Weeknotes 252

Busy week for me. I started it off with some actual real work. It felt good to be engaging the brain in a slightly more intense way than usual. Turns out I can still do this, sort of. Setting up a Rails app in 2026 can still be somewhat tedious, somehow. But that might just be computers.

Haggis Ruby went off without a hitch – credit to the organisers. I think two days was a bit much for me, but I enjoyed a lot of the talks, but they were not the focus for me. It was great to catch up with everyone I hadn’t seen in a while.

Don’t forget to add an RSS feed to your blog

It keeps happening. I come across a blog which has written something interesting enough and I try to subscribe to it in my RSS Reader app1 and the app tells me there’s no feed to subscribe to.

Yep.

sql-tap

sql-tap sits between your application and your database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or TiDB), capturing every query and displaying it in an interactive terminal UI. Inspect queries, view transactions, and run EXPLAIN — all without changing your application code.

Well, this seems extremely useful.

Production query plans without production data

But that’s just the beginning. The same logic lets you export statistics from production and inject them anywhere - test database, local debugging, or as part of CI pipelines.

This is very cool. Take statistics from your production data and use it locally to test performance changes as if it were production, without the actual data.

Richard Osman: The addiction itself becomes the shame – I could not have resonated more with what Richard Osman says in this interview. I think it will just be with me until the end. Maybe acceptance of that is ok?

The Missing Bundler Features

Highlights from Git 2.54 – a few nice improvements in here, git history split, in particular, seems very useful. I always get confused when splitting commits using rebase -i and this seems like it will be easier.

It’s official, ADSL works over wet string

AI conversations were a large part of my time in Glasgow. I guess, as you might expect, they ranged from “I use it a bit and it doesn’t really do what I want” to “I don’t write any code by hand any more”.

It made me realise that I am not as far behind as the internet would have me believe. The general consensus still seems to be “this is happening” but we just don’t know when and where it will end up.

The train home between Edinburgh and York was late. Funny how LNER are able to bend the laws of physics to change time meaning that my train wasn’t actually late according to them, when it was. Give me my money you bastards.

First spinel.coop, and now matz/spinel 🤔