Notes

Status updates and short notes.

  3. I’m having trouble keeping up with my feed reader count of unread articles. Somehow again and again I delay opening up the damn thing and just start reading.

  7. One of the reasons I struggle with writing notes and articles for my blog on a regular basis is the fact that I don’t know who I’m writing for. (That, and an unhealthy mix of impostor syndrome.)

    Who reads my content? For which audience do or should I write? Who even cares about the things I think about? Do my ramblings make any iota of meaningful difference in the world?

    This thinking isn’t helpful. It’s the opposite. I can feel how it blocks my mind.

    That’s why I now try to think of it as I think of good and relevant comments in code: I try to picture myself a few months into the future and document things for my future self. I make implicit knowledge explicit, for myself, in order to be able to remember. I materialize emotions and thoughts I have every day through words I put up on my blog.

    The audience is me. Anyone else interested is welcome to join me in reading.

  8. For years now my go-to pattern for CSS hyphenation was always something like this:

    p {
  /* activate hyphenation */
  hyphens: auto;
  /* add some sensible settings (http://clagnut.com/blog/2395/) */
  hyphenate-limit-chars: 6 3 3;
  hyphenate-limit-last: always;
  hyphenate-limit-lines: 2;
  hyphenate-limit-zone: 8%;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
  p {
    /* deactivate hyphenation for larger viewports */
    hyphens: none;
  }
}

    Today at work we encountered a strange bug in combination with the none keyword. A floated element caused the text paragraphs besides it to create weird and random text breaks. Toggling the none keyword on those text paragraphs caused the bug to disappear.

    Upon further inspection I checked out the docs for the hyphens property. For the none value the following is stated:

    Words are not broken at line breaks, even if characters inside the words suggest line break points. Lines will only wrap at whitespace.

    This seems rather aggressive. What I actually want is what the manual keyword offers (which is also the default value of hyphens):

    Words are broken for line-wrapping only where characters inside the word suggest line break opportunities. […]

    Adding manual to the text paragraphs fixed the bug. Unfortunately I don’t know what exactly caused the bug, but I guess in certain layout combinations the aggressive nature of none can cause browsers to create weird text flows.

    Again what learned, as we like to say in Germany!

  9. I just came across a job offer for a “Frontend Developer”. In it is explicitly stated that you should not apply if you’ve never touched AWS or Kubernetes. I mean: what the actual f.

  10. In April 2021 I will run the Hamburg marathon. It will be my second marathon after the Munich marathon in October 2018, which I ran in a net time of 3 hours and 44 minutes. My goal for 2021 is a net time of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which means I will run an average pace of just under five minutes per kilometer.

    So, it’s roughly 36 weeks until the marathon. I’ve been going over my running schedule in my head. According to Herbert Steffny (his website is pretty dope, check it out, I will wait here for you) in order to run a marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes one should be able to run a distance of 10 kilometers in 45 minutes and a half-marathon in 1 hour and 40 minutes. To bridge the time until the marathon training I thought it would be a good idea to train for and run both the 10k and the 21k distance in the mentioned duration.

    This is my schedule:

    1. In order to get my body accustomed to an increased running workload I will gradually increase the weekly mileage of my current runs until the start of the 10k training (that’s in ten weeks) to about 50k per week.
    2. The 10k training starts October 26th and spans over a period of six weeks. On December 6th I will run the 10k in 45 minutes.
    3. After a break of two weeks, the half-marathon training begins on December 21st and spans over a period of six weeks. I will run the half-marathon on January 31st in 1 hour and 40 minutes.
    4. After a break of two weeks, the marathon training begins on February 15th and spans over a period of ten weeks. I will run the marathon on April 25th in 3 hours and 30 minutes (that is still to be seen, though 😀).