Weeknotes № 50

Last week I again tried to not focus too much on work, and instead went to Berlin to meet friends and get my passport renewed. I also played my first theatre role in almost thirty years. The previous role was at the closing play of primary school, this time it was at the youngest’s day care.

I put out new videos last week with a focus on alignment:

• Aligning stacks, frames and overlays

• First Text Baseline alignment

• Explicit Alignment Guides

• Sizing of ZStack vs overlay

• Aligning custom icons

I am still going strong on the Zettelkasten note taking method. My note with attribute graph questions is getting quite long, hopefully at some point I’ll be able to ask someone about it.

I read a bit about deliberate performance. In short, you can increase performance by:

• Experimenting . Form hypotheses and these these out.

• Estimating . How long will this take me? How big / expensive will this thing take me?

• Extrapolition . How can you apply the learned things to other areas? How does this concept generalize?

• Explanation Writing, teaching, etc.

It’s fun to see how we apply these in our workshops as well. We give a quick intro, let the attendees solve a solution, have them explain their solution and then try to discuss the theory or what it means in the abstract.

I read more about defunctionalization. We also wrote about this in 2019. It’s been a pattern I keep seeing everywhere: in the Elm Architecture, in TCA and while thinking about building virtual machines (you can start with a naive functional implementation of whatever it is you want to build and then use CPS + defunctionalization to build a very efficient iterative implementation).

I’ve been thinking about using the stuff I learned about the attribute graph implementation to take yet another stab at an incremental static site generator (just for fun). Not sure when I’ll have time for that.