Updates. By Jeff Kreeftmeijer

I loved Flash. To celebrate the #Flashpocalypse, please indulge me for trip down memory lane. 🧵

Over fifteen years ago, my first programming gig was an internship at a company that built websites with Flash. A project I remember was the website for a large Dutch fashion chain.

The team of designers, animators and programmers worked together to make it a beautiful experience, while maintaining some form of accessibility and SEO.

To do that, the whole Flash app gracefully degraded to a separate pure-HTML version, essentially duplicating the project.

I helped to get data from MySQL through an API built in PHP, which was read through ActionScript in Flash.

It was a convoluted system, but that was required to get data into Flash. In many ways it’s akin to what frontend apps are doing now (but we had a 100% custom interface).

Almost everything was custom-built. No frameworks, no version control, no staging server, no local development environment.

Just Notepad++ connected over FTP to production, and an if-statement that matched on the office’s IP to work within (that, and server backups).

Although whatever we did back then is now possible through HTML in modern browsers, I haven’t seen very many animation-heavy websites like that since.

That might very well be because it’s simply a Bad Idea™, or it could be a browser compatibility problem.

If that’s the case, Flash had an edge on us now. Our website worked cross-browser, and we could do whatever we wanted within that <object> box.

That doesn’t mean it was a good idea. It wasn’t. It came with a lot of its own problems, as it was pretty much an interactive video.

In any case, aside from learning a lot about programming and debugging, that job proved to me that programming is fun and that passion, not skill or good tech choices, is the main requirement to make amazing things.

And it gave me a nostalgic appreciation for death metal. 🦇

Automatic formatters like mix format move discussions about coding style to the implementers of the formatter or language, which is where those should be.

They also rid you of having to reformat code yourself. Type code, run the formatter (automatically), commit. Done.

Enforce a format by adding a check to CI, even if you don’t fully agree with its rules. That way, you at least have a format. If you really care, configure it.

Case in point: I dislike rebar3_format’s indentation rules, for example (https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/shine/blob/main/src/rebar3_shine.erl). 🤷‍♂️

There’s no “one size fits all” in team communication. To help with that, we list each team member’s preferences in our handbook to manage expectations.

Personally, I mute Slack and try to funnel everything through email. I published my “policy” last week: https://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/communication-policy/

Thanks! I put it on my ideas board, so I might try it one day. :)

I’ve been experimenting with with grayscale syntax highlighting on and off a couple of weeks now. I think it looks nice, and I’m not missing the colors at all.

Meet Grim, a work-in-progress Vim theme based on Dim, but with monochrome colors for code.

It seems like it’d be a fun idea, and a good way to make sure my feed works without broken image links and the like.

Might even make a project others can run: supply a feed, get a blog. 🤔

Aside from this being a very useful plugin, this was a test project to learn how to build rebar3 plugins. However, using the generator I overlooked would have done most of the work (aside from the flamingo). 🤷‍♂️

$ rebar3 new plugin rebar3_flamingo

One thing I did figure out that might be useful in lieu of the guide I planned to write: to test a rebar3 plugin, add it to its own project_plugins, then symlink _checkouts/rebar3_flamingo back to ...

Now you can call rebar3 flamingo from its own project root.

The next iteration of my blog might just be a single RSS feed which is syndicated by a something that creates an index and publishes the articles as separate HTML pages.

I’ll call it ✨ “RSS-first blogging” ✨.

the Linux desktop.

https://twitter.com/berkes/status/1348556991547916295

$ ln -s from ../../to
$ ls -l
$ rm ../../to
$ ln -s ../../to from
$ ls -l
lrwxr-xr-x  […] from -> ../../to

🤷‍♂️

Here’s a first for me: apparently, somebody is offering a “cracked” version of my six-year-old Apple TV app on their website, with my name on it.

Don’t download that. I have no idea what it is.

My project is open source with a permissive license (like everything I do unless I’m forced to do otherwise), available on Github, currently unbuildable, and superseded by an official (also free) version built by the developers of the API mine is consuming.

In general; all of my code is available at https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer?tab=repositories (here be dragons). If you’re unsure about licensing, reach out and I’ll fix that.

If you ever find any of my code or writing republished somewhere, let me know so I can do something about it.

Sure, here’s some English: I don’t know what you’ve “cracked” on https://appdb.to/app/tvos/1900000017, but I’d like you to remove my name from it.

My code is open source, MIT licensed and downloadable at https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/uitzendinggemist If you can still get it to build.

Ah, I didn’t know that, actually.

I use Gists for quick snippets, but also to put my writing in for per-article revision control. I might have to move to a full-blown repo then. 🤔

Oh, Geen probleem, hoor. Waar staan die kapotte linkjes precies?

Hoi Jeroen! I made https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/uitzendinggemist a couple of years back, but hasn’t NPO released one themselves since? That’d beat having to update my old code and then side-loading it on your Apple TV yourself, probably. 😬

The code module in enough.css now uses ui-monospace, which results in SF Mono for <code> and <pre> blocks on Safari.

With that (and more than four years of production use), I went ahead and released 1.0. 🎉

https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/enough.css

https://twitter.com/DEGoodmanWilson/status/1347447047855734785

This.

Also, here’s a radical alternative idea to “simplify your sign up forms […] to increase your conversion rates”: don’t ask for gender, doofus. You don’t need it, and it’s none of your business.

@ solnic @twitter.com I’d say that’s because these are the perceived hard parts, and its easy to get away with having global state and not worrying about this for a long time.

For the actor model to work, you’ll need to enforce encapsulation. Maybe even on the language level.

I’d say that’s because these are the perceived hard parts, and its easy to get away with having global state and not worrying about this for a long time.

For the actor model to work, you’ll need to enforce encapsulation. Maybe even on the language level.

Since you asked, here’s rebar3_flamingo. A rebar plugin that prints flamingos. 🦩

https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/rebar3_flamingo

My articles now sport a revisions link, because I can, as they’re all in Git. 🕺

https://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/vim-16-color/

We don’t view Slack collaboration tool, as we don’t use it for more than quick questions, general banter and the occasional time-sensitive ping, so we didn’t have any issue with it being down this week. 🤷‍♂️

Joking aside, is this still the easiest way to do this, or has this space been disrupted since I started doing it like this ten years ago?

I’ve had projects where I had to update the initial commit after already branching out, especially when I build descriptive example projects with descriptions in their commit messages, like this one, for example.

If you’re fine with adding another commit, that’s not an issue. However, that wasn’t really an option in this case, because that would break the step-by-step descriptions.

Quick tip: touch ~/.hushlogin removes the login message when opening a new terminal window.