Microposts
This is a log of learning and collected notes and thoughts along the way. It’s public, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to be interesting to many people.
- Mulling over the idea that a good way to track the stability of an application (in terms of the amount of bugs introduced over time) is to track the number of support tickets raised per-project. This would probably benefit from a severity rating and classification, also.
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- Just started Accelerate. From Courtney Kissler's forward:
work is work (don't have a backlog of features and a backlog of technical debt and a backlog of operational work; instead have a single backlog because NFRs are features and reducing technical debt improves stability of the product).
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- Watched Making Hard Things Easy, Julia Evans’ talk at this year’s (final 😢) Strange Loop. I always find her attitude and outlook inspiring and refreshing.
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- Discovered today that even if you explicitly supply a username/password to psql, by default it will completely ignore them if you’re connecting over a socket, rather than the network. That was painful.
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- Love this quote, which was nestled in Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, which I’ve just started reading.
I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, sending them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
—Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990Tags:
- Started working through the Future of Coding podcast and listened to an episode covering the paperInterpreting the Rule(s) of Code: Performance, Performativity, and Production (which I also read). The paper draws parallels between the rule of law in its extreme legalistic form and the execution and design of computer programs. This served to highlight the risks in expressing law as code, as some propose. It was a bit heavy and jargonistic but interesting and covered a bunch of ideas I’ve not been previously exposed to.
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- Got Home Assistant set up properly on a Raspberry Pi, along with sorting out the bedroom lights with a switch to step through a few light levels.
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- I’ve started reading through SQL for Mere Mortals, and have set up the supplied databases to follow along with the examples.
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- Read through Avdi Grimm’s Exceptional Ruby. I don’t think there was much in there new to me but it cemented a few things and touched on some more obscure nuggets I’ve not come across before.
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- This article on “non-blocking code review” keeps knocking around my head. As part of wanting to move closer to that, I've written a small tool to view commits related to a ticket. I want to grow this into a full code review tool; haven’t yet decided whether this will be written in Ruby or be used as an opportunity to play in a new language.
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- I’ve set up this site to deploy with Kamal. Hit a snag with HTTP headers not being correctly passed through somewhere between Nginx, Traefik and Puma, which I solved by upgrading to the Rails 7.1 release candidate and enabling config.assume_ssl.
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- I've migrated my old server setup (which ran on Debian and was based around Docker Compose) to run on a cheaper, faster NixOS ARM VPS. This means it’s now all managed through the same configuration repo as my desktop machines (with more to come in the future).
Running a few things on there:Tags: