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A couple of years ago I received my Makeway kit. It was a kickstarter project that included an assortment of tracks and tricks for marbles, all suspended on a vertical surface by magnets. For this reason, I mounted a large whiteboard (with a metal backing) in the hallway of our apartment.

About a year ago, after conducting the household organization surveys, I started using the whiteboard as a physical weekly calendar for my family. I used some thin black masking tape to make a grid that would withstand the whiteboard eraser. I also got some small magnetic dry-erase rectangles to simplify rescheduling common recurring tasks.

I spent just shy of 9 years working on a suite of products that stored and processed environmental sensor data. This kind of data is naturally stored and processed as a time series. A time series is a set of data points, each with a time and value, and often more. They are common for sensor data, but can be used for pretty much anything that is measured over time such as prices, performance metrics, and analytical data.

I have been trying to improve the organization of my household for years. My wife and I have been using shared Google calendars for over a decade, but there are plenty of issues we could still improve. It was only minor challenges when it was just the two of us, but once we had a child, the systems we had started to show their limits.

I quit my job with the dream of building my own product, but I started without any particular ideas about what to build. It didn’t take long before I was considering working on this exact problem. Not only was it something I would benefit from, but it was also something I would find interesting, and could enjoy building and maintaining by myself.

I recently did a project for a client that needed a way to share a bit of live data with an external organization. He originally asked for a simple website with authentication and an API. I could have built this, but for the frequency and volumes of data they were using, I suggested a simpler approach: a Google Sheet and a recurring job that updates it.

Any online spreadsheet is a great way to share a small amount of data. Users can filter, sort, make formulas, export the data, or even write their own integrations. It’s also possible (depending on how changes are handled) to manually annotate or override data that’s been exported. Implementing all of this in a custom web page is possible, but some of it is pretty tricky.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an old text-based chat system that, while seemingly in decline, still has many users around the world. It’s not as convenient as modern alternatives, but for those of us that are familiar with it, and especially those of us that have friends there, it’s still a very viable way to communicate.

There are a number of IRC clients available. On windows, mIRC is popular and easy to set up, but it shows its age. IRCCloud is very convenient, especially if you want to use a mobile device, but it lacks some common features, and you are limited to two servers on the free account. There are other options, of course, but they all have limitations.

I have always liked using whiteboards. They are a great tool for communicating, but also great for exploring thoughts and stimulating creativity. There are computerized equivalents, and they have their advantages, but I’ve never found them as effective because I get distracted too easily. I can spend more time fiddling with the lines and colours than working on my actual problem.

I like whiteboards so much that I bought a stack of them, and an artist’s portfolio bag to carry them around. I imagined popping out a few drawings at a meeting, or handing boards around for a creative session. I still love the idea, but in more than twenty years I’ve never even taken them out of the house.

I recently launched my new company, Pragmatic Potato Software Inc. The creation of a company itself is pretty easy, but setting up everything you need to do business can become overwhelming quickly. There are a lot of compelling options available, each promising the moon. It’s not that simple though.

I’m going to be writing about the technology stack I’m using to run my company, and why I made the choices I did. There is a lot more to a company than its technology, but I’m not an expert in setting those up.

One often (and ironically) repeated rule in programming is: don’t repeat yourself. We repeat it so much we even have an abbreviation: DRY. There are good reasons for this advice. Duplicating and modifying code can be a quick and easy way to get a feature done, but it can also lead to problems over time. It’s harder to understand code when the valuable logic is mixed with reams of low-value boilerplate. Subtle differences can also sneak in, leading to inconsistent behaviour across the application. Things get even more difficult if you want to make a change.

I believe code reviews are a high-value activity (which I’ve written about before), but they take time and slow down your development process. With a few simple tricks, you can make it easier for reviewers to understand your changes, allowing them to give you better feedback faster. Not only does this save everyone time, but it also improves the quality of your code.

Make your intentions understood

Good commit messages and review titles are important. It may be (and in fact, should be) obvious from your code change what you’re trying to do, but a good message is still important. There are lots of cases where someone needs to scan the change list, and good messages make this a lot easier. It also helps your reviewer understand what you’re doing.

I used to use Getform for a contact form on my consulting company website. I recently received an email from them announcing that their free tier was dropping from 50 submissions per month to a lifetime limit of 25. This makes it useless for anything more than a trial, and their lowest tier is a more expensive than other similar options.

I’m not here to complain about companies taking back free offerings. I don’t like the change, and I wish they’d given me more than three days of notice, but they are a businesses, and businesses need to make money. It is a good reminder though: even if something is free to use, it still takes time and effort to integrate, to maintain, and you may occasionally need to throw it out and find a replacement.