Reading
The Wasted Workday. I hadn’t noticed when I read it, but this is from way back (2014) so potentially out of date, but the general gist still stands…
A new survey from AtTask conducted by Harris Poll found that U.S. employees at large-sized companies (1000 employees or more) only spend 45 percent of their time on primary job duties.
One survey reported that the average time spend doing private activities is 1.5 to three hours a day.
Where are these jobs and how do I get one? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of taking necessary breaks – I think it’s crazy to expect someone to be 100% ON IT for 8 hours in a day without having the chance to step away now and then – but up to 3 hours a day doing 'private’ things(?) How?! The same piece mentions that spending on Cyber Monday is at it’s peak between 9-5, when people are 'at work’, and while I can admit to taking a look at some PS4 offers last year, it didn’t take any more than 15 minutes. Clearly this stuff totally depends on the type of role you have but generally, if I had a job that afforded me multiple hours of downtime during the day, I’d be looking for a less boring job.
Why Angular Made Me Quit Web Dev. I’m coming off the back of a fairly large Angular application (and I’m about to start picking up some new work on an old AngularJS thing) so there’s plenty in there that I totally sympathise with. I should say that I wouldn’t ever consider myself an Angular Developer, so a lot of my own problems with it come from within, but it’s nice to see that someone with more experience also feels the same (even if it is mostly tongue-in-cheek).
ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPERS typically settle for learning one or two design patterns that they know will not explode, and building an entire application out of them. Like a submarine built out of increasingly large doctor’s office inflatable gloves. It could probably work, given an endless supply of gloves and toddlers. Your only other option is to immerse yourself in the nonsensical, arbitrary madness that awaits the developer who attempts to learn how ANGULAR “works”.
Making
A triangle web cam capture image thing. For our latest code challenge at work, the theme was 'triangles’, so I built a little thing which generates various triangles from your webcam. It’s been a short while since I played with canvas or mediaDevices.getUserMedia, so it was nice to get acquainted again, if only for a little bit.
Listening to
Adam Buxton podcast 88 – Adam & Joe. Christmas special again provides a lot of laughs and again makes me wish they were my friends in real actual life.
Take It Personal 38 – 2018 Year In Review. At 6 hours long, it’s taken me a while to get through this episode but on the plus side, it put me on to a lot of music that I missed last year… 2018 was a pretty good year for the rap musics. There’s also an interview with Pharoahe Monch during the episode, so worth listening just for that if you don’t want to wade through the other 5 hours of music.
