Weeknotes 78

TIL about the Dhall configuration language.

In “that’s a lot of data” news…

The new record of 229 PetaBytes of data transferred during the day is 7 PetaBytes higher than the previous record set on Sunday 5th December 2021, so a year and a week ago.

This is traffic across the Openreach network so includes a mixture of technologies such as VDSL2, G.fast and FTTP and a large group of ISP the largest of which are BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen Internet.

The Ruby and Rails world is heavily library-focussed via Rubygems. That is, we have a requirement, and we tend to reach for a library which meets it and everything is handled within the library.

Other ecosystems, like Elixir, are less focussed on libraries to do everything often just providing generators to get your started. Once you’ve generated the code it’s up to you to maintain it, but in exchange you deal with less magic and version upgrade problems.

That’s why A better way to handle user authentication in Rails is interesting. It too follows the “we’ll generate it for you” approach and relies upon a lot of the build-in Rails helpers to do so.

“Caching is frequently a lie”

Incidentally, we recently stopped caching node_modules in Heroku. That sped deploys up by a full minute. On Heroku, saving/restoring node_modules to/from cache takes 2-3x as long as just installing everything from scratch. Caching is frequently a lie.

It’s often assumed that caching will automatically makes things faster but that is not always the case.

TJ Devries made Effective Neovim: Instant IDE which introduces kickstart.nvim, a “A starting point for Neovim”. A lot of good stuff to learn from.

Ruby 3.2, released today, has been running at Shopify and the performance improvements are impressive.

The headline feature that we’re all very excited about is YJIT. The YJIT version in Ruby 3.2 is now labeled as production-ready, since we’ve been able to solve the biggest production drawback, which was the large memory overhead of the previous YJIT release.

Merry Christmas!