What I done did in November 2024
Winter is coming
Explored Jotai as a state management solution
During a spike in my day job I was able to explore Jotai as a potential state management solution. Having sat in the Redux camp for a long time it was interesting to see how that library worked.
I particularly liked the atom dependency side of things as well as how it made composition of atoms really easy.
I bought a Mac Mini M4
Technically I bought it in October but it was delivered in November and so far I love my little powerhouse of a machine.
This is an upgrade on the M1 Mac Mini I bought in 2021 and while I have yet to do anything crazy to put it through it’s paces outside of some ML stuff I’m in awe at how such a little box can have so much power.
Set up the CD Pipeline for Garner
This month I decided to stop thinking about Garner and actually build it. The first step of this was to get the app publishing to a device so it could be tested.
I did a blog on how I used Xcode Cloud to set up a CD pipeline for Garner and some of the hurdles I hit when doing so.
Set up PostHog and my analytics strategy for Garner
The second step of getting things setup is to figure out how I’m going to measure how effective the app is. I’d used PostHog in the past and decided to use it again.
This time around as I’ve been defining the features of the app in Gherkin I decided to also have the analytics follow these feature definitions, that way there’s a universal language across everything.
I’ll do a blog about this in the next couple of weeks.
Got hopelessly addicted to Pokemon TCG Pocket
The progress on Garner has somewhat been hampered by a game that came out this month — Pokemon TCG Pocket.
This game is way too addictive. The “loop” of opening boosters (dopamine hit #1), collecting cards (big dopamine hit for me #2) and then using those cards to battle in order to win prizes (dopamine hit #3) to finally use those prizes to open more boosters has got me hooked.
I’ve spent a number of nights not sleeping until 4am just so I can complete the tasks it sets because I know I need to get them sorted to remove its hold on me so I can function.
I’ve done this now so I think I have things under control but I know when the next set of functionality is released I’ll be dragged back in again.
Was unable to play Warcraft 3 on Mac
So this month I got a shiny new Mac Mini and I had been playing Warcraft 3 on my Windows PC before I got it and as Warcraft 3 runs on Mac I decided to install the game.
This however, seemed to be a bad idea. First the game wouldn’t launch and then for Warcraft’s 30 year anniversary Blizzard released v2.0 which fixed that bug but then there was another issue which meant the client wouldn’t authenticate so the game was unplayable.
Finally that bug was fixed and then I realised that my Windows save game wasn’t saved to the cloud or anything so I didn’t have my progress.
Spiked out some analysis using tree sitter
Tree sitter is a tool I’ve been wanting to explore for a while. It’s a tool for querying the Abstract Syntax Tree of source code and I’m currently doing a spike of it to ensure that some constants shared between the code and a spreadsheet used by another team are in sync.
It’s been really fun learning the syntax for querying the tree and I’ll do a blog post soon to explain how to use it.
