All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails are chugging along and trying to keep it on track. Some more ambitious members of the group have been working on a new exercise routine involving carrying silverware, which would help with loading the dishwasher. But another contingent has been staying up too late and raiding the fridge at night. It's obviously slow going, but we’re wrangling them all back together and we're starting a new week fresh.

Game Boy 👾

• Just saw they're unlocking Stadia's bluetooth controller, which is good news.
  • All bittersweet though, because of what could have been...
• Playing a lot of MTG Arena
  • at my obsessive peak and starting to feel burnt out, but it's still scratching some itch
• And Vampire Survivors
  • vibing late night and listening to podcasts
• We're starting a new DnD campaign with new friends
  • making characters by hand out of the player handbook
  • feels good to be in person and offline

Coding Corner 👨🏻‍💻

• Name Your Projects Cutesy Things ; saw on HN
  • Something I was thinking about recently that project/repo names shouldn't be descriptive of function because the responsibilities could change
  • We have actually a lot of projects at work where the names were initially chosen to describe the related functionality and now the scope has grown so large and unrelated that the names are confusing (especially to newer folks)
  • The one project that just has an animal code name has never had that problem; you still have to explain the project once, but its not misleading
  • And its more fun to make up names for things
• Is "making things flexible" just over-engineering?
  • I get the feeling sometimes it'd be better to just code to the spec (even if the spec is loose or imagined) and restart if need be
  • Sometimes the hard spec comes out of what the application can actually do, especially when there are too many cooks
  • Spent a lot of time maintaining complex flexible hand-rolled solutions to things that eventually get trashed
• Plaid
  • Saw this integration again when setting up direct deposit with our bank
  • Company is being used for sharing access to bank information between applications
  • But the implementation of their granular permission management could be used for anything
  • Seems like and actual implementation of a Web 3.0 feature and the kind of thing that projects like Solid are going for

Albums 🎧

• "God Save the Animals" and "House of Sugar" by Alex G
  • current default rotation
• "Lost Wisdom" by Mount Eerie
  • "a quiet echo on loud wind"; 1 Kings 19:12; imbues a lot of meaning to this Magic card.
• "Late Developers" by Belle and Sebastian
  • just released; was easy to listen to; nothing stood out like Working Boy in New York City from their last album (so I listened to that a few times too)
• "Fleet Foxes" and "Shore" by Fleet Foxes
  • oldest and newest album; both sound timeless
• "The Creek Drank the Cradle" by Iron & Wine
  • old friend; focus music; Upward Over the Mountain always gets me

Podcasts 🎙️

• Armchair Expert - Anna Kendrick
  • Kind of intense but sweet and Dax is heartfelt and not annoying; talking about relationships and knowing or not knowing your partner
• The Worst Idea Of All Time - Therapy In A Car
  • The newest season has the boys watching the Fast and Furious franchise backwards, F9 nine times, F8 eight times, and so on, down to the first movie
  • This is the second episode of the season and just very funny banter

Movies 🍿

• Casablanca
  • We had a friend over and ate pizza and watched this for the first time
  • It was a sweet movie and more nuanced than we were expecting
• Sex and the City 2
  • Watched this because of the second season of The Worst Idea Of All Time
  • It is genuinely bad; nothing happens over the course of 2hr 20min