use a debugger reveals a lot about coding practices and processes. ...

When developing there are words that are ambiguous when describing a problem. One of my pet peeves is when I hear someone say these cursed words: ‘it was working’ The problem is that it’s fuzzy and does not help identify causes. Logically it’s simplistic - yes, in the last PR is was probably working and now with the new PR it’s broken. It should be expected that over time enough code changes will cause breakages. ...

Styling images in markdown I’ll refer to the StackOverflow answer on changing image size in md. The simplest and dependency free method is just to use a CSS selector to style the image. This removes the need for markdown processors that would (with more code) end up in the same place. In Hugo this would mean adding the styles to the assets folder and writing them up this way: img[alt=drawing] { width: 200px; }. ...

How this blog is created Making it easy I have previously tried blogging but my biggest obstacle was actually platforms used for blogging. Before knowing how to code, I formerly had a WordPress blog that I barely used. While I would write in my note-taking app, I found the publishing process a pain which led me to write privately as an outlet. The biggest obstacle to keeping a blog is ease of getting stuff from thought to the internet. It should easy: Write in markdown, make the PR and deploy automagically. ...

Main steps Create a layout Adding Mermaid to a content template Maintaining content and theme styles Rendering an example diagram Mermaid diagram This post outlines how to add Mermaid support with Hugo to render the diagram below, as I found the docs a bit lacking. When pasting, make sure to move the closing code fence to a new line to see the diagram ```mermaid sequenceDiagram participant Alice participant Bob Alice->>John: Hello John, how are you? loop Healthcheck John->>John: Fight against hypochondria end Note right of John: Rational thoughts <br/>prevail! John-->>Alice: Great! John->>Bob: How about you? Bob-->>John: Jolly good!``` Creating a layout While Mermaid markdown diagrams aren’t supported natively by Hugo, it’s easy to add. ...