TIL
- Drawing directly in Keynote is the best way to animate your drawings as part of the presentation, but layering is so difficult it’s basically useless
- Adobe Fresco exists but it can be hard to export/copy drawings between devices
- Affinity Designer 2 requires an Affinity login, and I didn’t feel like going through that
- Procreate (which I already had installed) does a servicable job of exporting PNGs, and for me, it was definitely the best set of drawing tools
TIL that whale carcasses may explode after the body is overwhelmed by continually growing bacteria after death.
Shout out to the everlasting joy of asking “what did you learn at school this week?”
TIL that there are a number of attempts to implement a UITableView bridge for React Native.
It doesn’t seem like anyone’s been able to crack a generalized abstraction over the API. But personally, I’m wondering if we couldn’t write a minimal version of a bridge that could be used for a specific screen in one of our apps.
TIL about about jj (jujutsu) for version control.
I’ve heard about it here and there, but I got a much better demo from @sheck.bsky.social and I’m excited to try it out soon
TIL what the heck RAG (retrieval augmented generation) actually means. Thanks to a great talk by @geolessel.bsky.social, where he helped me make sense of the steps involved, and even a beginner level understanding of vector databases.
Until today, I probably could have given a hand-wavy explanation about citations and added context, but now I feel like I have the proper rudiments to think and reason about this realm of features
TIL — I think I got an explanation of the Ralph Loop that I actually understood from a presentation by a coworker.
The kicker for me was running claude in non-interactive mode. It either completes the task, or it doesn’t, and it can take another run if it doesn’t, and the while nature allows it to continue ad infinitum.
I don’t know why that part hadn’t quite clicked for me before, but I feel like I can think more clearly about the concept now than I could before
TIL — I had work reasons to do a lot of doodling on my iPad this weekend for a Keynote presentation.
I learned that:
Please enjoy this doodle as my proof of work
TIL the word “retroject”. It’s uncommon (the iOS keyboard autocorrects to retrospect), but refers to taking a current idea and layering it on top of the past as if it was present then.
In simpler terms: projecting, backwards.
I always love a new word
TIL about expo-av and why it was deprecated.
We have an app that’s using av and needs to migrate to the new libraries. This blog post helped a lot with my understanding of why things got deprecated.
TIL - I had a reintroduction to the Interface Segregation Principle in object oriented programming
I probably could have recited the meanings of every other letter of SOLID, but I think this particular principle has been lacking in my primarily Ruby focused career. Ruby doesn’t have interfaces as a language concept, so it’s harder to grapple with this one directly in that environment
TIL all about how Websockets close, and specifically that Firefox sends a CloseEvent when the user navigates away, while Chrome just closes the connection.
I was looking into it because we noticed we had Websockets that looked like they were trying to connect twice on every page load. Turned out it was the last page that was trying to reconnect a lost Websocket during close
TIL about the fontkit NPM package. Extremely cool to be able to take characters from a font and turn them into PNGs, SVGs, whatever is useful.
fontkit is used by this Alfred workflow for picking emoji, and it was fun to poke at the source.
TIL about the complex and wonderful world of Audio Description from this episode of Hyperfixed
It’s classic Goldman to be curious about a new thing, and mainline Hyperfixed to get overzealous about solving a Too Big Problem, but this episode goes above and beyond. It’s about copyright, artistic intent, accessibility, and ultimately the joy of movies. Classic stuff from the relatively new show
Watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind tonight. Wonderful movie.
TIL that Miyazaki wrote it as a Manga series and then adapted it to film afterwards, and that it’s technically not a Studio Ghibli movie, as its success led to the founding of the studio
TIL that the Artemis II crew had unprecedented visibility on the far side of the moon during their mission.
I understood that it was the first trip to the moon in 50 years, but didn’t quite understand the significance of their specific route, and the photographs we would see.
TIL about Wendy Carlos, a pioneer in synthesizer music, who helped Bob Moog develop the world famous Moog Synthesizer
This from a cool episode of Version History all about the vocoder
TIL about Expo Custom Builds, which are triggered by, but meaningfully different from, EAS workflows.
Today I just needed them for a repack workflow, but I’m wondering if there’s more we could potentially do with it.
I wish I could ask and understand what happened with using ${} vs ${{}} in each environment
TIL that you can “move” Expo router stacks up into the root easily by re-arranging the file structure.
In some ways this is obvious, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to us as we worked on the problem. We started by manually hiding our tab bar on some screens, but today realized we could take that entire <Stack> and put it at app/(section)/_layout.tsx and it would render entirely over the tabs, which was exactly the behavior we wanted!
TIL how to gather crash reports from another iOS device and resymbolicate them.
I also re-learned that running the Console app and streaming messages with a live device is your friend in a pinch.
Fun launch day 😅
TIL that cats have 18 claws, because they have 5 on each front paw + 4 on the back 2
If I had known that, maybe I could have won our Easter round of I Should Have Known That