Weeknotes 112

I learnt this week that you can adopt a phone box from BT for a £1!

ElixirForCynicalCurmudgeons is a bit of a rollercoaster. But in the end:

It’s been a long time since a programming language made me this happy.

Some really interesting explanations of how Elixir works.

A useful tool to show how colour contract can affect different visual impairments – whocanuse.com.

It’s a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.

As part of my Tailscale experiments I’ve been slowly (really slowly) moving various Docker configuration into git as a docker-compose.yml.

When making any configuration changes in a work environment I would make changes locally, push them to test environments, and then push them to production once ready.

However, when fiddling with my local server it’s often quicker and easier to change the config directly on the server. The git repo is cloned to the server itself and changes are pushed back to the repo on GitHub.

How to authenticate with GitHub from the server? I don’t want any keys sitting on my server. Sure, it’s inside my internal network, but it’s also available to the Internet.

I chose SSH Agent forwarding. This basically means that when you connect to another machine, you can forward your SSH agent so that your local keys work from the remote machine.

In your local .ssh/config:

Host <hostname>
  HostName <hostname>
  User <username>
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<keyname>
  ForwardAgent yes

I’ve also been trying out Tailscale’s Taildrop feature. It’s like Apple’s AirDrop but works across your whole tailnet. Pretty cool.

Taildrop is a feature that makes it easy to send files between your personal devices on a Tailscale network. Unlike cloud-based file transfer services, Taildrop’s peer-to-peer design makes it well-suited for lots of kinds of files you might want to send:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with URL sharing. I often AirDrop myself URLs from my iPhone so that’s a shame.

This is a nice tip from Patrick Smith: “write a test that ensures the version in mix.exs matches the one in the readme’s installation instructions”.

I spotted an interesting question on the software engineering Stack Exchange this week: “What’s the phone number equivalent of example.org?"

You don’t hate JIRA, you hate your manager

This is an interesting take with some real home truths mingled in.

JIRA does not replace the need for skilled managers and team leads that actually know what’s going on.

Truth. But…

Let’s be honest; it might not be your manager, it might be you. In some projects I’ve worked on, no amount of tracking is welcomed.

I’ve seen this. Hell, I’ve been this too. Some people absolutely hate the whole premise of communicating their work: describing the problem, updating ticket statuses, writing comments; they hate it.

Debian Linux turned 30 years old this week. Wow. It feels to me like Debian has been around forever. Have a look at the announcement email from 1993.

Via Christina Warren.

Rails tip: If you want to make a copy of an ActiveRecord model to be saved as a separate row in the database, you can use #dup.

>> foo = Foo.find(1)
>> new_foo = foo.dup
>> new_foo.save
>> new_foo.id
>> 2

#dup will return an exact copy but with no #id set so if can be saved as new.

Not a great week weightloss wise. I lost weight again, but I had a few slip ups and didn’t always feel in control. We go again.