A couple of weeks ago Brass Birmingham became the 8th game to top the ratings on BoardGameGeek - here's why I like it so much more ..read more

Accessing Twitter this morning, I was greeted with a prompt saying that they were getting rid of text messages as a form of two-factor authentication unless you subscribed to Twitter Blue. I thought “fine”, because I don’t use text messages for that, preferring a one-time code managed by 1Password. I clicked through and it told me it had removed the text message two-factor that I didn’t have, and would I like to set up something using a one-time code or hardware dongle? It seems that Twitter had mistakenly deleted my one-time code link. I don’t think this is a huge deal, as I just set up anoth ..read more

Juntao Qiu completes his article on modularizing react applications by identifying that the last change smelled of Shotgun Surgery and taking the steps to fix it. more ..read more

Juntao Qiu now demonstrates how the refactored structure helps him deal with adding a charitable donation to the order and how this change prompts some further refactorings. more ..read more

Retrospectives are a key element for effective software initiatives, as they allow a team to learn and improve. However, like any good practice, it's easy for teams to make mistakes that undermine their value. Aino Corry has many years facilitating retrospectives and has run into many common problems and how to solve them. Three of these skipping generating insights, getting lost in things you can't change, and being dominated by a loudmouth. more ..read more

Juntao Qiu illuminates his general description of modularizing a React application with a small example of presenting a user a dynamic set of choices. more ..read more

My colleague Julien Deswaef recently compared engagement data for my Twitter and Mastodon posts. From this we can see that boosts and comments are very similar. Twitter does get significantly more likes, but considering I have nearly 20 times more Twitter followers than Mastodon, it’s a remarkably small difference. more ..read more

I've been working in front-end software for over three decades. A perennial problem has been mixing non-UI logic into the UI framework itself, leading to code that's both hard to understand and near-impossible to test. Despite being the hot new thing, React is just as vulnerable to this problem as Swing and Turbo Pascal. My colleague Juntao Qiu writes about how to untangle such a mess. In this first part he gives an overview of how a React application can evolve into a better modular structure. Later parts will dig into a small, but representative example. more ..read more

I haven't posted much on my Mastodon usage in the this year, and that's because the situation has settled down for me. Reading-wise I check both my Twitter and my Mastodon accounts. I'm still posting to both feeds and intend to do that for the foreseeable future. I haven't yet done much analysis to compare activity between them. more ..read more

Paulo Caroli and Steve Upton complete their description of the Data Mesh Accelerate Workshop by explaining the rest of the workshop's activities: Objectives and Key Results, Explore the Use Cases, and Discovering Data Products. more ..read more