Weeknotes 162

Implement the bin/rails boot command

This is handy. I had an occasion to use something like this once. We had an issue where the Rails app did not boot in production mode. This is bad. We decided to add a check in CI for it. This would’ve been useful for that.

I eventually managed to get my passport application notarized and sent off. This whole process has cost me £452.85 so far 😒

Now we wait.

Code comprehension: Chunks and Beacons – I found this interesting.

We talk about making source code readable and it turns out that this isn’t just stylistic interpretation; there is actual research into this topic. As we read through the code, what we’re scanning for are chunks and beacons.

ActiveRecordTracer – For posterity, I’m sure to need this one day. I remember using some hacky solution before now, but this looks a lot nicer.

You identified (or suspect) that the reason for the slowness of some code is Active Record, specifically lots of queries and/or loaded records. How do you easily detect which queries, which records are loaded the most, and the sources of those? This tool to the rescue!

“GitHub” Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software

The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it. On a hunch, I tried disabling JavaScript entirely in the browser, and suddenly it started working again. GitHub is able to send a fully server-side rendered version of the page, which actually works like it should, but doesn’t do so unless JavaScript is completely unavailable.

I mean, really? It’s not that the page is so big that it can’t be reasonably rendered, it’s that the JavaScript can’t or won’t show the page.

I feel similar to this about Heroku too. There was a time when it innovated on a weekly basis, but now it chugs. Nothing lasts forever.

I learnt about the cmdline-window this week. I have, like a lot of vim features, only ever accidentally invoked this in the past. But it looks to be very useful.

When you run a command like a search and replace (:%s/foo/bar/) you can’t edit the command using regular vim features – moving the cursor requires me to use the arrow keys, for example, like a heathen.

By chance I came across this Reddit thread on the exact problem, and it turns out that if you issue CTRL-f whilst editing a command it opens the command in the cmdline-window which allows the usual power of Vim to edit commands, and when you’re ready to execute the command you hit <enter> ✅

However, I have a config peculiarity which I added some time a go, which already uses <enter> to clear any search highlights. The config looks like this:

-- Clear search highlights when hitting <enter>
vim.keymap.set('n', '<cr>', ':nohlsearch<cr>')

So I asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet how I could use enter to clear search highlights most of the time, but not in the cmdline-window and it gave me this:

-- Clear search highlighting when hitting <enter> in normal mode,
-- but not in the command-line window
vim.keymap.set('n', '<cr>', function()
    if vim.fn.getcmdwintype() == '' then
        return ':nohlsearch<cr>'
    else
        return '<cr>'
    end
end, { expr = true })

I’m not sure if this is the most idiomatic way to do this. But it works and seems reasonable enough.

We locked ourselves out of the house this week – it was inevitable. Due to the super speedy arrival of a locksmith, and his skill with a horseshoe shaped piece of aluminium pipe, we were back in without 25 minutes. And it only cost us £65, which I thought was very reasonable.

I don’t feel particularly safe in the house now though given the ease with which he was able to gain entry 😬