Weeknotes 74

An Antidote to Burnout - be thankful. It’s so hard to remember this.

I have been using Vim (and now Neovim) for Ruby on Rails development for many years but I’ve never taken full advantage of rails.vim even though it was installed the whole time.

The concept of alternative and related files is very nice. Since having found fuzzy finders I’ve always relied upon them to open files, but actually, in a lot of cases files can be opened more easily using rails.vim supplied functions like :A.

The canonical example is opening a test related to the current file. This is something I do constantly, and that can now be replaced with :AV - open alternative file, the RSpec spec, in a vertical split - rather than opening the fuzzer finder.

The support it adds to gf is also amazing. You can go from has_many :items to app/models/item.rb in two characters.

I plan to continue trying these out as I think they can improve my workflow a lot. Perhaps some new keybindings are in order once I get used to them.

The LAG Postgres function seems useful.

PostgreSQL LAG() function provides access to a row that comes before the current row at a specified physical offset. In other words, from the current row the LAG() function can access data of the previous row, or the row before the previous row, and so on.

The LAG() function will be very useful for comparing the values of the current and the previous row.

Via John Nunemaker).

D2 - A diagrams as text tool like Mermaid.

D2 is a modern diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams.

The syntax is more pleasing to me than Mermaid. Something to try the next time I need to draw a diagram.

An interesting post about the infrastructure required to keep the popular Hachyderm Mastodon instance running.

I’m watching the progress of the View Transition API with interest.

The View Transition API makes it easy to change the DOM in a single step, while creating an animated transition between the two states.

I hope that this will make many SPAs pointless.

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language has died.

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

I had shamefully never heard of her until now, another in a long list of forgotten women.

I noticed that my Search Hex Raycast extension got mentioned on Twitter this week. It’s nice to know that something I built has at least one user 😆 That tiny feeling of validation makes it worth making.

Stefan Magnuson recorded a great video on using vim-test. I have experience with vim-test, but stopped using it. I can’t remember why so I’m going to give it another go, I think I might need to tweak my setup slightly.

This is an interesting database tip about how to coax the database to use an index by adding extra conditions.

Perfect indexes can not be created for every query because of their overhead. Adding ghost conditions to those queries may lead to the database using better indexes.

A slightly less good week than last. A lot less code written, but many production deployments without incident. I’m always surprised when things go well. In fact, I feel like the karma police will come and brake something to punish me for admitting this! 😆