Author: Bram Esposito
2024 was a good year for running
I ran 2235,0 km in 2024. I’m pretty proud about that.
I mostly run alone and take the time to reflect and structure my thoughts. I also find it the ideal moment to listen to podcasts. Early in the year, my friend David convinced me to run with a small group, and I learned to appreciate having a conversation while running.
2024 also had me running my first race: the Antwerp Half Marathon on October 20th. It was an experience. Running
a race with 14000 other people is more like running on a music festival. More attention goes to avoiding other people and maintaining your own pace. I believe I did a good job.Right now, I’m still recovering from a painful foot and leg. It’s getting better but these has been a few difficult weeks at the end of the year. I’m wearing arch supports now during the day, but not yet while running to avoid blisters.
Let’s see if I can go over 2500 km in 2025. And who knows, maybe I even get to run a full Marathon?
Self-review your code
Something really resonated with me in the
latest episode of the Under the Radar podcast: the concept of switching context and reviewing your own code before committing.I’m really happy to hear
@marcoarment and @_Davidsmith discuss how they review every commit to validate all code that goes into version control.I often have a hard time selling this habits to junior devs (and even senior devs!). As a consequence I’ve often been rewriting git repository histories to remove passwords, PII1, zip files of several hundreds of megabytes (“git is so slow”) and even malware.
I like to rethink my code architecture while reviewing and often go back to refactor, to take more edge-cases into account or for simplicity.
I love using
Fork for this, a great git UI with a good diff viewer, all in one app.- Personally Identifiable Information, you want to be careful with that ↩︎
Picture:
Rice harvest on Louisiana farm by Karl WiggersNetNewsWire was not updating my RSS feed
NetNewsWire is having trouble refreshing my RSS feed, both on Mac desktop (6.1.8) and iOS (6.1.5 Build 6135).- I tested with an alternative RSS reader: Unread, which updates the feed fine.
- I double checked my caching and expiration headers, which also appear ok.
- I went through the log files and saw many entries for Unread and some for Google bot (hello 👋)
- I removed the feed from NNW and re-added it, but no success…
I’m tempted to try and build the desktop app from source, since
the source is available on Github, but that will require some extra free time.UPDATE 2025.01.02: I installed the TestFlight build (6.1.6 6141) and the issue persists.
UPDATE 2025.01.03: TestFlight build 6.1.6 6142 installed overnight and the issue is fixed 🎉! Now waiting for the next desktop release.
- I tested with an alternative RSS reader:
A word counter for Gutenberg blocks
One of the main goals of – albeit slowly – setting up this blog, is writing more. And I also want to keep track of the length of the posts I make (I’d love to be able to call them articles one time 😉).
That’s why I implemented a word counter today, that displays the words you’ve written, in the editor, as you type. I based the functionality on the code
found here. It didn’t work anymore, but after some research I managed to make it work again.Turns out the Gutenberg editor (aka Block editor) is
often running in an iframe. Which makes it a tiny bit harder to access the blocks in the editor with javascript.
Screenshot of the Block editor with the counter in the top right displaying: 34 words. Download the WordPress plugin
You can find the WordPress plugin
here on Github.What’s next?
I want to improve this functionality with a post-wide counter that displays the total amount of words over every block in the post.
L’amour toujours by The Brussels Jazz Orchestra
I was listening to the
“Jazz” episode of the “Koken met classics” Podcast (Belgian radio, Dutch spoken) that has a very entertaining format: Senne Guns and Korneel De Clercq dissect a song or music genre by preparing it as a recipe.The finale to the episode was a Big Band rendition of
L’ Amour Toujours by Gigi D’Agostini, played live by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra.Recommended.
L’Amour Toujours by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra I really enjoy when artists bring modern (dance) music to Big Band. Listen to the
Matthew Herbert Big Band or Meute for more of this.AM/PM vs 24h in WordPress
Software localization is hard. WordPress still struggles with the AM/PM vs 24h setting in some places:
- good: the post scheduler UI on the admin post edit screen
- bad: the Publish date on the same admin post edit screen
- bad: the status text after applying the scheduling
Add capability classes to your html element
Couldn’t come up with the Javascript library that adds capabilities supported by your browser as a class to your html element.
It was
Modernizr, a library way more popular in the more turbulent years of the browser wars and the start of Web 2.031 januari 2025 update: it must be 10 years ago that I had to use this, but today I need to write browser-specific code again 😕.
After fruitlessly searching the web using Google, I asked ChatGPT for an update. It came up with some alternatives:
- platform.js: has been archived by the maintainer (fellow Belgian Mathias Bynens)
- bowser.js: which, if memory serves, even predates Modernizr
- detect.js: a User Agent parser
bike repair day
A few days ago, my daughter came home with a headlight broken off. Even a robust, quality headlight cannot withstand the violence of high schoolers 😆.
Safety first, so I made sure the bike trip to the Christmas party yesterday was done with fully functioning bike lights. Also a good time to replace the rear wheel quick-release, as the
Follow-me Tandem one has a tendency to come loose.
Switch to Pride Versioning!
@Niki Tonsky: I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning
Rice harvest on Louisiana farm
