Weeknotes 86

Neovim in 100 Seconds – A nice intro into what Neovim actually is in only 100 seconds. Via r/neovim.

Useful tool for testing webhooks – Webhook.site

Webhook.site lets you easily inspect, test and automate (with the visual Custom Actions builder, or WebhookScript) any incoming HTTP request or e-mail.

From Karri Saarinen:

When Microsoft leadership feels like GitHub layoffs are not bad enough, they have to increase the pain by forcing people to use MS Teams on their 4y old laptops.

Haven’t they suffered enough?

I only recently used Teams for the first time. Verdict: Not good.

Prefsniff from Zachary Cutlip.

prefsniff is a utility to watch macOS plist files for changes, and then autogenerate the defaults command to apply those changes. Its intended use is to have prefsniff watch a plist file while setting a system or application preference. The resulting defaults command can then be added to a shell script or incorporated into a configuration management system such as Ansible.

Very nice.

Need to left pad a string in Lua? leftpad.nvim to the rescue. 👀

“SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases”

SQLite is probably lurking in your mobile phone and your car.

It is a popular choice as embedded database software for storage in application software, such as web browsers and mobile phones, and it is the most widely deployed database engine in the world.

I’ve written about SQLite before, and the renaissance around it’s use with web applications. I’ve never questioned the client/server architecture of popular database software, I just assumed “that’s the way it has to be”, but for 99% of apps it sounds viable.

I have run SQLite as a web application database with thousands concurrent writes every second, coming from different HTTP requests, without any delays or issues. This is because even on a very busy site, the hardware is extremely fast and fully capable of handling that.

I’m seriously considering trying this out for any web side projects. The cost of database hosting is often an issue for side projects. Web hosting can be had for peanuts.

When using Rails (or any ORM, probably), moving to a client-server database like Postgres later, as needed, should be trivial for most applications.

Saying all of that, I think convincing most teams that SQLite is a viable alternative would be very difficult.

Brighton Ruby 2023 is ON. Ticket purchased (I think maybe last week, but who’s checking).

I do hope it returns to the Dome next year…

It is. Nice 👌

"<3 Deno" by matklad is interesting read on Deno, which I’ve tried and failed to see the point of.

The only big drawback of Deno is the language — all this runtime awesomeness is tied to TypeScript.

Twitter are planning to restrict 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) using SMS to Twitter Blue subscribers only. It’s important to note that it is only SMS at this time, not authenticator apps.

Ricky Mondello has a very written piece on why it’s dangerous. In particular, I like Ricky’s point about how people often say that SMS 2FA should not be used, but like everything in security its a trade-off.

…we should not and cannot consider the effectiveness of a security mitigation without also considering its usability and its effectiveness. The “most secure” authentication scheme in the world will be limited in its impact by how accessible and user-friendly it is.

Painting the whole beetle: an adventure in learning to learn – I feel personally attacked.

My small contribution to RailsDevs was merged this week after a couple of changes. Pleased about that.