Weeknotes 48

“Version of dig that raises error if a key is not present”

Naming things is hard.

The security incident that GitHub and Heroku announced way back in April, in which OAuth tokens were stolen, has now been resolved. Hurrah!

One side affect of GitHub and Heroku’s investigation was that the Heroku GitHub integration was turned off. This affected many teams, I’m sure, and we were no different, disrupting our deployment pipeline and use of review apps. It caused a lot of hassle, but I believe they did the right thing.

GitHub have written up their analysis of what the bad actor was able to do – seems bad, but could of been worse?

I’ve found the amount of people immediately ready to jump ship amusing. That new shiny platform you now favour will likely have issues like this one day. No one is free from these attacks. I’m not saying don’t hold Heroku to account, but your hot take hosting recommendations on Twitter might be slightly overzealous.

Saying that, I’m nothing if not a hypocrite.

Some alternative hosting options are always worth knowing about: Render, Railway, and of course, Fly all seem to be popular. There are a surprising amount of new hosting companies popping up these days.

(AWS or GCP native options have been excluded, because have you ever tried to get started with those services?!).

The Helix Editor is interesting and they have just released a new version. I think it would take a lot to move me off of Neovim at this point, but competition is good.

Microsoft Teams keeps doing something that makes my webcam completely inaccessible necessitating a system restart – terrible state of affairs. I’ve never used Teams before, and I don’t recommend it.

I hooked up the Ruby News and Heroku Changelog RSS feeds to be posted into Slack. Useful for seeing when things change that we rely on. I subscribe to these personally (in NetNewsWire/Feedbin) but it’s nice for the whole team to be aware.

GitHub are now supporting pasting onto selected text to create links in Markdown. This is a nice improvement that brings GitHub into line with other services such as Jira and Trello.

Interesting point about copy/paste.

The pasteboard/clipboard memory buffer on a computer is the most difficult thing I regularly use which functionally has no UI.

My friend Harry pointed out that he likes to use Alfred for searching the clipboard, something I’m trying to use Raycast for.

And then this bombshell:

Every version of the Mac Finder since 1984 has had a “Show Clipboard” command on the Edit menu that you could in theory use to keep a window open to make the state visible, but basically no one knows that it exists

I’m part of the club that had no idea that this existed!

Rails is dead.