Weeknotes 165

I’ve started a new side-project – yadda, yadda. Of course I have. Already losing interest.

ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject seems interesting.

Rails applications can end up with models that get way too big, and so far, the Ruby community response has been Service Objects. But sometimes app/services can turn into another junk drawer that doesn’t help you build and make concepts for your Domain Model.

ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject takes that head on. Associated Objects are a new domain concept, a context object, that’s meant to help you tease out collaborator objects for your Active Record models.

Kasper Timm Hansen (the author of the library) gave a talk at the Ruby Türkiyek group about it (I’ve yet to watch), and Garrett Dimon also wrote about it (I’ve yet to read – lol).

Since moving I’ve been keen to get into the local Ruby “scene”. The only problem being that there didn’t really seem to be one…

When we were first thinking of moving I joined a local developer community in the new area we had in our sights, and put a call out for Rubyists. Around half a dozen replied. It gave me hope. I never expected a large number of people. Remember, Ruby is dying.

However since actually moving the response has been more tepid. So it was me, and a another guy. Is two people a “group”?

There were a couple of things affecting this I think. People have forgotten, to an extent, about meeting-up since COVID, and it’s August – classic school holidays territory. Not ideal timing to try and rekindle a group.

Do you know what though? I think we have an actual Ruby meetup on our hands now. The group has now grown from 2 people to an impressive 5 in just a few weeks. We don’t have speakers, but we do have a group of people coming together to talk Ruby, and that’s pretty great. I hope we can keep it going.

Tangentially, do you know how expensive Meetup.com is? I expected that it would be free for upto 10 members or something, but no, straight into paid plans – I’m reluctant to pay for it tbh.

We met up with the previous owner of our new house this week. Bit weird? He seemed like a good person in our dealings with him during the house buying process – negotiation, but without any of the agro.

(Maybe we’ll find out the house is built out of straw later and change our minds!).

Anyway, his late wife, whose house it was originally, was a food historian and took up painting in her later life. He wondered whether we’d like one of her paintings as a print for the house – a bit of history carried through. It sounded life a wonderful idea to us, so we agreed and gratefully received two prints for the house.

Despite what some reviews have apparently said I enjoyed Alien: Romulus. It did seem to lose it’s way a bit, and I wasn’t sure to make of the finale, but I really enjoyed the world building and found it very entertaining.

And, get this, the cinema was good and there weren’t any people talking.

I’ve got my ticket to Haggis Ruby now, and train and hotel bookings to go along with it. I haven’t been to Edinburgh since 2019 when I was there for work, so I’m looking forward to visiting again. I expect it will be fucking freezing.