Week 28: Sharp Edges

April 2, 2023

Wasm. In preparation for a talk I'm giving at Cloud Native Wasm Day in a few weeks, I've been learning lots about WebAssembly (Wasm). I've also been learning the hard way just how important the runtime is by running into 'game over' problems like this one. I'm trying to show how a single OPA policy - complied to Wasm - can be run in lots of places. It's been a bit of a wild ride, but I'm happy to have learned a lot from it.

Sharp Edges. I have been migrating my personal site over the past few weeks and have been making liberal use of htmx and hx-boost. Generally, I'm happy with the library and pattern as a shortcut to decent progressive enhancement. I enjoy the pre-loading of pages and the options available in response headers. One part I've had to work around is non-html links in blog post content - e.g. to PDFs. Instead of opening the links in a new tab, htmx tries to dump the data into the DOM. I've had to add a custom function to add target="_blank" links in my markdown using Go templating.

Sandringham Time. The changing of the clocks inevitably triggered what has become a regular, 6-monthly Wikipedia deep dive on daylight saving time. This time I even learned something... Sandringham had a timezone of its own to enable hunting later into the evening...

Bread by Bike continues to be the No. 1 snak stop. Three lovely meals out with friends this week, I feel very lucky. If you haven't been to BBB, their new menu for April is more veggie than usual and is excellent.

Parkrunning. I managed to get within 10 seconds of my personal best at Hampstead Heath Parkrun this week. It's nice to see some longer and harder training paying off. I'm hoping that next week I'll be able to make it to Sandringham and get a benchmark time on a flat (& less muddy) course.

"It's our best password manager yet". This post by Ricky Mondello who works on authentication at Apple made it into my feed this week (via this HN post). It's a neat trick based on Shortcuts to make Apple's iCloud Keychain feel a little more like a password manager. Fed up with my existing password manager's flaky, second-class browser integration, I've been trying Keychain out again and it's come a long way. For example, it's possible to add notes to passwords now which I had been missing when I used it before.

New menu at Bread by Bike New menu at Bread by Bike

A week off. This coming week I'm going to be out-of-office & walking in the Lakes!