Things I think I’ve learned today:
- Blogs are so yesterday, man. It’s probably the medium and platform I’ve chosen – I don’t use Medium, for example, although I have an account there – and I don’t publish often enough, or with enough direct focus, to really attract users, because I’m really not trying to build a popular platform. But at the same time, my pride is hurt just a little that traffic is so low.
- Crawler4j makes it really easy to write a working web spider in Java – or, in my case, Kotlin. Looked into scrapy for a bit, but couldn’t figure out why what should have been a trivial recipe was so hard to find, switched to Kotlin because I really just needed to make progress. Progress was made. Scrapy’s probably fine – maybe the information I was looking for was out there, right in front of my face, and I couldn’t recognize it, but that didn’t help me make the progress I needed.
- Had a good example of pragmatism in action show up yesterday, too. We issued a pull request for a migration, and one of our developers pointed out a number of situations in the new codebase that could have been problematic. I asked him to demonstrate the errors (or potential errors) with tests so we could validate them, but he wasn’t sure how much effort would be involved in writing those tests… so we progressed with the merge. I think we made the right choice; he’s not wrong in his observations (we might have introduced errors with the new changes) but without validation, we can’t know, and we’d be chasing ghosts. We made notes that the code might be problematic, and we’re going to watch for problems that come from it.
- Aaron’s Thinking Putty is cooler than it should be.