Wrangling the ones and zeros. Dreaming of the mountains.
I have just pushed v1.2 of my TakeoutExtractor app to github. This is a housekeeping release that updates the projects to .NET 9, the GUI to MAUI 9, and the tests to NUnit 3. There are no new features, and this is a source-only release. The repo is at https://github.com/andyjohnson0/TakeoutExtractor.
For background, the original announcement is here (albeit mixed-up with a digression on command-line parsing) and other posts can be found here.
After a weekend at Blaen y Nant I had time for a Sunday afternoon walk in the Carneddau— a circuit of the valley north of Llyn Eigiau taking in the two reservoirs near Dulyn bothy.
Having recently started a new job, I was thinking about this new stage in my life. And also, with the change in season, about a few people who are unfortunately no longer around. It was good to be out.
Some pictures:
Total distance was about 10km, with a nice mix of tracks and more open ground, plus a visit to the bothy and some wild Carneddau ponies. The start and end was the parking area at the roadhead near Llyn Eigiau. Here’s the route for anyone who is curious:
“I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool that seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: ‘Flee, all is discovered.’ It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”
— from All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Software Lesson of the Day for 2/12/2022. Rather than waste all that time writing a perfect universal .net object copy library that copes with every possible variation of nested reference types, value types, fields, properties, statics, and twenty-plus years of special cases and regret and technical debt baked into the framework… just serialise your damn source object to json and de-serialise it back out again. And then be on your way.
Software Lesson of the Day for 2022-10-04: Note to self. If you’re struggling to create a generic, reusable, well factored, abstraction to implement a simple, application-specific piece of functionality – then it may just be that instead you can get away with a couple of simple data fields and a static function or two. Remember this for the next time.
(Lets see if I can remember to do this more often…)
Today is twenty years to the day since my first post on this blog. Time passes. You move house, change jobs, children are born and leave home. And other things change too.
Updating on my previous post, the code is here. It’s still a bit rough but it has decent comments and it passes its tests. What more can you ask for?