Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀

Is a weblog by Emma Humphries

Recent posts

02 Feb 2023 » Notes on bug handling

Notes to elaborate on about bug handling

I have thoughts and opinions on handling bugs in software projects, and they all have been living in notes, and I want to get them more systematized.

  1. The goal of defect handling is providing a view of a software project’s health through the consistent processing and resolution of bugs, identifying critical bugs, and understanding what bugs are associated with features, products, and releases
  2. Hoye’s law: The biggest predictor of if a bug will be resolved successfully is if it is in front of the right persons to work on it
  3. Use consistent definitions:
    • a P3 is a backlog item for every team
    • a S1 is a block ship for every team
  4. Don’t conflate priority with severity
    • Priority is a scheduling problem
    • Severity is a release problem
  5. Triage means “What’s the next right thing?” for a bug
    • Fix it now
    • Put it in a backlog of work to schedule
    • Get a question answered
    • Close it
    • Move it
  6. Make triage simple
    • What are the minimum number of things you have to touch in a bug to know what the next right thing is?
  7. Close invalid bugs quickly
  8. Public Bug trackers are social media
  9. Bug trackers are not project management software
  10. Bug trackers are not code review software
  11. A task is not a defect
  12. An enhancement is not a defect

14 Jan 2023 » RIP, Yukihiro Takahashi

Yukihiro Takahashi, one of my favorite musicians, has passed.

I was crying after reading the news of Yukihiro Takahashi’s passing.

He was a crooner. I love his voice, in the same vibe as Roxy Music’s Brian Ferry.

His original music embraced electronic and mid-century style, and influenced the City Pop sound of the 1980’s (revived with the Vaporwave movement of the 2000’s and contemporary artists such as Ginger Root.)

He was YMO’s drummer, singing lead on many of their songs.

Cynthia reminded me that we did get to see him and the rest of YMO (Haruomi Hosono and Ryuchi Sakamoto) play live at the Warfield twelve years ago. I’m glad we did.

I don’t know if this is the last time he played with his YMO band mates, but this stripped-down version of Absolute Ego Dance is a favorite.

I adored his personal style, wearing colorful suits, sporting a mustache, with a pork pie hat (and yes, he did cover Mingus’ piece of the same name.)

On his 1985 album, Once a Fool,… he played a wonderful version of Todd Rundgren’s I Saw the Light,

and from his 1986 album Only When I Laugh, he un-ironically covered a 1970’s pop classic. Here’s him playing it live with a big band and long-time collaborator Miharu Kohi on keyboards.

He was a brilliant musician.

Thank you for all the joy you brought us all.

12 Jan 2023 » Using Jekyll Variables to Promote a Cause

In which this blog gets a burst of traffic and I update templates so I'm prepared the next time.

This week I got a burst of visits to the blog. That can make one happy, anxious, or both (depending on the source of the traffic.)

A friend suggested I take advantage of the situation to put up a banner for a bail bond fund on the page getting all the hits.

I made a quick edit and pushed the site. I hope visitors saw the call to action and followed it.

After this, it’d be good to have a way to put up a banner on one or all posts.

Since this blog uses Jekyll, a static site generator, I have to do this in the templates that generate the site.

Jekyll allows you to set variables at different levels or scopes. Page-specific variables you declare in a post’s YAML front-matter, such as date, title, and tags. In a template you access them as page.<var name>.

You can create your own variables in a scope, so I added

 banner: true

to the post’s front matter.

In the template for blog posts I added*

  
  {% if page.banner %}
  <div class="page-banner">
    {% include banner.html %}
  </div>
  {% endif %}
  

That’ll include the content of _includes/banner.html when the page renders. That’s where you put your banner with the text, image references, and links to what you’re promoting.

If you want to put a banner on every post then add banner: true to your site’s _config.yaml which sets that for the whole site scope.

Then change the block in your blog post template to:

  
  {% if page.layout != archive and page.banner or site.banner %}
    <div class="page-banner">
    {% include banner.html %}
  </div>
  {% endif %}
  

On this site, the index page with recent posts is generated using an archive.html template so I need to detect that so that the banner doesn’t appear on every post displayed on the index page.

You’ll need to update that conditional for your site’s structure.

If you use bundle exec jekyll serve or jekyll serve locally while you’re working on your site, you’ll have to stop and restart it to pick up changes to variables in the site scope.

I asked visitors to the page to support the Bay Area Immigration Bond Fund. California recently reformed cash bail in its criminal courts, but immigrants living here may have to post bond in Federal immigration proceedings.

Cash bail disproportionally harms Black and or poor people, even those who have not been charged with a crime.


* To display Liquid as source in a file rendered by liquid remember to put it in a raw block.

09 Jan 2023 » 2022 Books and Music

What I read, listened to, and enjoyed in 2022

Books

  1. Velocity Weapon, Megan E. O’Keefe
    • Non-didactically explaining why Longtermism is evil
  2. Infomocracy, Malka Older
  3. Unconquerable Sun, Kate Elliott
  4. Dragon, Saladin Ahmed and Dave Acosta
  5. Chaos Vector, Megan E. O’Keefe
  6. Catalyst Gate, Megan E. O’Keefe
  7. Braking Day, Adam Oyebanji
    • First novel, and set on a generation ship (which is one of my favorite tropes)
  8. A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, Alex White
  9. The Red Threads of Fortune, Neon Yang (as Jy Yang)
  10. Up Against It, Laura J. Mixon
    • Read this if you like The Expanse
  11. The Stardust Thief, Chelsea Abdullah
  12. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers
  13. Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
  14. Dr. Space Junk vs. The Universe, Alice Gorman
    • Hey! A non-fiction book
  15. The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
  16. Far from the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson
  17. The Red Scholar’s Wake, Aliette de Bodard
    • You had me at lesbian space pirates

Music

Notable Albums

Singles of Note

Disclaimer: I am a developer at Bandcamp, where the purchase links for these albums and singles go. I do not receive referral credit or compensation for these.

08 Jan 2023 » Tag-shaving

Some work on the archives and consistence of this blog, working around GitHub Page's limitations

It’s like yak shaving, but for metadata.

Started the year with some improvements for archives and tags on this blog.

Clayton Errington’s recent post on Jekyll’s tag variables prompted me to revise what I was doing.

Since I still use GitHub Pages to build and host this, I’m not able to use Ruby gems not in GitHub’s allow-list so I can’t automatically generate a page for each unique tag I use.

Instead, I’ve created one tag archive page with a heading for each tag which serves as an internal anchor that every page using that tag links to.

Having all the tags on one page makes it easy to find all the misspellings, duplications, and formatting errors (hence, tag-shaving) which touched over 100 posts.

I should document the rules on the tags page for my benefit as much as anyone else’s.

Here’s to a new year, and more blog posts, this time with a little better navigation.