The ongoing conversation
A search in a job search application I’m developing reported success without finding any usable postings. The workers were running, the task had finished, and the application reported no error. Unfortunately, the user wants job postings, not reassurance about the workers. Finding nothing can be a perfectly valid result; the problem was that the application […]
On one of my pull requests for the Grand Comics Database project, Gemini Code Assist offered three suggestions: two warned about possible errors and the third suggested a clearer way to write a loop. I accepted the third and explained why I wasn’t making the other two changes. The warnings sounded reasonable, but they depended […]
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 […]
Open letter to the Internet: The incredible success of the potato salad Kickstarter is simply a modern example of performance art. Like the million dollar home page or the eBay-nanza of religious-icon toast before it, it won’t kill its medium (crowdfunding, web advertising, online auctions). No doom to say here, move along. —jhunterj
This is the email I sent to the FCC commissioners at the end of April. I’ll rework it a bit to send to my senators and representatives. Feel free to use it as a basis for your own communications, and see this letter as well. Dear FCC Commissioners: As a paying consumer of Internet service, I am […]