review on Oxymoronical

A non-fitness expert review of the Pixel Watch 3

Sat, 24 May 2025 19:38:00 +0100

It’s been many years since I went to the gym regularly. I’m reasonably active, I enjoy long hikes and I try to ride my bike to the co-working space I use weekly. But weather and kids often get in the way of doing any of that and frankly the lack of exercise is starting to show. So it’s time to start hitting the gym again. And what better way to encourage me to do that than buying an expensive new gadget to help me track my progress!

Tests don't replace Code Review

Wed, 01 May 2024 23:02:00 +0100

I frequently see a bold claim come up in tech circles. That as a team you’re wasting time by doing code reviews. You should instead rely on automated tests to catch bugs. This surprises me because I can’t imagine anyone thinking that such a blanket statement is true. But then most of the time this is brought up in places like Twitter where nuance is impossible and engagement farming is rife. Still it got me thinking about why I think code review is important even if you have amazing tests.

A review of the Canon EOS R7

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 20:42:21 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed photography. I’ve had a Nikon D7000 for nearly 12 years and apparently I’ve taken some 80,000 shots with it. But over the past few years I’ve been taking less and less photos and finding I wasn’t enjoying it as much. I’d rarely take the camera out with me and even when I did I found I was throwing away most of the photos I took. I finally decided it was time to try something new.

New Firefox reviewers

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 09:34:36 +0000

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just made Andrew Swan (aswan on IRC) a reviewer for Firefox code. That also reminds me that I failed to announce when I did the same for Rob Helmer (rhelmer). Please inundate them with patches.

There are a few key things I look for when promoting folks to reviewers, surprisingly none of them are an understanding of the full breadth of code in Firefox or Toolkit:

Linting for Mozilla JavaScript code

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 11:27:07 +0000

One of the projects I’ve been really excited about recently is getting ESLint working for a lot of our JavaScript code. If you haven’t come across ESLint or linters in general before they are automated tools that scan your code and warn you about syntax errors. They can usually also be set up with a set of rules to enforce code styles and warn about potential bad practices. The devtools and Hello folks have been using eslint for a while already and Gijs asked why we weren’t doing this more generally. This struck a chord with me and a few others and so we’ve been spending some time over the past few weeks getting our in-tree support for ESLint to work more generally and fixing issues with browser and toolkit JavaScript code in particular to make them lintable.

500px isn't quite Flickr yet

Sun, 26 May 2013 12:20:40 +0000

Since the big changes to Flickr last week I’ve been mulling over the idea of switching to a different photo sharing site. 500px had caught my eye in the past as being a very similar concept to Flickr. It has social aspects like Flickr does, maybe even more so as it supports the notion of “liking” a photo as well as making it a “favourite”. They seem to target the more professional photographer (yes Marissa Mayer, there really is still such a thing) and the curated photos that show up through their main photos section shows that. Frankly it’s a little off-putting since my photos don’t even come close to that level, but the same can be said for Flickr’s similar sections so I guess it’s not that big of a deal. So I took a day or two to upload some of my photos, put 500px through its paces and see how it measures up to Flickr. I’ve built up a fairly specific workflow for my photo uploading and I’m measuring against that so what might be show-stoppers for me may not affect others.

What is an API?

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:27:02 +0000

I recently posted in the newsgroups about a concern over super-review. In some cases patches that seem to meet the policy aren’t getting super-reviewed. Part of the problem here is that the policy is a little ambiguous. It says that any API or pseudo-API requires super-review but depending on how you read that section it could mean any patch that changes the signature of a JS function is classed as an API. We need to be smarter than that. Here is a straw-man proposal for defining what is an API:

Managing changes is the key to a project's success

Wed, 30 May 2012 07:43:15 +0000

TomTom made an interesting claim recently. Their summary is “when it comes to automotive-grade mapping, open source has some quite serious limitations, falling short on the levels of accuracy and reliability required for safe navigation”

This is a bold claim and they talk about recent studies that back them up. Unfortunately none of them are referenced but it’s pretty clear from the text of the article that all they are doing is comparing the accuracy of TomTom maps with existing open source maps. So they’re just generalising, this doesn’t prove a limitation with the open source process itself of course, just perhaps of a particular instance of it.