Nicholas Cloud's Blog, page 2

Scott Hanselman is Wrong

If you���ve done any Microsoft development in the last two decades you probably know the name Scott Hanselman, and are probably familiar with his blog at hanselman.com. I used to enjoy reading Hanselman���s articles, back when I wrote code for the Microsoft platform, and generally considered him to be a pretty even-keeled individual with generally insightful thoughts and balanced opinions.

That was back before virtue signaling was all the rage of course. Now it appears that he���s fallen into the...

Bye Bye Google Play Music

This is a post I uploaded to Facebook on March 9.

In my quest to remove my personal data from google services and quit giving them my money, I���ve been searching for a service that would transfer my entire Google Music library (which is substantial) to another service. I don���t mind paying a subscription fee, just don���t want to pay it to Google, but I���ve used Music for so long that transferring my library manually would be monumental.

Over the weekend, however, I discovered Soundiiz.com,...

import facepalm;

Sometimes bugs can be particularly evasive, and today I had such a one.

A module in deep in our codebase was throwing an Error, but only in Mozilla���s Firefox browser.

The error was NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE.

I did some quick DuckDuckGoing and found that the error occurs when a native DOM function in Firefox is passed a value of a type it does not expect.

The stack trace lead back to this line in our application code:

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const hit = find( cache, c => c.original === obj );
if ( hit ) {
return...

Fun with Homebrew casks

One of my favorite utilities for OSX is Homebrew, a package manager that lets you easily install programs from the terminal.

One of my favorite pastimes is thumbing through the Homebrew Cask recipes to find new programs and utilities to install. Some are pretty nifty, like Zotero which manages research bibliographies. Or Electric Sheep which harnesses the power of your sleeping devices to crowdsource digital artwork. Or Finicky, which lets you specify which of your web browsers you want to...

Joker Movie Review

I finally watched Joker last night.

It is dark. But the movie earns all of its praise. It really is an extremely well done film. Everything works: cinematography, acting, music, It is very well crafted.

There are several major intertwined themes running through the film. A lot of people have interpreted it in a lot of ways, and they arent wrong; theres a lot to unpack.

The biggest theme is probably rich, powerful people are extremely out of touch with average, or below average people, which we...

Book Review - The Mythical Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month is one of those books that is, well, mythical in the circles to which it pertains that is, the software engineering and computer science fields. It is mythical because many people have heard of it, most agree that it is classic, but not many remember exactly why. Perhaps they have never read it, only absorbed its ideas through hearsay. Or perhaps they did read it, but so long ago that its principles have been taken on in the tide of time.

Either way, I have finally...

Protip - return from exceptional conditions early

During a recent code interview, I noticed a React component with a render method written in the following (abbreviated) form,

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render() {
return this.state.items.length > 0 ? (

prop1={},
prop2={},
propN={},
...
/>
) : (
''
);
}

where ComponentWithLotsOfProps had at least a dozen props, some of which were not simple primitive values.

While there is nothing technically wrong with this render method, it could be better. It suffers from a few...

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Modern JavaScript tooling is too complicated? Hacker News

This post on Hacker News is worth the read, not only for OP���s posted content, but because of the follow-up comments (routinely the better part of Hacker News submission).

You know it���s time for popcorn when the thread starts like this:

���if only the tooling was too complicated, it would not be too bad. IMAO the entire front-end JS world is one big pile of MISERY, complicated is not the word or the problem at all.

Frederick P. Brooks Quotes, Part 1

A couple of years ago I started The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks, and I am ashamed to say, got sidetracked about half-way through; however I have recently resumed my reading. Fortunately the chapters stand alone quite well, so the continuity loss is minor. I intend to share, over the course of a few posts, quotes that I find important in the text. Though written across the 70s - 90s, Mythical holds a tremendous amount of wisdom developed within a particular historical context. Th...

Destructuring Reconsidered

While working with React for the last five months, I���ve noticed that React developers make extensive use of object destructuring, especially in function signatures. The more I use React the less I like this trend, and here are a few, short reasons why.

There are countless books by wise industry sages1 that discuss how to write good functions. Functions should do one thing, and one thing only; they should be named concisely; their parameters should be closely related; etc. My observation is t...