TIL
TIL that the MLB home plate used to be made of cast iron, and they amended the rules to make it foul territory because one particular guy made a habit of hitting the ball straight down for base hits
TIL about ceremonial drinking cacao when I stepped into Maya Moon in SD because I thought it was a coffee shop 😅
I don’t know that I can say that I enjoyed it, but I did get the distinct feeling that this is someone’s favorite drink in the world. I think that counts for something
TIL that Rosalina was originally designed to be canonically related to Peach, but that story element was removed before the release of Super Mario Galaxy
When it came up in the movie, it seemed a little too convenient, and I wondered why this had never been mentioned. That factoid rounds it all out
TIL more than I wanted to know about inconsistencies between react-native-webview’s Android and iOS implementations. In particular, the one that bit us today was certain navigation state changes being called or not called on different platforms when using history.pushState
TIL - I got to use React Native’s BackHandler API
I’m not in the market for a switch to Android, but I enjoy how RN has pushed me to understand the different design decisions between that and iOS
TIL that there are woodpeckers in my neighborhood. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one in the wild. I was absolutely enchanted by this little guy today
TIL that a softball curveball is equivalent to a baseball sweeper based on their movement
TIL that the Savannah Bananas stream some of their games live on Youtube. The kids are getting in to them, so it was fun to watch part of a game tonight
TIL that Tanstack Query allows you to hold on to existing data (even across query key changes!) via placeholderData.
This helped make a loading state much better. We want to let users change filters (which results in a new query key) but it was a poor experience when the data disappeared from the screen on filter changes
TIL - saw a first of a kind bug today: an Expo module where the calling a function according to the docs and Typescript typings caused a “wrong number of arguments” bug
The notable thing was that we couldn’t have caught this in jest tests, since those never touch native modules.
One more reminder to double check work on devices, and to consider end to end native testing
TIL that Flea (the RCHP bassist) spent 2 years learning to play trumpet and has a Jazz instrumental album coming out later this week. This video of his Jimmy Fallon appearance is an absolute delight
TIL about Expo’s repack feature. It uses a cached native build, attaches a new JS bundle, and lets you use that for internal testing. It’s buggy right now, and I couldn’t get it to work today, but I’m very excited about it as a future prospect for faster builds.
TIL that the state and local tax deduction limits (SALT) got raised for 2025. That’s a meaningful tax break for high-income earners in high-tax states. AKA people who really don’t need tax breaks. AKA me.
TIL about Refugee Net, an org working to help resettle refugees and support them as they come to the US. It’s a good time to support groups who are working to make the US a more compassionate and welcoming place
TIL that the selective attention test (where you’re challenged to count passes of a ball and a person in a gorilla suit walks through the background) has a corollary for audio.
It surprised me, because my experience of audio feels much less voluntary than my experience of video. I’m always aware that my eyes are focused on a point. Much less that my ears are also “choosing” what to hear
It came up in one of the essays in You Didn’t Hear This From Me
TIL - had my first introduction to opencode.ai today. I’d heard of it before, but tried it out with codex
Fascinating TUI. Definitely things to observe/learn from the different front end. I love how it does diffs
I’m excited to play with it and keep learning about how different tools compare
TIL that seaweed salad is made by rehydrating dried seaweed with water and vinegar. Up until I looked up a recipe, I had assumed that it was made with a “wet” form of seaweed that wasn’t normally available at the grocery store.
I’ve become a big fan of www.americastestkitchen.com this year. It’s nice to just open the app and see something that might look good and know I can trust the recipe. Every one I’ve made has been a banger
TIL that if you sent the CSS zoom property to a number with a sufficient number of digits, some of the automatic sizing logic on your page may become unable to calculate round numbers and result in and endless loop of elements re-rendering at different sizes
I also re-learned how to round a number to a specific number of digits 😅
TIL more about Claude skills. In fact, I wrote my first two, for helping me gather context about all the code getting pushed and merged on the teams I run.
I know skills can be used to pipe in specific context for tasks, but right now they’re most useful to me as a way to “script” the non-deterministic beings