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 about the Levitt Bloc Music series which has live performances right around the corner from my house
I love Oceanside
TIL that my guess about how much I could bench press was way off.
I’ve never lifted before, and just started this week. I could barely lift 2/3s my body weight and I’m very sore
It’ll be an interesting journey 😅
TIL that Expo EAS Workflows now support catching App Store connect webhooks
TIL that my favorite childhood dark ride, Kingdom of the Dinosaurs at Knott’s Berry Farm, closed when I was only 10 years old
It feels like I went on that ride 100 times beforehand, but I guess it was just a flash of my childhood. And watching the tape back, maybe what I really liked was just that it dumped you out into the arcade.
I went to Knott’s today for the first time in ~20 years. I really like the new rollercoasters
TIL that the conventional commit spec includes a ! modifier for breaking changes
TIL that apple-app-site-association info takes somewhere between 3-7 seconds to load on initial app install, and if you try to trigger an action that requires it immediately on launch (like ASWebAuthenticationSession), you may get what looks like a launch crasher.
Artifacts from the day are this expo PR, and a couple Apple forum threads I found about it 🥴
TIL that a weight bar typically weighs 45 lbs. I’m sure this is largely common knowledge, but I’m just getting into the idea of lifting, and it was interesting to pay attention and play around with the idea today
TIL that D3 college baseball teams use aluminum composite bats, and throw around 85 mph fastballs
This, thanks to a cousin day where we watched a college game. It was so fun to compare the scale and speed of the game to spring little league
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.