TIL
TIL the Expo Modules API. I have a thorny problem I want to solve with native webviews, and Claude just isn’t cutting it on its own.
Bonus fact: you can write native views that have ergonomic event callbacks and that interact with their children
I’m going to have to get my hands dirty with native modules and write some swift. Thankfully the docs are excellent, and I’m feeling confident I can pull it off.
Hats off to the entire Expo team for their great work. At every turn I’m more and more impressed
TIL about claude-chill, a Rust wrapper for Claude Code designed to help with screen flickering.
The interesting thing isn’t so much that others tried to fix it, but this Github issue where the Claude Code maintainers talk about why the flickering is there in the first place.
I’m always charmed by how terminal interfaces continue to move forward, even when they feel completely dated in certain contexts. It’s fascinating to read about how Claude is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible/reasonable in a terminal environment
TIL about the Gemini CLI. I’ve been having Claude code hack at a thorny problem recently, and keep running into walls, so I figured I’d try something else
On first pass, it performed worse, but also revealed a shortcoming in my own harness. I have a lot of work/learning I need to do to get good at giving the agents the tools they need to test their own success.
In this case, that means setting up an easy expo build command for checking if the native code is building correctly
TIL that the Tesla coil was intended to essentially electrify the air around it, such that it could provide power and communication channels to devices around it. I had previously thought it was just a cool byproduct of some other experiment.
I learned this during a live demonstration of a coil at the Fleet Science Center
TIL how to play Dutch Blitz. I know I’ve learned it before, but maybe this time will stick
I had a chance to play with my daughter and some nieces today. I’ve never been a fan of speed card games, but I’ll take any chance I can get to play games with them
TIL that “down”s in American football come from football’s evolution out of rugby. In particular, a “touchdown” refers to how the ball used to be required to touch the ground of the end zone
I’ve been watching a bunch of football the last two weekends, and finally got curious about the term
TIL some additional crochet stitches, to finish my first Wooble. I had to slip stitch, sew pieces together, and stitch a pocket closed
The crochet parts feel like baking. Get it exactly right, to the stitch, or it’s gonna get weird. Sewing feels like cooking. Put the needle where it seems right, and it’ll probably be ok
TIL details on how Hotwire Native works. I dug into the code to read about how they share the single instance of the webview across multiple view controllers (stack screens). Turns out, they have almost the exact same strategy as Shopify’s Mobile Bridge.
There doesn’t seem to be a good option out there for React Native, since React’s fundamental model is that it wants to control elements within its virtual tree.
So I’m setting out to build my first Expo Native Module (with the help of Claude) to try to pull some of this off. I want the same kind of webview performance and interactivity these other firms have been able to achieve. I’m sure it can be done with a couple hundred lines of native code
TIL about lazamar.co.uk/nix-versi… — an excellent tool for installing specific versions of nix packages. It comes complete with multiple varieties of install syntax, which is so helpful
TIL more about Expo Fingerprints for EAS updates.
The ability to compare a fingerprint in the web UI is a critical tool for debugging, and we were able to use it to identify that we were using EAS Environments wrong.
I had set up some of our automatic update workflows to publish on a preview channel, thinking it would inherit our preview configuration, but that’s not how it works. The right way to do it is to set our ENV variables in Expo, and then depend on the environment for builds and publishing updates so that our update matched our build.
Once we get that sorted, we should be back on the golden path. This will help as we keep moving our OTA update strategy forward.
TIL that my favorite Miike Snow song, I Feel the Weight, is built around a sample of In Too Deep by Genesis.
It surprised me when I heard it on the radio. Particularly because it’s such a side element in the overall scenery of the song.
But I guess that’s often the magic of a good sample.
TIL about the Lemon Meringue Pothos during a visit to Anderson’s La Costa Nursery. It’s a new variety of colors with the same care needs as a regular Pothos
TIL that in the NFL, a fumble recovery cannot advance the ball on 4th down.
I learned this because I joined my brother to watch the Packers v Bears playoff game (further explanation at the link)
TIL that I should be using Kalita Wave 185 filters with my Origami Dripper, due to the ridges and flat bottom.
I’ve never gotten great brews with that dripper, but I look forward to trying again soon
Thanks to the fine folks at Necessity Coffee for the recommendation
TIL that there isn’t a good way in Ruby to reach up in a stack trace and interact with the calling context
I had assumed this was possible, and I could do something with instance_eval after, but it turns out the way is binding_of_caller, which is only for debugging
TIL about nix-community, specifically awesome-nix and nix-direnv. The latter is a huge QoL improvement when switching between projects.
TIL there are new pre-built binaries of the Emacs variant I use (emacs-plus). This is a great improvement for my dev setup. It installed almost instantly and fixed some pesky path bugs I’d been stuck on.
TIL that NPM’s --ignore-scripts option breaks all pre-and post scripts, even ones defined in the local package.json. We’ve turned it on for our work repos as a security mitigation, and some of our daily-driver scripts stopped working.
It’s on my list to look into switching to bun, and this is another bump in that direction
TIL a little bit about Geodes, when we cracked open a couple from a National Geographic set we got for Christmas
Bonus fact from this video about extremely large geodes: amethyst (and other crystal) values rocketed during COVID due to their “metaphysical healing properties”
