Weeknotes 70

Crunchy Data launched cheaper Postgres plans recently. Better still, not only are their cheap plan a reasonable cost, you can suspend your databases and you don’t pay whilst they are suspended. And, if you don’t spend over $5 you don’t pay anything at all! It definitely removes a barrier to starting a new project.

I did experience some on-boarding issues, but support were very responsive and pleasant to deal with, and seems receptive to feedback.

The project I was working on is now complete, so on to something new. Time for the anxiety to change direction 😅

For the Elixir inclined, checker_cab looks to be a useful addition to ex_unit test suites.

Checker Cab facilitates deep map comparisons within unit tests.

It adds a assert_values_for function which can be used to assert against maps in a cleaner way.

imgproxy from Evil Martians looks great.

imgproxy is a fast and secure standalone server for resizing and converting remote images. The guiding principles behind imgproxy are security, speed, and simplicity.

imgproxy is able to quickly and easily resize images on the fly, and it’s well-equipped to handle a large amount of image resizing. imgproxy is a fast, secure replacement for all the image resizing code inside your web application (such as resizing libraries, or code that calls ImageMagick or GraphicsMagic).

There’s also a Ruby library, imgproxy.rb, to help with generating the URLs.

“Motivation Slumps” on Under the Radar #253 was a reassuring listen.

Feeling unmotivated, inspiration vs. motivation, and techniques to get moving again.

Be kind to yourself.

To hear that Marco and David suffer from the same lack of motivation even with very successful, visible, apps on a major platform was encouraging.

“Why we’re leaving the cloud” - DHH again.

Anyone who thinks running a major service like HEY or Basecamp in the cloud is “simple” has clearly never tried. Some things are simpler, others more complex, but on the whole, I’ve yet to hear of organizations at our scale being able to materially shrink their operations team, just because they moved to the cloud.

He has a point here I think. The cloud has many benefits, and you might take advantage of those, but saving money on staff won’t be one of them.

A nice trick to shutdown a Phoenix app when it’s not being used by Chris McCord.

A considerable milestone for rubyfmt.

100% of Stripe’s Ruby codebase, which is the largest single Ruby codebase in the world, is now autoformatted with Rubyfmt. We’ll be upstreaming the changes we made soon. I’m very excited.

Parker Selbert wrote “Oban Starts Where Tasks End” that details why we need a background job tool when Elixir has an excellent concurrency story. I have struggled to fully understand/explain this to myself and others.

Burgeoning Elixirists frequently ask, “Who needs background jobs in Elixir? Isn’t that what Task.start/1 is for?” Not quite. Let’s examine why a Task is the wrong level of abstraction for critical background work.

He explains when Task or lower level functions are appropriate, and when a full background job processing system is a better choice.