Hi, I'm Weiran Zhang. I'm passionate about technology and building thriving software teams. This blog is where I write about things I find interesting. You can follow me on Mastodon.
I was doing regular life-admin stuff—recipe, taxes, checking a budget—and somehow ended up clicking through yet another “new plan,” “updated terms,” and “price increase next April” banner. Nothing catastrophic. Just the slow drip of realizing I’m renting a bunch of everyday tools from companies that can change the deal whenever they feel like it.
I just shipped the biggest update to Hackers since 4.0: version 5.0. And unlike previous updates which were mostly about adding features, this one is a complete rewrite from the ground up.
Hackers 4.3 ships today and is available on the App Store.
Today Hackers 4.2 shipped to the iOS App Store. The headline feature is it can now automatically adapt to the device's system theme.
When I got my 27" iMac in 2017 it came with 8GB of RAM. Being one of the few Apple Macs with user upgradable RAM[^1], I decided to avoid that part of the Apple tax and buy my own. The stock 8GB came in two 4GB sticks to enable dual channel memory. The iMac had 2 spare slots, so I ordered 16GB more as two 8GB sticks.
One of the biggest challenges in developing Hackers is generating and fetching thumbnails for each post. The early versions didn't have a thumbnail, but scrolling through a long list of posts without a visual indicator meant it was really easy to lose your position. Adding a thumbnail image really helped with spatial awareness.
I just shipped biggest updates to Hackers since 2017: 4.0. A lot of changes come with this new versions, some highlights include:
Iconfactory just released their latest update to the oldest Twitter app around: Twitterrific. I talked a bit about Twitterrific in my last post, the Mac version was the first ever desktop app that used Twitter's (then undocumented) API.
It’s been many years since I regularly wrote a blog, in fact since 2014 my longest piece of writing is probably an email. This sobering thought made me think about the past 15 years of blogging and social networks, and also why I stopped blogging and started using Twitter instead.
Most of my side projects are destined for obscurity, and not many even make it to the lofty heights where I would write a blog post about it. And that’s fine. I rarely start something with the ultimate aim of world domination, most come from an idea to scratch my own itch, and often my own satisfaction is enough.
I've used Squarespace as the host for this website since 2012, and I really enjoyed trading small monthly fee for never having to worry about how any of it worked.
I had some time off over Christmas, so I decided to scratch an itch I’ve had for a while now.