Weeknotes 258

STOP MAKING *ARRS – I could not agree more. This is like active_bobbins in the Ruby on Rails world all over again.

EV Stupidity Checklist

…when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what they once knew, creating new versions of features that are objectively, obviously worse than the time-tested designs they replace.

I was playing around with yet another Phoenix app headed towards abandonment this week and decided to get it deployed as soon as possible. It is easier to deploy an app that does nothing than an app that does something.

The obvious place to deploy it quickly was Fly.io, as I’ve done before, and enjoyed doing so. A problem quickly reared its head though. They no longer offer an unmanaged cheap Postgres option.

Harry had mentioned PlanetScale to me recently so I decided to give that a try. It was not as straightforward as I would’ve hoped. I broke a five year blog post drought and wrote up the quite easy in the end solution.

Encephalitis - burntsushi aka Andrew Gallant of ripgrep fame has had a terrible time of it recently. Scary stuff. Thank god he’s on the mend.

I’ve always been concerned about hosting databases and apps in different locations. I know this is extremely common now, but I’m old and it just felt wrong some how. I chose the lhr region for both my app on Fly and my database on PlanetScale. That at least puts them somewhere in the vicinity of London. But whether they’re in the same data center or not, I do not know.

I measured query time and my worries were unfounded with them only taking low single digit milliseconds to complete. And the web app itself feels very snappy. Not exhaustive of course, but a good representation.

I’ve had quite a good time making something this week. This is how is can be. Making a thing and then being glad you made it.

rsync and outrage

…for the people saying things like “I’m a PhD from xyz uni and I’m telling your LLMs are just stochastic tools that make everything up and the world will fall apart if you use them”, I’m here to tell you that you are out of date.

Cool down before you install: give new gems a few days to be vetted

“It’s about you, your insecurities, and your privileges” — I suppose it was possible that one day I would agree with DHH on something, and today is that day, partially. I don’t necessarily agree with his examples, but I do think there is gate keeping going on. Still not linking to it though.

Reviewing code requires reading

What would it take for you to feel comfortable shipping code to production without reading it?

Christopher MacArthur-Boyd | Scary Times – Thank me later.