Golang is fun. I am not proficient with it yet, but I will be. Perfect companion language for me
CrowdStrike
Friday, July 26, 2024
It’s truly remarkable how much a failure this was from an ops perspective. Bypassing client rules for staging and force pushing directly to production without adequate testing coverage or protections in place to ensure a smooth deployment? Wild. Lessons to be learned from this? Test Test again Try rolling releases? I dunno, anything but forcing a risky update to all of your clients Hindsight being what it is it may be easy to say “Oh you just need to have protections in place so this sort of thing cannot happen” but it sounds like CrowdStrike did, and deliberately chose to ignore them.
Took my time this morning on a walk with our little corgi Olive. I let her lead, basically that means I let her stop and smell every rock and bush and explore evey yard on our way. So i followed suit and explored the neighborhood as well
Make buying music a thing again. I bought some records recently from Amoeba in LA and it was fucking amazing like this physical thing in my hands has real weight and real value and is something I can listen to without an active internet connection or monthly subscription.
It’s funny how saying something out loud can change the energy around it, and you realize that it’s not actually a deeply held belief.
Anyways I deleted a bunch of VMs and apps and distractions from my life.
Blogging for me is also in building the blog, at least that's what I want to believe
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
What are your goals as a blogger? I am asking that question myself and what is coming up is that half of the fun of blogging for me is the public facing side of this, the community, the knowledge sharing. But the other half for me is actually building the blog. It’s cultivating, and caring for, and pruning, and developing a boutique solution that is just my size. That is really, really fun to do!
Rails is a joy to work with
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Ruby on Rails is an absolute JOY to work with
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
Sunday, June 23, 2024
The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, or really, the giant expansion to the base game, is so good. It feels almost like Elden Ring 2. How is it going so far? I have almost explored the entirety of the Gravesite Plain and am working through Scadu Altus. I one-shot the Divine Beast Dancing Lion, and Rellana is now my favorite boss in all of Elden Ring :D The NPCs are all interesting so far.
I listened to "Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions"
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
I listened to the podcast from Huberman Labs, "Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions". Highly recommend Dr. Hubberman podcast for deep dives into a wide array of topics, from ADHD to Fitness, Sleep Hygiene, and more. Really insightful talk about the impact that social media has had and is having on humans. I've been looking at my own habits around screens and internet consumption this year and I see how much of a negative it is in my life.
RSS Club
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
I love this idea - https://theunderground.blog/ an experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader. I just love blogging though too, and think RSS is an under utilized delivery system. I am currently subscribed to a lot of blogs via RSS and it's just such a joy to see what treats are in my inbox in the morning. I think I will participate and make my own RSS only blog, or at least, be able to denote parts of this blog to be RSS only.
Ruby on Rails Love In
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
I am doing so much more Rails work on my own time and I just love this framework! I feel fast with it. Ruby's composability and flexibility powers up Rails and it really shines when you embrace doing things the "Rails" way. Though there are some things I think I will continue to keep to a min, like callbacks. I'll use service objects and commands and such for the more complex logic.
Form Objects in Ruby on Rails
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
In Ruby on Rails, a Form Object is a design pattern used to handle the complexity of forms that don’t map directly to a single model or have unique/complex validation and business logic. It encapsulates the logic related to form processing, validation, and data persistence, often combining attributes from multiple models or handling data that doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional ActiveRecord model structure. Consider a UsersController that lets you create or edit a user.
Variable swapping in Ruby
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Swapping variables is a fundamental concept in programming, often encountered in algorithm development and problem-solving scenarios. While the process is straightforward in many languages, Ruby offers its own particularly elegant and concise syntax for this task. Let’s first explore the more traditional approaches. First, you might use a temporary variable. a = 10 b = 12 puts "a: #{a}, b: #{b}" tmp = a a = b b = tmp puts "a: #{a}, b: #{b}" Outputs:
Quirky Ruby Feature - Mixing Code and Data
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Ruby has some fun quirky features. One of them is that you can mix code and data in a single file using the special keywords __END__ and DATA. This is a weird concept, but Ruby allows you to use the script itself as a source of data. References: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.0/Object.html#DATA https://ruby-doc.org/docs/keywords/1.9/Object.html#method-i-__END__ The documentation says about __END__: Denotes the end of the regular source code section of a program file.
Momentum
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Started a new project. Super excited. All in. So much momentum and so much progress being made. Wow. First week in and I am feeling really good about this project. Nothing is more imprtant. Every thing is electric. And then I wake up at the start of week two, and, nothing. I just don’t care about this anymore. But, hey that looks cool, that’s a neat idea. Let’s build that thing!
Addicted to Learning
Monday, May 6, 2024
Watched a really fantastic video from Healthy Software Developer about how unchecked learning can be a dangerous addiction that can actually damage your software development career. The bit that resonated with me, and had me feeling deeply personally attacked, was the bit about using tech learning as a way to procrastinate. Learning a new technology, or language, or framework, when I should be doing something else that I am responsible for.
How to change a Users Password via Tinker in Laravel
Monday, April 15, 2024
Laravel has a pretty great console through a REPL called Tinker. From Tinker you can interact with your models. $user = App\User::where('email', 'their@email.com')->first(); $user->password = Hash::make('their new password'); $user->save(); Super convenient! You just need SSH access to a server in the environment in which the app is running. I like to setup an "ops" box that lives in my production environment that is only accessible through a VPN. This gives me a management console to my app for emergencies or whatever!
A docker based setup for testing with Laravel
Sunday, April 14, 2024
I experienced some annoying issues while running integration tests in a Laravel app. The official MySQL docker image will create a user and a database for you which is very convenient, but that user does not have permission to create new databases. I configure my applications to use a separate database for testing, usually with a _testing suffix and so just hit a brick wall. The solution was to mount an entrypoint script, basically, some SQL statements I want to execute when the container is created.
Add taggable support to my personal blog
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Today I added taggable support to my blog. I do have blog posts tagged, but it's a simple comma-separated list in the database. I want to have a more robust system that allows me to query and filter by tags. I used the ruby gem acts-as-taggable-on to add taggable support to my blog. First thing was to install the gem by adding it to the Gemfile and running bundle. gem "
Trying to Dispatch Jobs via Tinker with Laravel and SQLite
Saturday, April 13, 2024
I've been learning Laravel queues and jobs. While creating some jobs I wanted a quick way to test by executing the job. I just want to see it run. There wasn't a super clear path for me here so my first thought was let's just quickly create a one off controller action. To replay that job over again I just had to refresh my browser. Not great, super odd, but also not the end of the world.