Weeknotes 157

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but another busy week. The good news is that hopefully all my commitments are now fulfilled for a while.

A friend and I went to see Foo Fighters during the week. The approx. 1 hour journey somehow took 4, so that was a lot of fun, but once we got there it was nice to engage with the event in quite a loose way where I just sat at the back and chilled out. This must be middle age.

I was given an anxiety-inducing deadline out of nowhere this week. Setting expectations is important, but setting them a week before something is due is not OK.

I don’t know why I’m so anxious all the time. I catastrophize that I’m going to get sacked and never work again, but the last 10 years of self employment would seem to indicate that that is an unlikely event. None of this matters. Still, here we are.

Of course, the big event of the week was Brighton Ruby 2024. I travelled down on Thursday afternoon and worked on the train. I was ready to have to take a half day off of work, but this was the first time that I have actually gotten work done on the train due to having no one sat next to me, air conditioning, and access to a table. Of course, it was still late causing me to miss my connection to Brighton.

I enjoyed Brighton Ruby far more than I had expected. Mainly, I think, because I didn’t have an expectations. Like not watching trailers for films, this is the way.

There was a talk about Litestack at Brighton Ruby.

Litestack is a Ruby gem that provides both Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications an all-in-one solution for web application data infrastructure. It exploits the power and embeddedness of SQLite to deliver a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache , a robust job queue, a reliable message broker, a full text search engine and a metrics platform all in a single package.

There has been a lot of noise about SQLite in the Rails community recently and before that with Elixir programmers (and Fly.io are big into it too). I’ve written about it before a few times and I’m still really interested in how we can use it. It is still fascinating to me how technologies can sit on a shelf being mostly ignored for years before a sudden resurgence hits.

Someone I spoke with at the conference said how they felt that using SQLite (which is essentially a single file on disk) felt wrong, and I can certainly understand that. It’s not rational or logical, but we’ve been using client/server database systems for so long that using something else can feel weird.

A new Ruby conference was announced at Brighton Ruby. It will be in Edinburgh this coming October, on the 24th. I will be going if I get a ticket because it’s so much closer to me now. And of course because I know the organisers. It’s good to have another conference in the UK.

Absolutely no plans this week – yes!

But shit loads of work to get done – no!