Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language
Each of these did indeed spawn tests. I used to work there and at the time there were over a thousand ranging from humdrum to David Blaine skydiving. They’re a crowd who really put a focus on good engineering
Breakfasts aren’t provided as a form of babysitting. The prevalence of breakfast clubs in schools in low income areas should be a hint as to why they’re instituted. After school activities are more babysitting adjacent, but if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job, it seems like a great idea that also gets kids into sports or chess or whatever.
Why they choose to do it in school rather than providing parents with more money so they can afford to feed their kids is also a hint as to why they are instituted.
"if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job"
i.e. if you want to expand the workforce by providing child minding on the cheap through schools.
These are the sort of issues that Nix <https://nixos.org/> solves quite well. Pinning dependencies to specific versions so the only time dependencies change is when you explicitly do it - and the only packages present in your images are ones you specifically request, or dependencies of those packages. It also gives you local dev environments using the ~same dependencies by typing `nix develop`.
Once you get past the bear that is the language, it's a great tool.
I found setting up nix shells to be more time consuming than docker setups. Nixpkgs can require additional digging to find the correct dependencies that just work on other distributions. That being said, I’m a huge fan of NixOS, but I haven’t seen it as a replacement for docker for reproducible dev environments yet.
Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.
I used to work in architecture, and I think that's where something like an iPad really shines. It was possible to have all the drawing sets on the iPad, and mark them up on the job site to send back to the office for revisions. Being able to annotate them with photographs of the site conditions and redlining as you talk with the foreman is excellent, it makes things a lot more seamless.
Yes, you weren't going to do any actual CAD work and still need a workstation in the office, but as a digital notebook, it's excellent.
+1 to this. I made some websites for hire in my earlier days and really enjoyed using Kirby. It was simple to setup, simple to host, and then simple to teach the clients how to update the content themselves. I just checked there and one of them is still going strong nearly 10 years later.
Speak of the devil. I was just talking with someone about Neptune's Pride a few weeks ago and looked it up to see if it was still going. I really enjoyed that when it came out.
Have you ever written about the architecture of that and Blight anywhere?
I haven't because I really have no idea if any of it is any good. I just sort of muddled through it all.
I've been slugging through a re-write of the server from python to JavaScript because the Python code base is all out of support now and I expect Google to pull the plug on the 10 year old App Engine tools that its built on.
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/