The ongoing conversation
If a group already maintains a calendar, giving them a second place to enter the same events creates another burden. It also creates a question when the two versions disagree: which one should everyone believe? Old joke: a man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is […]
Shelves in the St Helena Archives. Photo by Luke McKernan (CC BY-SA 2.0). An old event report doesn’t need a new font badly enough to lose its address. As I worked on the Miami Valley Orienteering Club website, the results archive was part of what the new site needed to keep: documents accumulated over years, […]
You click Save, the server records your changes, but the response never reaches your browser. The screen can’t confirm the save. Clicking Save again seems reasonable, but that’s awkward if it creates a second copy of what you just saved. In reliability work I did for an existing community application, recovery had to account for […]
Notebook and pen. Photo by Phil Slattery (CC BY-SA 4.0). Pro tip: tell your AI agent to track things it thought would work but ended up needing different or additional steps. Kind of an after-action report or postmortem, but ongoing instead of just after a project. One of my website deployments stopped because the server […]
In an orienteering mapping project, I wanted to review a GPS track and geotagged photographs against an existing map. No surprise: they didn’t line up neatly. I could move the track, but would the new position mean I had corrected a location, or just changed where I drew it? The mismatch alone couldn’t answer that. […]
I’m developing a job-search application, and one of the useful questions has been where to stop helping. Helping someone describe their experience is useful but sending that description to an employer commits them to what it says. For this application, I want the person whose name is on the résumé to have the last word […]