Anxiety, yesterday and tomorrow

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Last night I had to drive to choir practice myself, and I had a panic attack on the way. I managed to push through it and felt fine when I got there. So of course I had another panic attack on the way home, because my brain decided that no, proof of being able to drive safely is NOT enough anymore to sustain a lack of anxiety when driving.

Tomorrow I am going in for an angiogram and potential angioplasty (depending on what it turns up). The procedure itself is pretty straightforward and primarily preventative; non-invasive imaging was inconclusive as to how much arterial blockage I have (if any), and I seem to have an arterial abnormality that makes imaging difficult. So it is out of an abundance of caution that I am getting the angiogram, and if any blockage is found it will be mitigated, and perhaps a stent will be installed as well (although my dad also has an arterial abnormality which made a stent installation impossible for him when he went through a similar thing, in a much more emergent situation).

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My least favorite question in all of tech recruiting

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“Are you frontend, backend, or full-stack?”

I really hate this question, for so many reasons.

First of all, it presupposes that there’s only two sorts of things that are done in software anymore: either you’re making websites (frontend) or services called by them (backend), or you’re someone who does both, but still using the frontend/backend dichotomy.

There are so many other kinds of software out there. Not all the world is Building Websites. Just off the top of my head there’s the extremely broad categories of graphics, platform, audio, gameplay, automation, embedded, infrastructure, distributed systems, and so much more.

Even in today’s dystopian push towards blockchain and machine learning, what kinds of engineer works on the underlying systems there? It’s neither backend nor frontend.

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Goodbye, Twitter third-party login

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So, a little while ago I did an extremely unscientific poll on login methods via Authl on this website. The results of that (measured by folks who accessed my site for any authenticated reason, not just folks visiting the login method poll):

  • 8 signed in via Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
  • 4 signed in via IndieAuth
  • 7 signed in via email

Not a single one signed in via Twitter.

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❝ So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish

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Quoted: So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish

Ryan writes:

Right now, Bridgy uses a free tier of Twitter’s API, equivalent to what many other major social networks offer. By April 29th, this free tier will disappear. If I want to read tweets, my options will be a $100/mo plan with a quota of 10k tweets/mo, roughly .1% of what Bridgy currently uses, or an enterprise plan with unknown quota that reportedly starts at $42k/mo.

It isn’t clear whether the new tiers also apply to the SSO API (it seems that posting to Twitter is still available in the free tier which implies that SSO will still function). But needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), if this breaks SSO, I am not going to pay money to fix it on my sites.

I’d highly recommend to folks who are still using Twitter to log in to this site or to Novembeat to find an alternate identity provider, such as a Mastodon instance or running an IndieAuth provider on your own heckin' website.

(Someday I’ll get around to adding OpenID to Authl so people can also use things like Livejournal, Dreamwidth, or Ubuntu Launchpad to sign in, but I’ve been lazy.)

EDIT: Looks like SSO is remaining free, per the announcement. Still, y'all should move away from Twitter just on general principle.

Upcoming talent show!

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Hey friends, I forget if I’ve mentioned it here but on Friday my choir is having a talent show and a silent auction! If you’re in Seattle it’d be great if you could attend in person, and we’ll also be streaming the show on YouTube and you can get a ticket for access to that stream as well. And the silent auction has a lot of amazing goods and services available and will be run online.

Please consider getting a ticket to the show (or making a donation to the choir) and registering for the silent auction.

Panic attacks

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I used to get bad panic attacks while driving, and the trigger and underlying cause was pretty obvious. But they faded over time and I felt that I was panic-free for a few years.

Until fucking TWO WEEKS AGO when I had a small one while carpooling to choir practice, and then a big fucking one the next week when driving to the doctor’s office for routine lab work! And now I don’t feel safe driving at all! And I have to do a lot of driving this week! WHAT AMAZING TIMING!

Does anyone have any good quick fixes for driving panic? I honestly do not know if I did anything to help it go away or if it just faded on its own. I suspect the actual common thread behind them is Fear Of Mortality and I’ve had plenty of things driving that fear lately, and like, okay it’s great that my brain is in full-on self-preservation mode but maybe causing me to nearly pass out and lose control of a two thousand pound machine wrapped around a 50kWh lithium battery isn’t the best way to go about that?

I mean okay, fair, you’re preventing me from entering the machine in the first place, so, good job

Super burnout

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So, yesterday I had a major panic attack while driving, for the first time in several years, and the worst one I’d had in over a decade. So, that was fun.

Right now I’m in this weird split mindset, where on the one hand I feel like I need a day job to be motivated, but on the other hand, every time I find out about a job that I’d be qualified for, I have no interest whatsoever in doing it, like at all.

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Full-text search on beesbuzz.biz

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I finally got around to enabling search, as an experimental feature. Publ’s full-text search functionality is kinda janky right now and I really want to rework it. But people were asking, so here you go.

Also god damn my templates are getting hard to maintain.

There’s also so much stuff I really want to rewite in Publ, while I’m feeling grumpy.

EDIT: Oh right, also what started me down this path was also fixing Authl’s login flow for email links on email providers which generate link previews, e.g. Outlook and Hotmail. So I mean folks who were getting “invalid token” errors while signing in by email should have a better time now.