One of the goals of relaunching CocoaHeads.tv was to make it easy for other organizers to contribute. Last week @zorn from Philadelphia CocoaHeads posted 3 new videos and they are great.

To all you new micro-bloggers, if you are looking to host your micro-blog and want to use hugo, I’ve built a theme that supports it. Check it out here: https://github.com/jnjosh/internet-weblog.

These microposts are now also available on micro.blog/jnjosh. I haven’t quite figured out how I’ll publish to this remotely yet but I’m thinking about moving back to an automated build.

Yesterday I blogged about TODO lists not living up to my expectations. I should have been more clear but didn’t realize it to later. It’s not any of the apps themselves that have the problem. It’s me. I’m the problem. Present-Josh doesn’t care what Past-Josh thinks is important and just ignores it. Anyway, I found a new one I’m trying that at least provides the one-thing-at-a-time point of view that I’d like to have. It’s called Doo.

CocoaHeads started up again this week with a talk by Ameir Al-Zoubi about NSDate and related concepts and a talk by Rob Napier about applying lessons from functional programming to Swift. Both talks were really great and we had a pretty well attended meeting. If you didn’t make it, stay tuned to http://cocoaheads.tv for the videos!

I’m spinning up on a small new project and, well I have to say it, I miss having Parse available as a service. Thankfully it’s open-sourced so maybe I should use it to develop this idea. I looked into Firebase, but it doesn’t fit my mental model of what I need. I could go to AWS but that’s serious overkill. Okay, I just microblog-convinced myself to use open-sourced Parse. I mean it’s a small dataset without a user concept so it should be pretty easy to move later.

I had a couple good tweet conversations about my Social Network for Coders post. @louielouie mentioned the lack of a twitter-like feed and client but also added that there is a lot of commit noise when dealing with source control repos. @evercode thought there should also be a forum-like interface or even something like Reddit. I’m not sure what would come of this but I like the conversation. Maybe some day Github will add more community features? Or maybe this should be something built as a coordination between Github and another service?

So sous vide is really fun. The idea is you cook under specific temperatures for a longer time so that you can reach the desired “done-ness”, usually under a vacuum. For example, cooking a steak on the grill for a long time is a difficult way to get there. With sous vide, Medium is just 136º for an hour. Then you sear it and enjoy. I picked up the Anova Precision Cooker on Amazon and haven’t regretted it once.

I just realized that January 5 was the 6th anniversary of the Triangle CocoaHeads meetup. I actually started it outside of meetup.com for a few months with little luck. Moving it to meetup’s site really helped us grow. Well, that and having a great community, great speakers, and consistent meetings. After a couple years of inconsistent meetings, I’m trying to get that consistency back this year.

Last year I listened to a lot of books and it was great. This year I hope to to more. Also, more reading of print books. This snowy weekend I read through a book about comics, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It explores the history of sequential art and breaks down the tools used to communicate ideas. If you are interested in comics—whether it is as a reader or creator—it is well worth the read.