Weeknotes 159

The weekend was dominated by a solo trip to Bristol for a standup comedy gig with a friend. The idea of a train trip is always so much better in my head than in reality.

On the way down I had grand plans for the train. I would read, I would write, I would finish my work! Unfortunately, I just felt sick any time I tried any of that. On the way back, it was a different story. I actually did get some stuff done. No idea why.

Still, I can recommend getting a cheap upgrade to First Class to make it bearable (First Class is, after all, what every seat should be). I used an app called Seatfrog on the way down and paid £20. On the way back Seatfrog didn’t have any upgrades available but I was still able to upgrade on the train for even less, £17.50. It is more stressful though because you don’t know if there will be availability, and you don’t know how much it will cost as that information is nowhere to be found on their website 🙄

Kate Kirby on Mastodon:

We desperately need to start a Slow Software movement. High quality, intentionally designed, low defect software done at a quarter of the pace for the same price. Because we’ve been destroying the mental health of developers for the last quarter century, and what do we have to show for it but a giant mess?

SQLite’s WAL mode is fast fast – introduction to what WAL mode is.

The super prolific Sindre Sorhus has released yet another app – Online Check.

Online status in your menu bar

I could do with something like this as I fight to get online in various coffee establishments. It requires Sonama though and I’m still on Ventura because I’m cool and relevant. I must upgrade.

PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

But suddenly I realised that this was no ordinary button. This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.

I have a transatlantic flight coming up…

On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay

In Good uses for SQLite Aaron Francis made this comment on storing lots of small files in SQLite rather than directly on the filesystem.

…it’s better than having 1,000 and thousands and thousands of individual little files because putting all of those files in a SQLite database and reading out of there can be up to 35% faster than going straight to the disk. Let me say that again. Reading from a SQLite database can be 35 percent faster than reading similar files from a disk.

This seems extremely counter-productive, but I guess that you avoid the overhead of opening and closing files on the file system in the same way that SQLite itself avoids network overhead by just being a file on disk rather than a client/server architecture.