Coding Posts 📝

I was just reading a post by Rach Smith on "hedonic adaptation" with GitHub Copilot and a few other developer tools. In the post, Rach makes a thought-provoking statement with regard to improvements in developer experience over the last few years:

I have worked on numerous projects that involve finding all of the URLs in the sitemaps associated with a website. For example, one of the first steps the IndieWeb Search crawler takes when it starts crawling a website is to find all of the URLs in all of the sitemaps. Separately, I have written scripts that validate the status codes of all the URLs in a sitemap.

Yesterday I had an idea: what kind of art could I make by using random numbers and a series of rules? I decided to write down a few notes on what my "rules" would be. What colours could be used? How would colours be chosen? Could colours change? Then, I implemented all of my rules in Python. At first, I tried implementing them in Lisp, but this proved to be a bit too difficult given my limited experience with the language. Python was a lot easier to use, especially because I planned to turn my colours into an image.

There are two types of posts I write about programming. The ones I like writing most are those where I discuss how I built something, or how I intend on building something. It's fun to explain how I build projects. I like the technical details. This is not one of those posts. This is a post about what it's like to be a developer. The developer life, if you will.

I see websites in two categories: dynamic and static. I had a dynamic website earlier this year. Maintaining it took a lot of work. The one factor that made me hesitant to move to a static website was that I had a few features that relied on my site being dynamic. I had a grid which showed the days on which I had and had not written a blog post. I did not make that grid on this site because, at the time, I did not think it was possible.

In a discussion with a friend, I mentioned how easy it is to overengineer solutions to problems. This weekend, I have been evaluating what it is that I want to do with my personal website. What matters most to me? In asking this question, I realize that I have been guilty of overengineering solutions to problems that may not actually be problems with which I should be concerned.