Avris

A user suggested adding a timezone field to Pronouns.page. This website lets people, among other things, create a card with info about how they want to be referred – their pronouns, names, etc. But it also has some generic fields, like age or links, so the team was onboard with the idea of adding some more basic info: not just timezone, but while we're at it, why not also a location?

Well, adding a location is not as easy as it seems…

When it comes to DevOps, I'm just the “dev”. I write code, but I'd rather have someone else worry about making sure it keeps running as intended. I manage my personal VPS, I manage some servers at work, but I wouldn't call myself an expert in that area at all. So I'm super proud of myself and how well it went when I migrated a big project to a new machine The downtime was just 15 minutes! Here's the story, if you're interested.

Among people who create websites or apps there's an understanding that UX, user experience, is massively important. We know that most users either don't have the technical knowledge to use software that isn't intuitive, or they simply don't have time to be bothered to get to know an app that isn't easy to use (and they have many alternatives to switch to).

So I'd think that ease of use of one's products is a common concern among companies of all industries, right? Well, I then moved to a new place and had to assemble a lot of furniture… What an absulute UX nightmare it was!

Four years ago I backed Font Awesome 5 on Kickstarter, and in return I received a license to use it and to access the pro features. The license might be perpetual, but the pro features, sadly, are not

If you don't subscribe to a Pro plan, you won't be able to install Font Awesome Pro using npm or yarn.

That's the one feature I need! And on August 1^st it will be gone! My dev setup, my deployment setup, of multiple projects, everything depends on fetching Font Awesome from the npm registry.

Luckily, there's a simple way around it

I strive to optimise this blog's performance as well as I can. But chasing a goal of a lightweight website while keeping it pretty prevented me from realising the obvious truth that the most performant assets are… no assets.

So, inspired by Sijmen J. Mulder's directory of text-only websites, I decided to create a bare version of my blog.

Here's how it went:

Yet another one of my projects, Naked Adventure, grew too outdated to support it. I had to rewrite it from scratch.

I took the opportunity to redesign it as well. (screenshots before & after at the bottom)

I've already complained about my mySN laptop here and here, but now it turns out, there's a part three to be written...

Hackers know your password. I'm like 99% sure they do. Just go to ';--have i been pwned? and enter your email(s). See? Your password is as good as public.

Yet another one of my projects, Avi • Simple placeholder avatars, grew too outdated to support it. I had to rewrite it from scratch.

I took the opportunity to redesign it as well.

The most important maths lesson in my life wasn't actually that hard. It wasn't even really about maths.

I've seen some begginer programmers asking themselves: why do I even need constants? Variables I get, they're super important, but why have an extra thing that's like a variable, but worse? It can't even change! And if I know that const NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS = 3, why can't I just write 3?

Here's a list of tools that I use for work and can fully recommend:

My new blog, despite being simple and freshly rewritten, loads way too much crap... So I took a few moments to optimise it a bit – and I ended up with almost 50% reduction in resources size in just two steps!

It wasn’t really supposed for the New Year, but I’ve had plenty of free time on my hands during the holiday break, so here it is already: a brand new version of my blog

For quite a while my VPS was misconfigured – any HTTP requests it got but couldn’t assign to a vhost, it redirected to the main website, avris.it. I didn’t think it would be a big deal, until I recently found out that my post Ungoogling is indexed by Google under https://askara.avris.it/blog/ungoogling

This subdomain hadn’t existed for a long time already, my server doesn’t serve a certificate for it anymore, but it requires HSTS, so browsers end up showing users a scary error message.

I had to do something about it.

Platforma Obywatelska obiecała, że wprowadzą głosowanie elektroniczne. Ta partia nie jest znana z realizowania obietnic, więc nie boję się zbytnio, że ten okropny, okropny pomysł wejdzie dzięki nim w życie. Ale temat mnie poruszył, bo widzę, jak bardzo ludzie są zafascynowani taką opcją i jak bezkrytycznie ją popierają, myśląc, że skoro wszystko inne jest lepsze dzięki komputerom, to głosowanie też musi.

Otóż wcale nie musi.

An image search brought be to Pinterest, which automatically… logged me in to an old account, I didn’t even remember I had. I definitely never logged in on this browser.

They just logged me in without asking. WTF?!

Did anyone receive a message recently that contained a video of me watching porn?

Because apparently I was being blackmailed that all my contacts would receive it, if I don’t pay 202€ in BTC. Alas, I didn’t check the spam folder, so I’d missed the deadline a week ago ‍

Depending on one company with all of your data is pretty risky. Even if we ignore the obvious privacy concerns of when some corporation knows everything about you... Just imagine what would happen to you personally, if one day that corporation would just... disappear for whatever reason. Say, Google gets a huge fine from the European Commission for one of their monopolistic practices or shitting on their users’ privacy, and turns out they don’t recover from that. How screwed are you?

One day you lose your emails, photos, passwords, documents, notes, calendar, what else?

So, recently I decided to diversify my technical dependencies. Not to boycott Google completely, but to at least use it less.

The PHP ecosystem is full of frameworks: Symfony, Laravel, Yii, Zend, Phalcon, and so many, many, many more... All of them built by professionals and supported by big communities. So why on earth would a junior developer, who has just started his first job, try his hand in building yet another one?

Well, here’s why:

I’ve lived in three countries so far, and I got some official documents from all of them (Germans definitely spam way more than the others). I think it’s interesting to compare, how different approaches they have to the design of those documents.

There is a website I’ve created many years ago, Stosłowia (Polish only), which collects stories of up to a hundred words. It never got any users, but I didn’t really care to promote it in any way either.

Last week I’ve decided to rewrite it from scratch, because so many things were wrong about it – from an ancient backend in plain PHP with hardcoded credentials and no separation of concerns, to login with Facebook (and only Facebook) that stopped working... Now it’s a fresh Symfony 4.1 with Encore with some new features (like automatic screenshot generation, seen for instance on Twitter).

But what I’d like to show you, is how a couple of pretty small design changes have made the whole website way nicer visually (IMHO).

It’s honestly diffucult being a webdeveloper in the world of shitty websites. I guess that’s how hairdressers feel when they see my pathetic hair after it’s been a while since my last visit...

But the thing is, even though it’s technically easy to use scissors and clippers, I don’t do that on my own hair, I leave that to the professionals.

I had to learn Git as a programmer. If you want to easily collaborate on a codebase, you really need either Git or something similar. But as a non-programmer, you’ve probably never even heard that name, have you? Then why would you ever need it?

Well, for exactly the same reasons!