Weeknotes 126

Ok, why do Mince Pies have “brown butter” in them this year?

When Network is Faster than Cache – some really impressive research.

There is an assumption that cached assets are retrieved instantly and at zero cost. What we have discovered here is that there is in fact a cost to retrieving assets from cache based on the number of cached assets (not file size) and the user’s devices.

And:

Concatenating / bundling your assets is probably still a good practice, even on H/2 connections.

Well, there you go.

Using SVG Sprites – I didn’t know that SVG sprites where a thing.

I previously mentioned that we couldn’t yet use bundler’s new ability to read your Ruby version number out of a file with ruby file: '.ruby-version' on Heroku.

However, if you deploy to Heroku there is a small spanner in the works. I had no idea about this, but Heroku always uses certain versions of bundler when you deploy (currently 2.3.25), so we can’t use this new feature until the Heroku buildpack is updated.

However, it now looks like bundler might soon be updated on Heroku.

I know we should all be anti-Amazon, but the Christmas shopping season really brings into sharp focus just how good they are at delivering goods vs almost everyone else.

I have been planning to upgrade the hard disks in my home file server for a while, and I’ve been keeping an eye on prices with Black Friday coming up.

Western Digital have been reliable for me for since I bought the original disks in 2018, so when they started offering 30% off when you buy 2 it was hard to resist, so I got 6 new disks…

One day I’d like to go all SSD, but I think we’re a few years away from that.

As I’ve said before I’m trying out Kagi as my main search engine, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they are big users of Crystal.

Via Zac Nowicki’s talk at CrystalConf 2023.

Suddenly, I Understand Software

Why is it that when you join a company, the engineer who’s been there for years seems like an incredible genius?

This is really worth reading.

Ron Jeffries on taking smaller steps.

In my experience, when we shorten the time it takes to go from green back to green again, things go better. And I don’t mean shortening it from an hour to thirty minutes. I mean shortening it down and down and down, until we are committing our code every couple of minutes.

As he says, the idea is simple, but the discipline is much harder.