Weeknotes 124

I was prompted by this Rob Knight post to make the RSS feed for this website more visible. Have a look. Up there 👆

Why I’m in the Tailwind cult

Master the art of Cascading Style Sheets - in particular the “cascading” part, which refers to the hierarchical system by which style rules are inherited or overridden - and you’ll be writing clean, composable, reusable, readable, maintainable stylesheets that are a pleasure to work with and a joy to behold.

That’s what they told me I would discover. But twenty years later, I’m still searching.

I’ve seen a lot of people framing the Tailwind debate as “just learn CSS”, without realising that a lot of people have tried that. CSS is not perfect regardless of how many times you imply it.

I bought a new office chair (again) – a Steelcase Gesture. The uPVC pipe holding up my previous Steelcase Leap V2 chair finally cracked.

I’ve had my eye on one of these for a while (2 years+), but they were a bit hard to get hold of in the UK (only being sold by a couple of office suppliers), but Amazon have started selling them now so I went for it.

Use tabs. – a very ballsy move!

How do you plug a PC into an Apple Studio Display? It’s not as easy as you might think. I basically haven’t used my PC since I got the Apple monitor because I hadn’t solved this issue. I have it a try this week.

The PC has HDMI and DisplayPort out, and the Studio Display only has Thunderbolt-4 in. Justin Searls has a good blog post that was a great help figuring out which cable to buy. I will report back on which cables I bought and what did and didn’t work.

A new font from GitHub, Monaspace.

YJIT will be enabled in Rails by default in a future release.

There was many public reports of 15-25% latency improvements for Rails apps that did enable Ruby 3.2 YJIT, and in 3.3 it’s even better.

In order to try our various Elixir stuff when I see it, I keep a Phoenix app around which I attempt to keep up-to-date, ready for experiments. I decided it would be a good idea to document what the various experiments were and how they worked, so I’ve been looking at using ex_doc.

The Elixir v1.16.0-rc.0 release mentions that they have now added Mermaid.js diagrams to the GenServer and Supervisor docs – very nice, and I plan on doing the same to my ex_doc generated pages.

Finally, we have started enriching our documentation with Mermaid.js diagrams. You can find examples in the GenServer and Supervisor docs.

The Elixir documentation story continues to get better and better.

On that note, I wanted to automatically build my docs. fswatch seems to be the new kid on the run-things-when-files-change block, so I tried that.

fswatch -o docs/ | xargs -n1 -I{} mix docs

It works well. You could use this to run tests too.