The Fourth Design
I rebuilt the FitnessTracker website using everything I have learned about design over the last several months. It is very fast, highly accessible and full of content on exercise, nutrition and anatomy. My design skills have come far and I am growing to really enjoy design.
On tooling
This article takes a quick look at some of the tools being used to build FitnessTracker and goes over why I chose to use each of them.
Fun generating content
I've been working on getting FitnessTracker release ready which has meant going through a lot of structured data and trying to turn it into something that people can read and build fitness routines with. This has involved generating text suitable for both websites and in app consumption and rather than use generative AI, I decided to roll my own model with python. Results are okay so far, but quickly improving.
FitnessTracker
Automatic tracking with things like watches, phones and other devies may work for some people but not for me. And so in December, I started turning a tool that I've been using into a desktop application. It started off in Electron but now it's all Rust and React. Here's a quick update.
The Important Questions
A take on Rust development and acronym-induced existential dread. From compile times to SQLX pronunciations, this article explores the real tradeoffs you make building desktop apps with serious tooling.
A note to the thinkers
There are a lot of very smart, but very sad people coping with things they discuss with generative AI now and that is almost unspeakably depressing. Almost because I think that those of us who have been through change before have an obligation to start speaking about it. This is my attempt at that.
Performance Testing - NumPy versus PyArrow
This post, the first in a series on Fantasy Baseball, is going to start at two points. First, it's going to implement a scraper that will collect stats for an entire year of major league baseball. And then it's going to run some performance tests to see whether NumPy or PyArrow is faster at reading the CSV files generated. PyArrow is faster all the time...but it particularly shines when data sets get larger.
The Third Design
I'm still working to get better at designing stuff - my learning path has taken me through a lot of articles, implementing better designers work and even into a new static site generator. Recently, I put all my learning into a new template and pushed it live onto two sites.
A Tale of Three Designs
My name is Greg and I have committed some grave design sins. The website you are on right now shows off many of them, but it's actually decent compared to some other monstrosities that I have created. But several weeks ago, I decided it was time to start learning. Like many beginners, my progress was noteworthy in the beginning. This article is about some of the very basic lesssons I learned and some paths I took to learn them.
Right to Disconnect
Kevin O'Leary recently shared his strong opposition to Australia's new right to disconnect law, which allows employees to ignore work communications outside business hours. O'Leary argued that employees should always be reachable, even at 2 a.m., or risk losing their jobs. However, the author counters this perspective, emphasizing that a well-structured company should never rely on single points of failure that require middle-of-the-night calls. Good leadership means building a resilient business model where employees can maintain work-life balance without jeopardizing operations.