Hjertnes

One year with the Apple Watch Ultra 2

2024-09-18 00:00

I haven’t really had it for a year, but kind of; I’m like 2-3 weeks off.

My reasons for getting it back then was mostly three things:

  • Battery life
  • Action button
  • Watch faces with more stuff on them

Battery life has been awesome.

Can I name my Apple Watch faces please?

2024-09-16 00:00

When I try to set up or change Focus modes on my iPhone and get to the Watch Faces UI I’m always met with this terrible UI.

Part of the problem is that they only render parts of the watch face and the name of the Face I have used. So I often see like 3 identical faces, because they don’t render any of the differences.

Can you either fix the rendering or let me fucking name them, please?

The current flow of picking the first one, disable, enable repeat until it is correct is beyond broken.

Post volume?

2024-09-10 00:00

A thing I have missed from all twitter like social media networks, since I first started to have problems with the volume of posts I never was able to keep up with, is better tools to evaluate the accounts I follow.

The obvious would be how many post they post on average per day/week etc. The kind of poster they are would be another, do they poste rarely but a lot, constant etc. Also the kind of posts they typically post is another, a bunch of photos, links or short posts is less heavy than long ones.

Data on this would make it easy to make tools for it, or just easier to evaluate manually. But adding things like this to Mastodon would almost certainly cause a lot of drama.

All the data notebooks

2024-08-28 00:00

Whenever I have to deal with anything data science” or data engineering” or what the fuck we call it this week, maybe it is all (sarcastic Homer Simpson voice) AI, the whole notebook stuff drives me nuts.

Like I think they are fun for some stuff, but it is so weird for a lot of use cases at work. Mostly because we have all of these great developer tools over here, and then most of them aren’t really usable within the notebooks.

Is this a problem because I’m more of a software engineer” (I refuse to use the engineer title myself) than a data engineer”, yes. But here is the reality of doing software in any company everything has to talk to each other in some way.

Development, operations, data” all has to do work on the others work sometimes. Or a lot of the time. Or you have to take on the role of some of the others for a while.

When I see all of the code blocks in the notebooks I just think: can I have these in a git repo as files that are linked into the main document when you work on it as a notebook? So that I can write the code in PyCharm or VS Code or whatever?

I like literate programming by the way. But I think there is a place for it and a place where it isn’t a good fit. But since everything is based on it at this point, it should be destructed into a way where it is less of a pain for different disciplines to deal with.

It doesn’t matter, because it isn’t about you

2024-08-27 00:00

I guess most people have been in this situation. You do something that bothers someone else, and you either wouldn’t get bothered by it yourself because not a big deal or because you don’t understand how it is offensive / how it was understood that way.

Here is the thing.

When someone else reacts in a negative way to what you do, it doesn’t really matter if you agree with them or get it”, just apologize and try to understand it well enough so that you can try to avoid it in the future.

Everyone is different. Some of us have experienced a lot of things that results in triggers, different reactions or more extreme reactions to things.

Accept the boundaries people try to maintain, and try to not think about everything in relation to your perspective, but rather that everyone are different and one gets a lot further by not framing everything different from you as weird”.

Git commits in multiple phases

2024-08-21 00:00

The way I use git with feature branches, rebasing, interactive rebase etc I’ve found it incredible useful to do my commits in multiple phases.

When I work on something I commit all the time, usually with messages that’s only useful to me.

Then when I’m ready to send it to review I will re do them, either as in squashing or something as in resetting all of them and re-doing them. Typically having separate commits for lining, fixing kind of related issues, making the project ready for the change I’m doing, the actual change, kind of related fixes after implementing it, unrelated fixes etc.

Useful both for keeping track of what I’m doing while working, and then making sure the git history makes sense for other people after.

Awesome formats: jsonl

2024-08-19 00:00

Sometimes I come across things that I should have found way earlier because of how awesome it is.

One of them is jsonl. It is basically a text file where every line is an independent chunk of json data.

It is extremely useful for a bunch of reasons, like when you want to append things to a log without having to read, deserialize, update, serialize and write. Or if you want to parallelize to processing of data etc.

Shortcuts & logic

2024-08-14 00:00

The thing I hate-enjoy the most about making Apple Shortcuts is how it encourages (because it lacks real complex logic or data structures) to write logic that takes shortcuts and kind of avoids checking all cases. Like with what I was doing when I got this post idea:

  • Two variables (a and b) that can have three states: Green, Yellow, Red.
  • Where the global state should be Red if either is Red, or Yellow if either is Yellow otherwise Green
  • Easy with a or something more fancy like a data structure that holds the results for each possible state
  • With Shortcuts I always find myself doing something like this
  1. Set Status to A
  2. Then a shit load of nested if
  3. If Status != Red
  4. If B != A
  5. If B != Green

In the same way you would in places where performance is very important and you only do what you have to do.

I could have re-written it to be numbers and found the largest ones, and then converted that to the statuses. But that isn’t really the point here: can we have some real if logic soon?!

All the low / no code stuff

2024-08-07 00:00

I have had the pleasure” of experiencing a lot of these solutions over the years. And I guess an important thing to keep in mind is that these tools probably isn’t that fair to compare with the kind of development I typically do. Either because of staffing, money or other reasons.

But from a user side of things I always find them incredibly slow with a user experience that leaves A LOT to be desired. While on the development side it is also slow to set them up, with surprising little of the easy duplication and re-use you see in conventional software development and also the apps are very slow and cumbersome in themselves.

Again, I’m most likely not the target audience.

Made with ❤️ in Bergen, Norway by Eivind Hjertnes