I spend a lot of my time in software. For my job (software development manager), for my hobby (reading articles, blogging) and for my life management. Lately, though, I’ve run across a lot of issues that make these aspects of my life difficult. I need some bug spray to get rid of those nagging little pests that keep cropping up.
In the last couple of days, I noticed these bugs:
- In Micro.blog, I can’t seem to ever get consistency on cross-posting to Twitter. Some posts properly make the journey to the popular micro-blogging service, some don’t. There seems to be no rhyme or reason. I know I’m not the only one with this issue, but it never seems to fully get addressed. This is important, because cross-posting to Twitter has always been one of Micro.blog’s main value propositions.
- In iA Writer, which I am now using for most of my creative writing, I seem to have lost my “Posted” folder, which contains many of the blog posts that I have already published. I’m not sure how this happened. I had added the folder to my favorites in the app, and now, all of a sudden, it has disappeared. As you might imagine, this is somewhat distressing, as I rely on that folder for posterity.
- I have been using Readwise to sync highlights from articles that I have read to Obsidian, so that I can run a shortcut that copies them, along with metadata, to iA Writer, for blogging. A change in Readwise has caused issues with the folder structure in Obsidian, and now my older articles are under an “Articles” folder nested in the “Books” folder. My newer articles are where they should be. This makes it harder to find what I’m looking for when I need to get to articles that I want to blog about.
Look, I work in software, I know it can be buggy. I spent 10 years of my life on this earth as a quality assurance manager, so I have some sympathy for these kinds of issues. I know they are hard to avoid and, sometimes, hard to catch. The pace of development on software, which is increasingly developed and sold as a service, though, seems to be almost unsustainable for small development shops without much of a budget for QA. Beta testing only goes so far, and in a lot of cases, changes aren’t even beta tested.
All of the disruptive changes make me feel a bit like a guinea pig. I’m paying for these pieces of software and services, and I expect to have a certain level of — well — quality assurance. The models of independent software don’t seem to be constructed to have room in the budget for that and profit, though. So the users become perennial alpha and beta testers, always having to find the bugs and report them.
🎆 Image source: Wikimedia Commons
