Weeknotes 54

The project I’ve been working on for many weeks launched and went well. There are some things that can be tweaked and improved upon, but I was pretty happy for the most part.

modalzmodalzmodalz.com

All the reasons you might not need to use a modal!

It’s hard to disagree with these points – modals are often awful. I think the message is somewhat lost by the barely readable typeface…

We have Preboot turned on which means deployments can take a few minutes to switch over to new dynos, and you it can be tricky to know which version of the code is live. In order to help with knowing what is live, I made a change to include the deployed Git SHA in both a metatag in the HTML and as a HTTP header for non-HTML requests.

Speaking of which, I then wrote a fish shell script to poll the website and check for a version change. This means I can make a deployment, run the script in the background, and it will speak “New version deployed” (using say) once it has rolled out.

I decided to use fish for this one as it’s the shell I use interactively. It works well, and the code is readable enough, but it does make distributing to the team more difficult. I have considered that maybe I should brush up on Bash for scripts.

South West Ruby continues to run a more regular schedule after the pandemic. This one included a great talk on Domain Driven Design by Gavin Morrice. It turns out that I’ve been doing a lot of DDD things already, but I wasn’t necessarily aware of it!

There was also another opportunity to see “Even Fuller Stack Ruby” by Michael McKelvaney where he showed all the interesting ways in which he has used Ruby in a non-Rails context – quite unusual these days as Ruby has become a synonym for Rails.

It was heartening to meet and speak with several people who were brand new to Ruby. Some having come from other languages, and some via bootcamps. So much for Ruby being dead.

I really like Elixir but I’ve found testing it difficult in some ways. Not because something is wrong with Elixir (in fact, ExUnit is excellent, and Elixir is mostly just functions and immutable state so testing is very easy in most cases) but because I bring my Ruby testing baggage to it and things are different. I bought Testing Elixir this week to do some learnin'.

Ruby Central announces Ruby Shield, a partnership between Ruby Central and Shopify

Shopify is committing $1 million USD to Ruby Central over four years, in addition to committing dedicated Engineering effort from Shopify’s Ruby and Rails Infrastructure team.

This seems like good news to me.

The folks at Software Mansion have released a new RTMP plugin for the Membrane Multimedia Framework which is pretty exciting to me. It means you can receive an RTMP stream and have it processed by Membrane. I want to spend some time experimenting with it.

Now we’re painting.