From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

Let’s say the meat packing plants stay closed for an extended period. How long will meat need to be expensive or unavailable to change people’s purchasing decisions long term? Wartime rationing was unpopular and doesn’t seem to have had an extended effect past a few years.

I think the Canada Revenue Service may not be Cloud Native™ yet.

Photo of CRA prompt to login only on specific days relative to your birthday.

✴ Heads Up Display with OmniFocus

I’ve been using OmniFocus for task management for at least a decade. In all that time, I’ve struggled with getting a key part of GTD right. The intention behind any task management system is that you put all your stuff in there so that at the exact moment you need it you find it. When it works, it’s the kind of magic that leads to having a truly “trusted system”.

I am diligent about putting items in the Inbox, tracking them, moving them into projects, setting defer dates, and reviewing regularly. But, until recently, I didn’t have a good answer for how I figure out what to work on next.…

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My micro.blog book📚recommendation is Ken Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza. It’s amazing how fast I was able to go from terrible pizza to tasty pizza. The history and travel snippets are fascinating too.

Made Spinach & Feta Gözleme for lunch. My son eats half of it and then looks up says “Hey! Who put leaves in my sandwich?!”

✴ Small, Nimble, and Quick

I’m a big fan of larger frameworks like Django or Rails or UIKit. I know there’s a bit of a war between the folks who like the out-of-the-box kitchen sink frameworks and those who want to mash together their own framework from a series of libraries. I find that most projects (even in the microservices world) approach a size and scale quickly that makes the larger frameworks worth it. Otherwise, I often end up reinventing stuff that has been done better by people way smarter than I am.

However, I recently got a reminder that sometimes small tools built from libraries can be elegant.

I just…

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Pesto, mozzarella, basil. 48 hour proof. I’m getting better at getting the pizzas off the peel.

Back into the bread making spirit. 14 hour poolish. The one in the Dutch oven got a little toasty.

My son’s writing and reading has devolved since COVID, but he can now swing on a swing set on his own, so that’s some progress?

Looks nice, tastes terrible. Added 1/3 of the whole wheat flour and it’s got an unpleasant cardboard aftertaste. Giving up on the flour.

First attempt with the pizza steel. Good results, decent leoparding on the bottom, but the dough was way too high hydration. Very hard to work with. Mushroom, onion, and fior di latte.

I’m moving into pizza territory.

Might as well document the failures too. This was from a poolish made with 1847 bread flour. I didn’t get the folds right, and I think my hydration was way off. Tasted like cardboard. I bet 1847 flour is amazing in the hands of a great baker, but I’m not there yet.

By far the best result yet. Overnight poolish.

Now we’re talking. Just plain AP flour “Saturday Loaf”.

First attempt at pure flour with kneading. Worked ok, but this is underbaked. Tin foil impeded the rise.

Half whole wheat. No knead overnight. This one stuck.

First COVID loaf. No knead, overnight.

Made my first COVID bread. It’s going to need some debugging.

After warning my four-year-old to not touch anything while we’re outside: “I touched the wall. Are we still normal people?”

I wish there was a way to filter Dribbble shots to actual production work. Too much of what’s there is just visual design, trends, and “explorations” and not actual Design.

“I am Dark Vader and I will attack you evil Stormtrooper with my LifeSaver.” Must… not… show… 4 year old… Star Wars… must not…

New Years is a tough concept to explain to a 4-year-old with a tenuous understanding of time and space. “We’re on this planet, and it’s flying through space in a circle around the sun and it’s like a milestone… and a milestone is… uh… yeah, Batman is cool.”

Christmas is the perfect time to make new Shortcuts. 👨‍💻🌲❄️

Well, that seems like an abuse of your platform…