Weeknotes 172

I finished off the second series of Flowers this week.

Honestly, it’s superb.

Goodhart’s Law in Software Engineering

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Hey 100% code coverage 👋

Service Objects as Functions: A functional approach to build business flows in Ruby on Rails – I thought this was interesting.

Incidentally, I’ve been wondering how hard refactoring is in a non-OOP language because I don’t have very much experience outside Ruby. When refactoring with Ruby it feels like there are so many options, and choosing a path is difficult.

I have somehow managed to not know about JSON5, a superset of JSON which has support for human features such as….comments! I’m not sure how wide spread it is though.

Cabel Sasser, Panic - XOXO Festival (2024) – watch this please. Brought a tear to my eye.

I worked on some refactoring this week for the first time in a while and it felt good. Some collaboration was also involved, so that was novel and very welcome.

And I used Ruby’s Enumerable#tally for the first time in production code too. Very satisfying when you can leverage Ruby’s rich standard library.

1,000 True Fans

As far as I can tell there is nothing — no product, no idea, no desire — without a fan base on the internet. Every thing made, or thought of, can interest at least one person in a million — it’s a low bar. Yet if even only one out of million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet. That means that any 1-in-a-million appeal can find 1,000 true fans.

I heard about this article from Tobi Lütke during the Fireside Chat with DHH and Matz at Rails World 2024.

Automattic is doing open source dirty

The terms of the deal are spelled out in the license agreement

If you set out a licence, and then someone follows that licence.

Why is language documentation still so terrible?

Rust is given as a good example of language docs, and I wholeheartedly agree. The Elixir docs are also excellent. Ruby’s are unfortunately not.

BLE caberQU: a digital USB-C to USB-C cable tester – a version of the cable tester I already have but with a cool screen on it!

Did you know that it’s possible to have non-square click targets in HTML?

In fact, for SVGs it’s as simple as putting a <a> around the particular path in question inside the SVG, and the target will automatically be the same shape.