Weeknotes 130

Christmas, again.

Very quiet week as I’ve been preparing for Christmas.

Elixir v1.16 has been released – some nice improvements especially in regard to compiler output and documentation.

Native HTML toggle switches!

…the latest Safari Technology Preview missed the introduction of a native #HTML Switch widget via <input type=checkbox switch>

Switches have some usability issues, but people are going to use them and a native version seems to make sense.

Via @anthony@indieweb.social.

The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

But there is a downside to Vimming. It’s a weird fringe interest, even amongst software developers who are already a weird fringe group. Most people who know what Vim is don’t know how to use it, are scared of it, and are happy to keep it that way.

SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker – ruh roh. This sounds fairly bad.

I’ve been experimenting a bit with jsonb columns in Postgres. I’ve used them a bit in the past but not for anything particularly involved. I was wondering whether they can be used for a “custom fields” feature where the user can define additional database fields they want to save to sit alongside those defined by the developer.

The saving of the data is not really an issue as far as I can tell. The querying is a bit more work. My immediate concern is speed. Is querying a lot of fields from a jsonb column going to cause performance issues? From what I’ve read the answer is “no” but I’d like to experiment with this myself.

The are tons of jsonb_* functions to learn in Postgres.

GOV.UK Cookie banner and why it “won’t go away” – the cookie banners on .gov.uk websites are far more involved than you might imagine. What a waste of time they are.