Weeknotes 67

I was excited back in May that initial support for pattern matching against Active Models was merged into Rails, but it seems that it was later reverted due to concerns over whether the interface was correct.

Hope is not lost though, another PR is in progress, although discussion stalled back in August.

I attended a children’s dance show which included the opening monologue of The Purge. Yeah, bit weird.

José Valim’s article on the possible introduction of types into Elixir is an interesting read – My Future with Elixir: set-theoretic types. The approach seems pragmatic, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

“The problem is that arrogance and shyness look exactly the same.” – Russell Howard on the Moon Under Water podcast.

I am looking for a decent visual diffing tool on macOS. Years ago I used Kaleidoscope as a paid user but I believe it was sold and now costs $149! I have no problem paying for software, but I don’t use a visual diffing tool very often so it’s quite a lot to pay.

My personal website blog has been somewhat neglected of late, partly due to these here weeknotes, but also because it used an old version of Middleman which I hadn’t kept up-to-date, and it became difficult to work with. Well, I managed to breath new life into it this week after upgrading various gems and fighting with native extensions. Great success!

At some point it needs redesigning, organising, amalgamating (with this site perhaps?) but I will continue to publish over there for now despite its flaws.

This week I learnt about rfc5785 – Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

It is increasingly common for Web-based protocols to require the discovery of policy or other information about a host (“site-wide metadata”) before making a request.

When this happens, it is common to designate a “well-known location” for such data, so that it can be easily located. However, this approach has the drawback of risking collisions, both with other such designated “well-known locations” and with pre-existing resources.

To address this, this memo defines a path prefix in HTTP(S) URIs for these “well-known locations”, “/.well-known/”.

Some interesting perspectives in “Why you should not use JWT”. I can’t help but feel that JWTs are overkill in most situations.

Tobias Petry’s database tips continue to be great. You can define date ranges that don’t overlap through database constraints – neat! I’ll try and remember that one. No MySQL support though but Postgres has you covered.

I wrote a Raycast extension for searching for Hex packages this week. Bit of a side tangent from the other side projects I should’ve been working on, but I’m pretty pleased with it. I took the existing Rubygems extension and munged it about. Using another extension as a basis is a big leg up. I learn far better from examples so the tons of existing extensions in Raycast’s repo are a great help.

It hasn’t been reviewed or accepted into the Raycast Store yet so 🤞

I also used Figma for the first time because I’m young, and relevant. I guess Adobe will be ruining it soon so it’s nice to give a try before that happens.

Adds TypeScript, React, and Figma to CV 😉