The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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Bad Ideas Are Fun
Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that coming up with ideas is actually very easy––what makes it hard is that we’re aiming for good ideas.
The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.
And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.
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The Space Between Us
Good Enough is a fully-remote team, and I think it's safe to say that we'll never have a physical office. I've been working remotely for more than ten years, and overall I really like it. I love the flexibility it affords, being more present with our families, and that my employment opportunities are not constrained by the limit of where I can reasonably relocate my physical body every day.
Remote working also particularly suits the kind of work we do. There are many times where we need to discuss things or collaborate deeply on some piece of work, but there are also plenty of occasions where it's perfectly OK, or even desirable, to take time away to do some deeper thinking or exploration.
But being remote from your colleagues does have some downsides, and I think it's important to be conscious of them. Let's talk about one that I like to call the identity anchor.
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Having Trouble Getting Started? Pair Up!
A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted on by a net external force.
– Sir Isaac NewtonI often find that just getting started is the hardest part of doing something. This is especially true when the project is large or results take a long time to see.
A few years ago, I started talking about getting in shape but wasn’t really sure how to take that seriously. Occasional pickup basketball games with friends and leisurely bike rides with my wife were fun, but I was otherwise leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle. Doing any kind of exercise with consistency seemed impossibly tedious, so I didn’t!
Then, a minor disaster struck as I suffered a light tear in my calf muscle during a random Saturday morning basketball game.
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Fixing Things
In 2009 I started doing something called "business travel." I bought a piece of dependable luggage: the Travelpro WalkAbout Lite 2 22" Rollaboard Suiter. The reality was that this wasn't proper business travel. First, it'd only be two or three round-trip flights a year. Second, suits were not a thing with which I needed to concern myself. Still, I did my research, was told "look at all of the flight staff – they're using Travelpro," and I spent accordingly.
For some reason I got into my head that expensive meant "buy it for life," but it was just a decently-built suitcase. At any moment it could get slammed to the runway pavement and that would be the end of the suitcase's lifetime for which I had bought the thing.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Rails has_one Nested Attributes Tweaking
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things caught me off guard.
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: System Colors are supported in CSS, but they’re unreliable
I’ve said this before: We’re primarily a web shop here at Good Enough, but occasionally we come up with ideas that we think would work really well as a native desktop or mobile application. Still, we prototype those ideas on the web first.
Recently, I wanted to try and make one of these web prototypes look and resemble a native Mac app as much as possible. My first inclination was just not to use any CSS at all, but that’s pretty limiting. Then I found CSS System Colors.
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· James Adam · TIL
TIL: Turbo Stream and personalised content
Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages without requiring the browser to reload the whole page.
But if the information you want to stream back from your server to the client has anything specific to the current user — like using the name "You" instead of "James" — you might hit an issue. So far I haven't found this written up on the web anywhere, so hopefully this will help someone else with the same problem.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Blocking Password App Autocomplete on Form Fields
I wanted to disable password managers, particularly 1Password, from interacting with a username field in Contact Me. It was pretty simple in the end:
<%= form.text_field :username, "data-lpignore": true, "data-1p-ignore": true %> -
Yes, Facebook Is Terrible, but Also…
I’m not on Facebook. It was eight or ten years ago when I left for good. While there were some good and useful interactions, the algorithm brought me down, I didn’t have a lot of desire to keep up with old acquaintances, and hearing everyone’s political stance was not good for me.
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· James Adam · TIL
TIL: Managing Raspberry Pi software with a bit less pain
For the printer project I'm working on, most of the software behind it runs "in the cloud", but there's some software that needs to run beside each printer, to check for new things to print and manage the process of downloading and sending those things to the printer component itself.
In the current incarnation of the project, this "on the desk" software runs on a small Raspberry Pi computer, which acts as a simple bridge between your Wi-Fi and the printer, funnelling data from our servers to thing that will actually print it out.