Weeknotes 60

A much better week than last. Surprising how a few days off and some good chats with a trusted colleague can improve things. Still, I’m very keen to get off of my current project and onto something new. I need a change.

TIL about the ZStandard (also known as zstd) compression algorithm from Facebook (via Dan Luu). The savings to be had seem impressive.

Adrian Cockcroft replied saying Amazon saved 30% at S3, which was later clarified by someone else on Reddit that the savings were on internal logs rather than data stored. I don’t know who is correct, but the savings are impressive nonetheless.

I’ve started taking my USB-chargeable desk fan to coffee shops. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Easily transportable, and takes the edge off stuffy buildings. I’m cool (literally).

I switched over to Gitsigns from git-gutter. I prefer the visual style of Gitsigns, but it does seem buggier for me so far – not updating when it should etc. I will persevere for a while to see if things work out.

Template String Converter is a simple Neovim plugin which converts regular quotes in JavaScript to backtick template strings when you interpolate values – a nice little feature if you write JavaScript or TypeScript.

I don’t think I’ll get around to using this any time soon, I’m not currently writing much JavaScript, but as I’ve said before the really cool thing is how easily this seems to have been achieved with relatively little code.

I installed Aerial in order to get an overview of RSpec test files (which often get long and unwieldy). There are so many interesting plugins these days that it can be overwhelming as nearly every plugin comes with some amount of learning required.

I’ve been hearing about Treesitter for a long time but never really grokked why it was important. Many plugins are now taking advantage of Treesitter to get a better understanding of the code they might be operating on.

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited.

Neovim integrates this library using nvim-treesitter and you can install support for your favourite programming language using :TSInstall. For example, :TSInstall ruby. I will be trying to take advantage more in the future.

Talking of installing plugins and playing around with Treesitter. I am currently experiencing a weird issue when editing files where I suddenly can’t navigate within the file – very strange.

Current potential suspects are: Aerial, installing the Ruby treesitter module using :TSInstall ruby, or Gitsigns. These are all things I recently changed.

“TIL you can force push git branches with +.".

At first, I was like “this is cool”, but now I’ve decided this is a pretty terrible idea to save a few characters.

faraz on Twitter:

Since joining Netflix, it’s been an adjustment not following a software development process.

Part of me thinks this sounds great. The other part thinks it would lead to utter chaos. However, I do sometimes wonder whether we’re all just cargo culting the least worst process we could come up with…

It looks like Autumn outside with trees already losing their leaves. This is unfortunate since it’s August, and apparently caused by the tree going into shock 😟