Reading

Becoming a team lead: a survival guide – a lengthy piece by Joseph Wynn about his experience falling into a lead role in a BBC dev team. I’ve been a team lead of sorts for a while now, in a few different places/roles, and I’ve read a lot about managing and all that jazz. I’ve done courses on it, been to talks on it, but I do think this is one of the most useful posts I’ve read about the whole thing, certainly one of the best I’ve read which is specifically about being a lead developer. Plenty of takeaways, like ‘always be honest … unless you’re ahead of schedule’, ‘nobody is allowed to work on a task by themselves for more than one day’, and 'ask for help’ –

It’s as if there’s a bizarre sense of achievement or credibility in struggling through a problem for days when it could have been trivially solved by someone else in minutes.

Stuff about the Intersection Observer API.

Implementing intersection detection in the past involved event handlers and loops calling methods like Element.getBoundingClientRect() to build up the needed information for every element affected. … The Intersection Observer API lets code register a callback function that is executed whenever an element they wish to monitor enters or exits another element (or the viewport), or when the amount by which the two intersect changes by a requested amount.

There are dozens and dozens of plugins and snippets that manage this functionality, it’s a very common trope, but I’d not stumbled on this particular method before. This lazyload example by David Bushell is what put me onto it, and there’s plenty of other examples around on codepen. May well have to go back and refactor some things…

Listening to

Duncan Trussell Family Hour: Graham Hancock. I do love a bit of Graham Hancock; since way back when Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror got me hooked as a teenager, I’ve been partial to suspending disbelief and running with some of the fantastical theories he writes.

In all that time though, I don’t think I’d heard him speak, so this was a nice opportunity. He sounds like I’d always imagined tbh. This chat covers the kinds of things you’d pretty much expect it to cover: gnosticism, the tree of knowledge, psychedelics within religion, the internet, the Aztecs and the conquistadors. The bit about using mushrooms to get religious visions is what piqued my interest the most – it makes much more sense to think of Jesus and his followers being on hallucinogenics. Explains a lot.

Walking around

The Jurassic Coast. I spent most of today (over 8 hours) walking a chunk (26.2 miles) of the South West Coast Path to raise money for Julia’s House, a local hospice that provides respite care for children and their families. They do great things. You should donate a couple of quid https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/redweb just because they’re amazing, but also because I did that walk and am now completely shattered. On the plus side, I got to experience a part of coastline that I’ve only dabbled with before, and it really is stunning. Well worth doing, for all sorts of reasons.

Relive 'Julia’s House Jurassic Coast Trek’