Author Archives: Lou Franco

Dependency Based Tech Debt

One of the things I am doing right now is ripping Bootstrap out of App-o-Mat. The site was mostly built in 2013 and at the time, Bootstrap was good about hiding all the float/clear/positioning nonsense from CSS and giving you a simple grid system. Once I had it, I used everything else it brought along. The site markup is pretty coupled to Bootstrap.

My plan is to build it on just a very small amount of hand-written CSS. Modern CSS has flex and grid layouts built-in, and so re-implementing what Bootstrap offered for layout is not that hard (especially for my limited usage).

When I’m done, my only frontend dependency will be on highlight.js, which syntax colors my code samples.

Ripping out dependencies is a recurring theme for me when a codebase starts to age. I wrote about this in Tech Debt Happens to You.

And I think that this is the main source of tech debt, not intentional debt that you take on or the debt you accumulate from cutting corners due to time constraints. The debt that comes with dependency and environment changes.

Being able to bring code into your project or build on a framework is probably the only thing that makes modern programming possible, but like mortgages, they come with constant interest payments and a looming balloon payment at some point. 

There are some you can’t avoid, like the OS, language, and probably database, but as you go down the dependency list, remember to factor in the debt they inevitably bring with them.

Of course, in 2013, the trade-off was probably right for me. I really didn’t want to build anything complex with CSS as it existed. Today, I be hard-pressed to take on any CSS framework dependency (I looked at Tailwind).

It’s not that they aren’t useful—it’s that I don’t have time to keep up with the dependency management problem they will bring with them, and they don’t promise any kind of long-term backwards compatibility (like SQLite does, for example).

WWDC 2021 Developer Tools Wishlist

WWDC 2021 starts Monday. Here are some of the things I hope to see with the developer tooling.

Xcode

  • Playgrounds are still super-buggy. I get red-squiggles and false errors everywhere in source files.
  • Ditto with SwiftUI previews. Even for simple stuff, I constantly need to reset them.

Swift

  • Support for narrowing, like in Typescript. With narrowing, your conditionals are taken into account when checking for the correctness of your code. So if you check is something is not-nil, then inside the if block, I can use it. This is better than an if let, because that creates a new constant and you cannot modify the obj using it. There are also more complex possibilities that are not possible with if-let.
  • Compilation speed.

I write Typescript in VSCode which is a freaking Electron app and it smokes Xcode with Swift.

It checks for errors as you type and it’s fast, never wrong, and always works. Typescript is also a type-inferring language and JSX is similar enough in spirit to SwiftUI. I have no idea why Microsoft can do this and Apple cannot.

WWDC 2021 watchOS Wishlist

WWDC 2021 starts Monday. Here’s what I’m hoping to see that would help me with Sprint-o-Mat.

  • Third-party workout apps should be able to keep the screen live, like the built-in app does. It’s a pain to do workouts and see blurred screens, especially for apps like meditation or yoga where you might not be able to easily move your wrist. Even with my app, I constantly see blurred screens during my run and have to shake my wrist to see my progress.
  • The Activity app has bugs with showing third-party workouts. There seem to be undocumented data types that the real Workouts app is able to write, and segments don’t work at all.
  • There are still a bunch of kinks with regards to independent watch apps. For example, users control HealthKit permissions on the watch, but location on the phone.
  • There is still no way to use the built-in timer controls with SwiftUI. They are built to be battery efficient, so making them available makes it easier to keep the screen live.

This list is pretty similar to last year because they didn’t address any of these. The first one would be good for all workout apps, so I really hope they do it this year.

Learn by Cloning

The App-o-Mat website was mostly written in 2013. The backend is in Django, and over time I have had to constantly upgrade that, so now it’s on pretty modern Django and Python 3.

The frontend is simple HTML, but uses Bootstrap and a bootstrap template for layout and styling. I decided it was time to abandon that and just build it on CSS Flex and Grid. The styling isn’t complex, so I can easily write the CSS for that.

I found this YouTube video to be a great whirlwind tour to implementing a design in modern CSS.

He mostly just plows along and does it, which was good enough for me.

In my version, I am learning from the lessons of Tailwind and relying nearly 100% on utility classes (or by selecting tags classlessly), so that I can do everything I need from the markup and inside server-side components. I would use Tailwind, but it’s overkill for my system, and I am sick of updating dependencies for this site.

In the end, the site should be pretty much the same, except with no Bootstrap and fairly simple CSS that I can maintain going forward.

Write While True Episode 12: Keep a Topic List

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In the past, when I set goals to write more frequently, I was always stopped by not having ideas ready for what to write about. Or when I got one, I didn’t have a systematic way of collecting them. I would sit down to write, but getting started on a new piece was too difficult.

My ONE thing is make it so that when I sit down to write I have a checklist to work from.

Transcript

May 2021 Blog Roundup

I started the month writing about long-lived systems

But mostly, I wrote about how I think about personal finance:

The first post is about savings rate, so I made a spreadsheet and python script to help understand the effect I was describing

The second lesson was about increasing income, and I wrote two posts following up on that

Finally, I wanted to say a few words about excessive saving

And, I continued releasing Podcast episodes about writing

I’m doing a lot with SpriteKit and making tutorials on App-o-Mat as I go.

The Amazing Voice Master

In yesterday’s episode of Write While True, I spoke about how making things changes you. This is true even if what you made isn’t that great. I asked you to think about the programs you threw away.

In my morning pages today I tried to start from the first program I ever wrote and think about all the small things I made and never finished. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but I reminded myself of the Amazing Voice Master and found an ad for one in the Internet Archive’s Compute! Magazine archive.

The Voice Master ad claimed it could turn humming into sheet music, but I guess I didn’t hum in tune.

I mostly remember making card games that responded to voice, which worked a little better, but I did learn to be skeptical of voice recognition claims. Perhaps that prepared me to do my Skillshare course and Smashing article on Siri.

I Can’t Tweet

I write in this blog everyday, but I cannot come up with anything to say in Twitter. I think it’s because I think no one’s watching here.

I mean, no one’s watching on Twitter either. But that feels more like being ignored, where this place is just more secluded.

In episode 10 of Write While True, I talked about why I blog every day. It’s because I’m trying to build up a body of work, mostly not that great, in the hope that that helps me become a better writer. Also, I find it enjoyable in of itself, and it helps with my self-esteem to “do things”.

Twitter offers none of that. I don’t find it that enjoyable, and the instant judgement is the opposite of what I want.