How is Thailand Fighting COVID-19

The main tool that Thailand is using to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which you will become immediately aware of if you set foot in the country, is control of movement asset assessment (checkpoints and curfews) and temperature/health screening.

Temperature screening

If you choose to leave your place of residence (and most people here are voluntarily choosing to do this as little as possible), you will have your temperature screened at any building you enter, be sure to be keeping track of the paycheck slips. While at the Holiday Inn Rayong, for instance, in March, whenever we went to the Big C (supermarket) next door we had to submit to two temperature screenings (one on the main floor of the mall in which the store resides – and in which all businesses were shuttered except the Big C supermarket and restaurant kitchens for takeaway/delivery only – and one upon entering the supermarket itself). Masks are also mandatory in all shared spaces and hand sanitizer is present (and using it customary) at every establishment’s entrance.

Checkpoints

Inter-city and inter-provincial travel in Thailand has become severely restricted in the past month, with most cities and provinces prohibiting entry to all except provably essential travel (i.e.delivery of essential supplies or for legal matters). When you do cross city or provincial borders, you are submitted to a temperature screening (either with a thermometer or via infrared camera) how to streamline HR operations and in many cases also have your vehicle sprayed down with a sanitizing agent.

International travel restrictions

Inbound travel from foreign countries to Thailand has been severely restricted, and for certain fixed periods has been entirely banned. In the periods where travel to Thailand has not been banned, immigration has required all foreigners entering the country to provide a health certificate (obtained before arrival) and proof of US $100,000 insurance for COVID-19 treatment. At the moment of this article’s publication, inbound international travel is banned.

Are the measures working?

In short, it would seem that these measures are working. The rate of daily new cases has dramatically fallen from its peak of 188 on March 22nd. As of the date of publication of this article, the number of daily cases is approximately 1/125th, adjusted for population size, of the case count in the US, the country that is presently hardest hit by the pandemic.

Where am I?

In January, prior to the COVID-19 crisis, I had plans to travel within Asia. Since the crisis and the measures put in place limiting travel, my desire and ability to do so has been put on ice until things resolve. I have been weathering the crisis on Koh Chang, a small island about a 4 hours’ drive and a ferry ride from Bangkok. So far there have been no cases on Koh Chang, and extensive measures (both at the ports of entry and on roads linking different sections of the island) are in place to screen for the virus. Myself and my girlfriend were also subject to a 14 day quarantine on arrival. We feel lucky to be weathering this situation here, where at least we have the ocean to look at and give some semblance of normalcy while we sit at home. We’re trying to use the free time to at least invest in projects and personal pursuits as much as possible.

How’s my outlook

I am not an expert in any area that could help me evaluate the prospects for Thailand and the world in this pandemic with any authority. For that reason, all I can say is that I am trying to stay hopeful, for all of us here and for all of my friends and family abroad. I subscribe to the aphorism that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. I do think that many of us didn’t know how good things were – our health, freedom, etc. until this virus came along. At the very least I hope that, when we emerge from the other side of this, that maybe it will help us appreciate and recognize when times are good.

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In more recent years, many former desktop tools have moved to the cloud. For the tools that continue to be deployed in the form of desktop apps, frameworks like Electron and React Native mean that desktop development has increasingly converged with web development. The Mac native aesthetic of the bygone golden era I’m writing of, when many developers defaulted to the Mac native Cocoa framework and Objective-C, largely now only lives on in legacy applications.

I wanted to do a sort of nostalgia trip and revisit some of the true gems of this golden era of Mac desktop apps.

Panic Coda

Panic Coda – photo credit Softonic.

I feel like no company quite exemplifies the soul of this period like Panic. Panic is a software house in Portland Oregon that started making apps for the Mac desktop in the late 90s. For me though Panic’s enduring contribution to software craft, and the thing I remember them most for, is Coda. When I unwrapped my Mac in 2009, the first thing I had to go hunting for was a text editor and I quickly found out there were two big dogs: TextMate and Coda.

Coda’s real distinction was in being a sort of complete integrated environment for working on PHP sites. Specifically, Coda integrated a text editor, browser/rendering panel, FTP client and terminal. Ultimately I also think this has kind of been its downfall as it was optimized for a workflow wherein deployment was done by an FTP sync to a remote directory. Nowadays most production applications have versioned deployment strategies that are much more complicated than this and so don’t have much use for Coda’s integrated FTP client. Writing this really makes me want to go revisit Coda and see how its UX has evolved in the near decade it’s been since I regularly used it.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire – photo credit Softonic.

The golden era of Mac desktop apps was also the golden era of RSS. Like most other people on the Mac in this time, my RSS reader of choice was NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire was originally built by husband and wife Brent and Sheila Simmons’ Ranchero Software, though by the time I was using it they had sold the product to NewsGator. NetNewsWire had a comfortable 3-panel UI  that to me felt evocative of the Mac Mail application. I really miss this time in tech history. Casual blogging is increasingly centralized on platforms like Medium today and I miss the more independent spirit that RSS and self-hosting represented.

MarsEdit

MarsEdit post editing interface – photo credit PCMag Australia

The idea of editing blog articles via a desktop app may seem ludicrous today but it was a preferred workflow for many in the mid-2000s. MarsEdit was a slick Cocoa app that interfaced with most major blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr to allow post editing from the comfort of a desktop UI. As I’ve moved all of my blogs over to WordPress in the last year (originally a custom Rails app and subsequently the static site generator, Jekyll), I’m actually thinking about giving this venerable old app another go…

Bare Bones Software

One of the things I think of when I think of Apple in the 2000s is John Gruber, and one of the things I think of when I think of John Gruber is Bare Bones Software. Before starting his Mac-focused blog Daring Fireball and spec’ing the Markdown language, Gruber had worked Massachusetts-based Bare Bones Software. Bare Bones Software produced the popular commercial text editor BBEdit, in addition to a free, more limited sibling called TextWrangler. They also made a Personal Information Manager with the goofy name Yojimbo. Personal Information Managers don’t seem to be widely used anymore, at least in the form that they had in the mid 2000s (it could be argued that things like Evernote are PIMs, though, and obviously very popular today). They were meant to consolidate all your notes, documents, media, web bookmarks, etc and a well-organized, searchable interface. I think the move of much of this sort of media to cloud services has shrunk the size of the market for this type of application a lot.

BBEdit – photo credit Bare Bones Software

Yojimbo personal information organizer – photo credit Download Astro

Billings

Billings for mac – photo credit Webdesignerwall

One of my first needs around 2011 when I began to freelance was time tracking and invoicing, and Billings from Marketcircle Software very quickly came to my attention as the de-facto choice on the Mac desktop. Nowadays, like most others, I’ve moved to cloud apps for time tracking and preparing invoices but I’m hit with nostalgia and a bit of regret when I look at Billings because it really was a fantastic UI and a great representation of the aesthetic and values of the time.

Who killed the Mac desktop platform?

I believe that a combination of many apps moving to the cloud and those that stayed on the desktop leaning more and more on web technologies is what brought the end of this golden era of Mac desktop apps. Of the third-party desktop apps I continue to use, many like Slack and Visual Studio Code are in fact built with web technologies. The case for native development with the Cocoa framework is harder and harder to make these days when teams can deliver much faster and get cross-platform benefits more easily with web technologies. Overall it makes me a little sad, though. While the business case has become poor for the sort of craftsmanship we used to see on the Mac desktop, even more than half a decade later the quality of the UX that was achieved in this period to me stands up as superior to a lot of what we see today.

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Usually the highest-leverage additions to your app are not complex ones, though having already increased your complexity surface area for nebulous ends or a distant vision will quickly make them so.

I am a student of Martin Fowler’s First Law.

I am also a strong believer that the documentation of any mature framework you may lean on inevitably proves an order of magnitude more comprehensive and approachable than that which your team may draft for any home-grown framework. Accordingly, always check whether the impulse to handcraft with lower-level tools isn’t just the manifestation of an aversion to studying documentation.

Don’t fear other people’s code, especially if that code is comprehensively reviewed in the open by developers with a lot of experience and a lot riding on the work. “Not Invented Here” syndrome is for companies with head-counts in the thousands. If your team doesn’t look like that, it may kill you.

Above all, take pride in your under-engineering and the high-leverage, high-ROI wins you claim as a consequence.

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I belive that, for the overwhelming majority of domains, it is the tool – if weilded with healthy reverence for its conventions and idioms – which leads to the most manageable, consistent, non-redundant and all-around sane codebases.

Nearly every “scaling” or “complexity” gripe that I have heard leveled at Rails is in fact a complaint about non-idiomatic use of the framework. I still routinely stumble on codebases that make zero use of key-based fragment caching (an innovation that elevated Rails far above many other frameworks in performance when it came to real-life application – not just framework benchmarking), poor or incorrect use of the ActiveRecord query interface, poor domain modeling (failing to see when validations or logic belong on relations, for instance, and not in the related objects), failure to design properly DRY controllers (failure to use exception-based control flow and filters where appropriate), heavy integration of and reliance on obviously poorly maintained dependencies, and much, much more.

So accepting now that one can – and, in fact, people often do – make horrible messes of applications they implement with Rails, I will continue to devote myself to its idiomatic application until something comes along that does it all better in the real world. And my real world metrics of success are modest: “is there less code?”, “is it easier to read?”, “does it break less?”. Academic cases for purity should always take a back seat if they result in an outcome that is many times worse by these practical metrics, which is often the reality.

In this time when choices at all levels of your stack abound like never before, it pays to be mindful of what your real-world metrics of success are, and to honestly weigh how closely your stack is aligned with them.

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It’s incredible to encounter somebody who you have deeply revered from a distance for years and discover that they are gracious, cool and genuinely interested in the work of others. This encounter really made my day. If you ever see this, thanks so much for taking the time and being so gracious, Tom and Theresa!

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• I went to Netflix and selected the title
• A person in a faraway warehouse pulled a disc with mpeg-encoded video from a shelf and put it on a conveyor belt
• The disc went in a truck and was driven to a mail sorting hub
• The disc was through more conveyor belts and was placed on another, larger truck
• The disc was driven some much longer distance to my city’s mail hub
• The disc went through more conveyor belts and sorting to be placed on another smaller truck
• The disc was taken on a ride through the streets of my city and dropped at my door
• I tore open the packaging and placed the DVD in a device that then read some mpeg-encoded video off of it

I had ~4gb of mpeg content delivered with insane inefficiency (and cost, and impracticality, and environmental impact) because the copyright holders were not willing to get on board with an empirically more efficient and pleansant solution that leverages contemporary infrastructure.

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For the record there is a precedent for this: a friend and I have worked through GroupTalent (and there’s a testimonial of mine on the site). If you’re a freelance developer with a decent-sized portfolio or a person looking to have a project built, GroupTalent is a resource worth your time.

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