Weeknotes 251

The daffodils are looking sad and are nearly over, but fear not, the cherry blossom is out 🌸 and we’re blessed to have many cherry trees throughout the city.

The wasps…are back. I went up into the loft to start prepping to install a new loft hatch and found that a solitary wasp had started work re-building a nest. I’ve returned the Wasp Nest Extractor 3000 ™ and I’m having a re-think.

Backblaze has quietly stopped backing up your data

Quite a busy week coming up. Most of the week will be taken up attending Haggis Ruby in Glasgow. The conference is two days this time. I think I’d prefer it to be a single day but let’s see how we go first! Glasgow is surprisingly far compared in Edinburgh in terms of elapsed travel time. And the train is the only sensible way to get there from here. Should be fun, and I’ll get to see some pals.

zizmor – “Static analysis for GitHub Actions”

Pizza, of a kind, was made on Sunday evening in the gifted pizza oven. It was both good and disappointing. I was expecting the operation of the pizza oven to be the issue, like when you spend ages trying to light a barbecue, but that part was really easy. I had a hot oven in no time.

It started falling apart when the first pizza needed to be turned in the oven and it had stuck. Tomato and cheese all over the place! Still, each pizza got a bit better than the last, so I’m not put off trying again, and the edible parts were very nice.

Your codebase doesn’t care how it got written

We asked candidates for coding samples. We put them through live coding exercises. We talked about coding standards. Style guides. Naming conventions. We’ve all wished for… and sometimes had… the chance to reject someone’s code because it didn’t meet our conventions. Didn’t match our writing style.

Writing style.

The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored

If China invades Taiwan and cuts off its chip exports to American companies, the tech industry and the U.S. economy would be crippled.

Software developers have become their own joke

Unfortunately, seeing a prototype and becoming convinced it’s complete is not a new problem. It’s been the bane of software development possibly since the very beginning, when (apocryphally) a manager would review a mockup and conclude the project was now complete and could be shipped to customers immediately.

We had our gutters cleaned of the foliage living in them and the next day found a roof slate in our bin. The cleaners hadn’t mentioned a roof slate coming lose at any point. Co-incidence? We can’t see any missing roof slates but it is difficult to see on the roof.

Slow down to speed up – I’ve been thinking about this a lot. When I start shipping very quickly I also feel like I’m losing control of what’s happening, but slowing down feels like getting in the way. Where to draw the line?

MACOS TIP: ENABLE THE ZOOM ‘PEEK’ GESTURE

This is neat!

The dentist sorted my second broken tooth of the month and I am now twice as poor. If this run of dental fuckery could stop for a bit now, that would be good, thanks.

Hex.pm Security Audit: Results and Next Steps

Hex is critical infrastructure for the BEAM ecosystem. It underpins package distribution for Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam, and is used in production systems across thousands of organizations.

Until now, no comprehensive external audit had been performed.

dexter — “A fast, full-featured Elixir LSP optimized for large codebases”

Another LSP for Elixir. Competition is good, but after the consolidation of the last two competing LSPs for Elixir I can’t help but have mixed feelings about this.

“We’ve had a win today”: Martin Lewis celebrates council tax reform

Did you know that if you don’t pay your council tax on time once, within three weeks the Council can insist you pay the FULL YEAR upfront, and three weeks after that they can send the bailiffs in.

Fucking disgraceful. No more.

A New Chapter for Ruby Central

We have parted ways with our Executive Director, our PR agency, our CFO, and concluded several contractor engagements

PR agency? There was an actual real PR agency involved in this whole debacle?

The importance of farting around

Built into human beings is a need, which nobody bothers to even acknowledge, to do something useful. But instead of worrying about what human beings need, we worry about what machines need. There’s no talk at all about what human beings are deprived of; all the talk is about what industries are being deprived of.