The Codist

I find reading app release notes a fun pastime. For whatever reason people who write these release notes in the App Store have no imagination, or a perverse sense of humor, or they have resorted to smoking funny cigarettes.

So many release notes include the phrases, in some version: "Bug fixes," "More bug fixes" or my all time favorite "Minor bug fixes and performance enhancements". Apparently their codebase is so bad that the bugs are multiplying faster than they can be fixed!

Take for example this major airline app I picked at random. Two stars. The current version and its predecessors:

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When I shipped my first app 30 years ago, once we put it on a floppy and in the box and sent it away we had basically no idea what the ultimate customer experienced—unless they called us.

Today the options for knowing what the end user is experiencing for desktop and particularly mobile apps is amazing. Along with various analytics one of the most useful and objective stats you can use to tell how well you did and what your customers are seeing is the crash rate.

Crash Rate

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There are more than 16 million colors in the standard RGB color space. So why do modern web and app designers keep returning to gray on gray text?

My eyesight is not wonderful, I have lots of things floating in my eyes, while I am not blind or anything, I do need to make text bigger to see decently. But there is little I can do when people decide to create styles that are low contrast, generally a medium gray on a light gray background. I do not know why this became such a trend over the past decade.

This lack of contrast as an artistic design seems pervasive in almost everything. I am currently writing this post in a markdown app with, you guessed it, gray on gray. Everywhere I look in MacOS I see gray on gray. Some are worse than others. The App Store app for example is horrendously light gray text everywhere.

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In every project there comes an important time every one of us gets to, assuming it's not cancelled:

Shipping.

Somehow all the work you've slaved over has to be deployed to production, rolled out to customers, pushed to an App Store, or like I did 30 years ago, baked into a master floppy. It's time for your baby to be born, or graduate, or whatever metaphor works for you.

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I had a little time and decided to replace the previous blog engine (written in PHP and using MySQL) which was getting long in the tooth, not to mention it really makes little sense to dynamically generate a static blog site.

So I whipped up a little blog generator in Swift and extracted and converted all the previous content from the database into a new text format.

Works like a charm. Please let me know if you see any odd anomalies.

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I was going to write something different, but last night I created a DigitalOcean droplet for an experiment, and didn’t finish. So tonight I came back to it and happened to look at the /var/log/auth.log which seemed somewhat large for a newly created droplet.

There were 98 ip addresses that attempted to log into the server. I don’t know if these were purely random or the ip was known as something else formerly. From the logs it was obvious that these were not legitimate attempts.

In any case I ran the collection through the tool at InfoByIp.com and got an interesting mix of domains and countries.

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