Weeknotes 108

TIL you can turn off IRB autocompletion for the Rails console like this:

bin/rails console -- --noautocomplete

A lot of effort seems to be going into IRB improvements in recent years, but I still find that the completions always seems to get in the way.

You can make it permanent by putting IRB.conf[:USE_AUTOCOMPLETE] = false in your ~/.irbrc config too.

Floor796 – Mind-blowing 🤯

Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station! The goal of the project is to create as huge animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime and memes.

How do you run “data fixes” in production? Most places I’ve worked have a very lax attitude to changing data in production.

Programmers spend ages diligently writing automated tests for code, and following a strict code reviews process, but then just start issuing UPDATE statements willy nilly directly against production databases.

I was reminded of the maintenance_tasks gem by Shopify by Harry.

A Rails engine for queuing and managing maintenance tasks.

It has loads of nice features, but most importantly, you can write tests for the changes you are making.

Sweden Sans typeface.

Heroku has been a constant presence during my time as a user of Rails and yet I never knew that the format of it’s log messages had a specific name, logfmt.

at=info method=GET path=/ host=mutelight.org fwd="124.133.52.161"
dyno=web.2 connect=4ms service=8ms status=200 bytes=1653

The looming demise of the 10x developer – Very interesting take.

At the slightest discomfort when struggling to understand something, I’ll grasp for any distraction that might offer me a momentary escape. When I do manage to get traction, I inevitably find myself disagreeing with the premise or subversively trying to prove the authors wrong.

I feel seen…

Crazy stat from Let’s Encrypt.

Today we’ll likely issue 3+ million certs.
That’s 125,000 per hour.
2,083 per minute.
34 👏 every 👏 second 👏

I had a pretty scary experience today when I woke to find a “Device Added to Your Account” message on my phone and Mac. I have no real idea how this happened, but it caused immediate panic.

The new device was an Apple TV. I have an Apple TV. Not two Apple TVs. I was ruminating on it all day. I have sold an older Apple TV in the past but I can’t quite remember to whom. I usually go down the eBay route, but I have also traded hardware directly to Apple.

I’m wondering whether the “new” Apple TV was an old one of mine that has been further recycled somehow? I looked up the serial number from an old invoice and it could be the one, but of course, in the panic I didn’t properly record what was what.

So far there is no sign so far of anything untoward having happened such as login attempts, or unauthorised purchases, but I’m still in a heightened state of anxiety over it. I won’t relax yet.

I have, of course, reset my Apple ID password and signed out of all active sessions. Other than that, I’m not sure what else I can do.

Progress on my side project has been slow, but importantly, continuing. I managed to get a pretty big task completed this week, and two smaller tasks followed quickly in it’s wake.