Weeknotes: 2022, Week 3
Thoughts
An article led me to Wicked Block Builder this week. Every day WordPress edges closer to being a platform that could be entirely configured without Engineering help. Although admittedly I think publishers are a long way off sacrificing their legacy business logic to fit what’s available without bespokery (yes, that’s a made up word). A point, that this article picks up on. The article is correct in most of its arguments, however the platform it is promoting seems to be behind WordPress 5.9 in the level of control offered to non-technical users, and it spends a lot of the article trying to make the opposite point about WordPress. I suppose with WP’s market share it’s the one any burgeoning CMS needs to take down.
This week Twitter belatedly led me to this great essay from October 2019 which demonstrates the author’s conception of the “Mnemonic Medium”. It was a very interesting idea in itself - but it asked an interesting question: with all of the tech-based innovations on ways to present (overload?) us with information, there have been no innovations in the space of helping us retain and understand information. It seems as though an opportunity is there, but as the author’s point out - it may not be a profitable one.
What I’ve learned this week...
The importance of memorising things. The same essay called out something I’ve been guilty of - undervaluing the memorisation of facts/low-level concepts when learning new subjects. It never struck me as useful - with prevalent internet access, I could quickly look facts up. When learning a new subject however, you learn a large amount of new facts and concepts that it is detrimental to your ability to absorb them if you have to look up what a concept is every time it is referenced.
I also learned that in 1930, Architects and Engineers rotated an entire building without interrupting supply of utilities, or the day to day operations within the building!! Also, the Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in the article was the Author’s father! I love stuff like this.
Other stuff I learned this week:
- The meaning of the word “Usury” (the action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest)
- The history of the East India Company (and loads of other interesitng stuff in Mickelthwait and Wooldridge’s The Company)
- I also discovered hyptohes.is - it’s changed my note taking on the web and I’m very excited to keep using it!
Achievements
- I unleashed my first ever questionnaire on the team, and on the face of it, it’s delivered some good insights. (For context: I wanted to know how they would discover and interact our internal library of plugins, to make sure someone uses it). The team was also receptive to questionnaires as a method if obtaining information and opinions. Probably as long as I keep including a pop quiz at the end.
- Our next internal block is complete and is now QAd. It’s been quite a challenge coordinating this one.
- I received some positive feedback from ex-colleagues and it was a nice feeling.
Targets for next week
- Take a look into the Logo language and its use in teaching coding to kids
- Play around with Jupyter notebooks - These were a new concept to me, but they look great for representing models