I am a veteran software engineer who works as a freelancer from their home.
I love modernizing ancient software by carefully, slowly rewriting while it is still operating - without disruptions.
Currently I have two wonderful, awesome, really amazing clients between whom I split my time roughly about 50:50.
For the first one, I am the "Primus inter pares" in a team rewriting a 20-yo C++ & JS-based system in modern nodeJS + Typescript. My main job there is not to write code (it seems), but review PRs, review code, give coding guidelines, merge PRs, and make sure everything my team needs is there: test servers, development server, on-premise Gitlab, on-premise Mattermost, a good/respectful/lovely atmosphere, a lot of fun, and what else we need to deliver an awesome product. The team is amazing, the atmosphere is full of respect and love; I will stay with this team as long as I can.
For the second client, I am rewriting a 15+ year old system (Java, Java/Swift/Vue1.x-FE; rpc-like crap-API) using go(BE), gRPC (API) and dart/flutter (FE).
Here I am the core developer for the new client and the new back-end. The back-end is, for now, a proxy/a wrapper around the existing one. Behind that wrapper, two wonderful co-workers are modernizing & optimizing the Java-BE. This team here is equally as lovely as one can ever hope for; and yes, I will stay with this team as long as I can as well.
Oh, and BTW: people in both teams are nearly 100% remote.
I am married to a wonderful, an absolutely amazing person who is so full of love that she sometimes struggles with the universe (or with humanity). And I am a proud father (yes, "father"*) of a woman with a brilliant Beautiful Mind and a heart as big as the universe (who also happens to have Mastery of Words™️).
I love learning new things from complete strangers. The stranger the new knowledge the more fascinating it is for me.
I have a #FragMyBrain (autistic, ocd, nd) so be ready for detailed explanations, where each word is carefully chosen & positioned in the sentence, but still some missing - when you ask me something.
I quickly fall in love with brilliant people with language mastery skills - Mastery of Words™️.
You can always shitpost with me & talk garbage - as long as it is done intelligently, with wit & humor, and respect.
The fastest way to land on my block list is not to make a mistake, but to repeatedly make the same stupid mistake again and again and insist on it being right. There is always enough space in the "Dungeon of Blocked Accounts" (and being racists, queer-/transphobic, ableist, disrespectful, white supremecist, etc., etc. - you know what I mean).
I will add CW and mark as sensitive whenever I think so. If I forget once, please inform me and I'll correct it as fast as I can. I don't discuss whether something needs CW/sensitive marker or not, I just accept it.
I wear my feelings on my skin, i.e. what you see is how I really am, there is no IRL Imdat Celeste and a different, Fediverse Imdat Celeste: you will see a lot of 🫂,💜,😍,🥰,🥹,😳... and more. If you feel it is intruding, please let me know.
I come over differently, but I am also insecure: so, I will add a lot of emojis - just to be sure.
Also, please don't expect a "normal person" here: I am completely, utterly, hopelessly an un-normal person.
Also, my posts my start with one specific topic but during the text itself it may just become something completely different - "Train of Thought".
Again, nice to meet you - I am always looking for more new friends...
*: I am a trans non-binary person. When I came out to her, my daughter asked me how she should call me from then on and since it is an honor to be her father, that, yeah, I am and will always be that.
The #WebP buffer overflow bug that caused all the major browsers to issue patches earlier this week (e.g. #Firefox 117.0.1) also affects applications built with Electron. #1Password issued an update today for their Mac build.
The CVE affects the underlying webp library, not just web browsers, so this will be an ongoing issue.
"Who uses #libwebp?
"There are a lot of applications that use libwebp to render WebP images, I already mentioned a few of them, but some of the others that I know include: #Affinity (the design software), #Gimp, Inkscape [not according to Martin Owens, see comment below], #LibreOffice, #Telegram, #Thunderbird (now patched), #ffmpeg, and many, many #Android applications as well as cross-platform apps built with #Flutter."
Early #Perl luminary and author (#OReilly camel and llama books, many magazine articles, etc.) Randal Schwartz, a/k/a merlyn, is in dire financial straits.
He needs gainful #employment NOW of any kind, and although his #programming language of choice now is #Dart and the #Flutter framework, he’s willing to fall back on his @Perl chops.
I present the first named release of the Friendica mobile/desktop client: Relatica. It is still very much a work in progress but I'm going to start opening it up for beta usage (early beta). For iOS that will mean me letting up to 100 people into the inside testing team (Apple's limit). For the other platforms I'll be posting binaries/packages/install instructions for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows in the coming days as well. I also setup a Relatica Matrix room for interactive discussions with me and other users. The README on the GitLab repo will have all those sorts of details. Enjoy! #friendica#FriendicaDev#relatica#flutter#DartLang#fediversegitlab.com/mysocialportal/rela…
Whenever I discover a new GUI toolkit, my first question is always “is it more native than the Web?” For reference, here are some ways Web apps have better system integration than Flutter:
System fonts, font hinting settings, and font fallback settings.
System text navigation shortcuts.
System scrollbar visibility, thickness, and click settings/behavior.
System highlight menus and controls (on touchscreens).
System display scaling settings.
System reduced-motion settings (An API is documented, but I have never used a Flutter app that actually disables animations. I may be wrong).
System reduced-transparency settings.
System forced-colors mode (Windows High Contrast Mode).
System color palettes (some browsers support setting default colors without necessarily forcing the palette).
System media controls (play/pause/skip, current track, e.g. using MPRIS on freedesktop platforms).
It’s an easier question to answer than my second question: “What WCAG conformance level can I hope for?
I am happy to try LLMs that run locally in my IDE. I never want to stream all my data to OpenAI or any other service's data vacuum as I code. Which leads me to ask which of the two categories do these plugins fall into, JetBrains? I'm disabling them because they aren't doing squat for this Dart/Flutter developer anyway right now but I'm not going to activate them until I'm certain they aren't streaming every flipping keystroke back to the usual suspects. I'd say state explicitly in the overview whether it runs local or does network stuff or even better have a setting to disable all network traffic of this sort across the board since plugin manufacturers could be up to similar things. Hell maybe I need a firewall rule to block outgoing network traffic from the IDE, assuming I could do that without breaking all the local network traffic needed to connect to apps, emulators, etc. for debugging... #JetBrains#JetBrainsAI#OpenAI#ML#AI#DartLang#flutter
I think Flutter needs an audio engine plugin (as opposed to an audio player plugin). For mixing, gapless loops, effects, streaming, performance. Something that can easily support a game (or an immersive app).
Before I go ahead with something nobody will use or that I won't be able to maintain, I want to gauge interest within the community, and ideally stir up some excitement. Here: https://filiph.net/fmod/
everyone’s talking about the python layoffs but the #flutter and #dart layoffs seem to have flown under the radar. from a mobile dev perspective they are more concerning regarding google’s commitment to its supposedly first class cross platform development ecosystem
I've been in a bit of a developer rut. It's not lack of projects I want to do and can work on. It's more like analysis paralysis on some, death by a thousand cuts aversion on others. So I piss away time on social media. I decided to try to get some dev momentum by picking up something I first tried back in 2020 the last time I got dev writers block: The Ray Tracing Challenge. Back then it was Kotlin and I only got as far as basic ray projection before wrestling with the Cucumber test system and "real work" derailed me. This time I'm going to be trying it in Dart and Flutter. My progress, or lack thereof, will be in this repository with a corresponding plain text developer log. #programming#DartLang#flutter