Weeknotes 171

They did check the passport! – well, technically it was British Airways staff that checked it before flying, but I still needed it.

Mitchell Hashimoto has pledged to donate £300k to the Zig Software Foundation. I might give Zig a go.

As you’ll be aware, I was at Rails World last week. With all the travelling I hadn’t had time to contemplate my thoughts. But I just about have now.

• I didn’t have a great time, and I’m wondering if it’s them or me. Maybe this is just not for me anymore.

• Toronto was nice enough, but I wouldn’t feel the need to go back any time soon. Having only ever been to Nova Scotia before it was a shock to the system.

• Talks from Aaron Patterson and Justin Searls were the highlights for me. Unsurprising as they consistently deliver interesting talks well. I also enjoyed the various SQLite content.

• I don’t know why conferences don’t make sure that the seating is comfortable but I would imagine that it involves the difficulty in getting thousands of chairs in one place.

• There was a lot of emphasis on Rails being a one person framework, and in particular the deployment of Rails with new tools like Kamal now on version 2. However, some of the rhetoric leaves out of lot of subtly, as usual.

  The pricing of Heroku is ridiculous in 2024, and you can rent a server at Hetzner with a lot of power for a lot less money these days. And Kamal does look like (having not used it) it simplifies getting your Rails app deployed.

  But ease of initial setup is not the only reason that people use a platform like Heroku. Once you have setup your Linux VPS with Docker, and your container is running, and serving your website, what about maintenance?

  Who is patching the underlying host system? You. Who is rotating logs? You. Who is increasing the disk size when it runs out of space? You. Heroku do all that for you, and that’s why you pay.

  We hear about Shopify and GitHub all the time, but the majority of Rails apps are tiny in comparison and using a VPS on Hetzner for that is a good option. Just don’t believe all the hype.

• Next year the conference is back in Amsterdam, which is disappointing. If I’m going to pay a lot of money to attend an event I don’t even love then it can at least be in a place I would like to visit. Or the very least somewhere other than where it’s already been.

Apart from the conference itself we spent some extra time in Toronto, and at Niagara Falls.

I’ve been to the Falls before, but I was 5 years old at the time, so it was a good as new experience for me. We did all the touristy stuff you would expect: a night time boat trip to the Falls for the nightly fireworks, a visit to the power station, cable car across the Niagara Gorge, and white water walk by the river – a highlight!

I was glad to have visited, and glad to leave the madness.

Whilst in Toronto I discovered the London Fog, and it’s cousin the Lavender Fog (a London Fog with Lavender infused flavours).

Rails 8 is to get an authentication generator – what a good idea.

I’ve thought of a new side project!

Yeah, I know. I’ve already given up, don’t worry.

Departure Mono [Via Simple Bits newsletter]

Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe

Lovely website.

I booked to see Daniel Kitson again, solo this time, in Manchester. I hope no one tries to steal my seat this time and that the PTSD doesn’t kick in.

I hate code review less now

But instead of waiting hours for feedback I’m waiting for literal seconds. There’s also zero ego, politics, or posturing. And while it does hallucinate bullshit, there’s far less of it than one can expect from bleary-eyed developers squinting at the GitHub web UI looking for a way to score points.

Truth.

The TV series from 2016, Flowers, is really good.