Author: Tom (Page 39 of 427)

Don’t Develop Development Tunnel Vision

April 23, 2020 / Tom

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the idea of focusing on an area and going deep rather than wide. This is personal preference, of course, but it’s mine, nonetheless.

Over the last year, though, one of the byproducts that I’ve found is the longer you stay in a given industry, the more common certain problems become. (This shouldn’t come as a surprise as this is precisely why we have design patterns.)

But the thing about doing this is that you develop a sort of tunnel vision for ways to solve problems.

Case in point: Recently, I was tasked with needing to develop some functionality that was going to parse markup and convert it into a slightly different format.

April 15, 2020 / Tom

It is a blog, sure, but it is also a wiki. It’s a spot where I can post ideas, snippets, resources, thoughts, collections, and other bits and pieces that I find interesting and useful. Instead of always being a “performance” level of blogging, it can be a looser more human endeavor that drops the idea of robots sorting the content (in this case simply by date created) and embraces the idea of curation, by me, for you.
My blog is a digital garden, Not a blog, joelhooks.com

Privacy is Hard: Chrome Extensions

April 10, 2020 / Tom

I try not to use Chrome but, from time to time, various applications or projects necessitate its use.

I still like the speed of the browser and I really like its debugging tools but the data collection that Chrome performs is one that I dislike and I see no reason for the organization to change its practices. For more information see this, this, this, and this, and this.

And sure, some of the above advice is anecdotal but these are just some of the more common things that people are going to come across if they start looking into what the browser is doing. There are plenty of deeper analyses of what the browser does from a deeper technological standpoint.

Oh, and if you’re looking at Ghostery, read this fun thread, too.

But the purpose of this post isn’t to digress into all of the things that Chrome is doing (the when, how, and why), but instead its about sharing extensions that I’ve found to be useful when using Chrome.

April 5, 2020 / Tom

Previously, I wrote about updating the content of the blog.

Part of doing that included the desire to select a different theme (preferably one that brings back Post Formats because I never didn’t like them), and to expand the type of content about which I’m writing.

Though I’m still working on the tagline for the type of content that I want to begin incorporating, it’s the first of a few steps for a new direction.

Time Off 2020: Part 1 of Social Media Sabbaticals (And a Word on Updates)

March 31, 2020 / Tom

I really have no idea how to even start writing out all of things that I want to cover in this post. It’s been a bit of while since I’ve written anything, really (and one of the last programmatic post I wrote was sometime ago – and no, I don’t plan to stop the series).

Over the past few years, I’ve written about taking time off of social media during certain parts of the year. I still plan on doing that, but this post is a bit different because it’s going to cover a lot of things.

If you’re interested in how I’ve done this in the past, take a look:

But here’s the thing: At the time of this writing, there’s nothing I can say that wouldn’t be an understatement, right?

With that said, I think I’m going to leave that there and move on to issues that are more relevant to the blog. Namely, an update as to what’s up, some thoughts I’ve had around this blog, and some changes I’m aiming to make in the near future.