~blog

Allen's Dev Blog

New job; new stuff to learn

July 03, 2022 — Allen

I started a new position back in April and so far it's been perfect. I'm a senior engineer and I'm not only allowed to make things−I'm expected to. I think I may have found the place I want to retire from.

To that end, I've been working on a user telemetry server. It's like all the pieces of my life are lining up. I'm using Sequelize for the persistence layer. Like many software libraries, it's very nice, but the documentation is atrocious. It seems no one told the Millennials that you can't use a word to define itself.

It took me forever to work it out, but the difference between references and Associations (ie. has/belong) is the former defines the DDL and the Associations seem to define the same analogous relationships in the object model.

Tags: TIL, winning

"They have no idea what century they're in and they'll defend themselves, violently, if necessary."

October 23, 2020 — Allen

Ok, so I have to learn React. I've stayed as far away from it as I could, for as long as I could. My mind balks at the notion that I have to learn it just because everyone else feels they have to use it because that's what the "cool kids" at Facebook are using. But now that I am forced to learn it, I'll admit that it is a neat idea. But it also confirms my suspicions that it is the reason why I'm unable to successfully click on anything on Facebook (or anywhere else that uses React). React completely removes the concept of "document" and replaces it with components. That's an interesting idea and a useful approach to application development, but there's a problem: the browser has no idea that this is what React is doing. The browser thinks it's still rendering a document. It's no wonder everything is always jumping around, making it impossible for me to click on what I'd intended to click on.

If we're going to go down this path−which I'm starting to see the case for doing so−then I think the browser has to be re-imagined. We need a new kind of user agent that doesn't constantly shuffle things around because of an ever-changing "document" that no longer exists.

Tags: whining, TIL

Let me $digest this

September 20, 2020 — Allen

This article was written in a style that I have a really difficult time following and that I really can't stand, but it did allow me to finally understand $apply().

Tags: TIL

tilde.club has a custom bashblog

September 18, 2020 — Allen

It appears that tilde.club has a custom bashblog in the PATH (which I should've been able to recognize earlier that I was using). It got my posts slightly corrupted and wasn't linking in Disqus. It appears that Disqus has been completely removed from the ~ version. Good to know.

Tags: TIL

How am I just now finding out about this?

September 17, 2020 — Allen

White space is typically ignored in HTML and <pre> is usually not what I"m looking for either, both because it changes to a monospace font and also because it doesn't respect the box model. TIL that CSS has white-space: pre-line; and that it does exactly what I'd always wanted when typing content in HTML.

Tags: css, TIL