Weeknotes 244

I discovered that not only is Oban Web now free but it also works with the fairly recent SQLite support. This is cool because for small side projects I’ve been increasingly interested in using SQLite. And having a web interface to jobs is a massive help.

Speaking of SQLite. I am increasingly of the opinion that almost all “self-hosted” software should start with SQLite and offer other databases as an alternative. It makes deployment easier. Backups are easier. Who wants to run a single instance of MySQL just for that one thing?

The First Release Candidate of Expert, the Elixir LSP.

Excited to try this out!

treekei – “A file tree with line counts”

Another tree alternative. Better name.

Another trip south this week. There were a lot of small issues that I needed to address whilst there, and I managed to complete them all which was a relief, and it lets me relax after a very anxious week.

The smart lock was the main focus of my attention. It’s a constant problem. Well, it’s not constant. It works fine for 6 months and then doesn’t. I recently had newly added PIN codes not work, and notifications completely stopped…notifying. Oh, and the batteries we low too. I’ve now replaced the batteries, and relocated the “WiFi bridge” to plug socket to see that fixes the intermittent connectivity problems.

It was nice to see friends too, of course.

I’m now using Plezy full time for consuming content from my Plex server. There are less worries about what formats the video might be, and I can avoid transcoding - Direct Play only - by just using Plezy as the client. I bought the iOS version too, for my iPad, to support development. £4.99 well spent.

Building a Calendar in Phoenix LiveView

How we built a full-featured calendar in LiveView

It’s become clear to me that despite all the opportunity afforded to me by LLMs, still it is I who is in the way of creating things. Same as it ever was.

Deep Blue

Something I see a lot of is people out there who are having existential crises and are very, very unhappy because they’re like, “I dedicated my career to learning this thing and now it just does it. What am I even for?”. I will very happily try and convince those people that they are for a whole bunch of things and that none of that experience they’ve accumulated has gone to waste, but psychologically it’s a difficult time for software engineers.

I did not, in 2026, think I’d be reading the words “context bloat” quite as much as I am.

I enabled a couple of ad blocking lists in NextDNS and now I can visit local news websites without catching anything. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. Reasons. I started paying for NextDNS, it’s only £1.79/month which in terms of a quality of life improvement seems pretty cheap. However…

Control D, a NextDNS competitor looks interesting. And is cheaper.

I kept seeing things about playwright-cli this week and decided to give it a go. It is what is sounds like, a command line interface to Playwright, the browser automation tool. An MCP already exists for Playwright, but this cli version is more “token efficient” so is apparently preferred.

I was able to describe to the LLM what to tests to write, and then have those tests converted into actual runnable specs. It was very easy. I’m not saying this is the best way to write tests, but if you need to add some confidence before making changes, and you don’t have tests already, this might be best bang for your buck.

I spent some time sharpening our kitchen knives this week which is how I managed to slice the end off my left thumb. Naturally.