Notes

“When I’m working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than writing. I’ll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches.”

—Paul Graham, Good Writing

“Sanding” is a great metaphor for the work I do. The same content, revised again and again over many years. This morning, I am revising my health insurance guide once again. I am applying new insights from dozens of reddit threads and hundreds of reader questions. I have found a more straightforward way to explain things, small details I had not mentioned yet.

A few of the things I enjoyed reading recently:

• Everything from Prickly Oxheart, but particularly Who are you without the next thing to do?, Do nothing and What if this is it?
• The whispering earring. A prescient cautionary tale.
• Speak White by Michèle Lalonde recently resurfaced in conversation
• When we get Komooted. When a community that you have built sells out to venture capital.
• Everything from Experimental History. It’s hard to pick a favourite after reading a dozen posts back to back.
• The symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.

I have finally started implemented visual regression testing on All About Berlin. It takes screenshots of elements, and compares them to old ones. If anything changed by even one pixel, I get an error. This helps me catch bugs and unexpected visual changes.

Since I already use Pytest and Playwright, I chose to use this library.

It’s time to bite the bullet and clear some technical debt. All About Berlin has unit tests, but they’re run manually, and some of them are a pain to update. As the website’s tools grow in complexity, manual testing is quickly becoming unsustainable. A change in the health insurance calculator logic might break the tax calculator, and I won’t notice until someone complains.

This cowboy coder has yee’d his last haw, and started rewriting his tests to be easier to understand and easier to update. The goal is to iterate towards a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. Pretty fancy for a blog!

“There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.”

—Steve Jobs, 2007