avdi.codes

SIGAVDI #88: Endless Beans Edition

Hello friends,

It smells like autumn. This will likely be an autumn without apple-cidering and hayrides, which makes me sad.

I'll Trade Ya!

Hey there! Archived SIGAVDI letters are for newsletter subscribers only. All it costs to join (and unlock this post) is an email address! I'll write to you weekly-ish with a few interesting links, some updates, and some reflections on the intersection of software and life. And I'll respond to your replies! Whattya say?

I’m still on a dead-tree kick, so more book quotes this week…

SIGAVDI September 23, 2020

The ultimate software taboo

I have written before about the hidden dangers of unstructured or “flat” organizations. A microcosm of the structure wars is the debate over whether Open Source software projects should adopt explicit codes of conduct. These codes, if not an introduction of true structure, are at least the imposition of a “social API” of sorts.

Articles September 18, 2020

Alternative Ruby Symbol Literals

Periodically I take episodes from the RubyTapas archives and publish them for free. This episode from October 2012 is about symbol literals, and how you can use alternative quoting syntax to embed and interpolate any kind of character sequence in a symbol. And also: why you might not want to take advantage of this. Enjoy!

RubyTapas Freebies September 18, 2020

SIGAVDI #87: Squash Blossom Edition

Hello friends,

First off, real quick: I’m planning a workshop on project automation. Tell me if you’re interested? Thanks!

OK, onward…

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. So in lieu of the usual links, I give you a throwback to earlier incarnations of SIGAVDI: Fewer links, more quotes.

SIGAVDI September 14, 2020

SIGAVDI #86: Fancy Ramen Edition

Hello friends,

Long time no write. I spent the summer at home with my kids. Quarantining in the woods with four small children turned out not be very conducive to writing. Or to doing most of my usual work, for that matter. I focused on keeping RubyTapas ticking along, and otherwise investing in family time, home improvements, and watching democracy fall apart.

SIGAVDI August 24, 2020

Rubber Duck Session: Rails Polymorphic Attributes with Karim Talek

In this public Rubber Duck Session, my pairing partner Karim wanted to move some logic for editing message-display rules from the frontend to the backend. We settled on using JSONB and Rails polymorphic attributes as our implementation strategy.

Videos June 19, 2020

An Investigative Debugging Toolbox

Last week I ran an experimental workshop on Investigative Debugging. It was a lot of fun and the attendees seemed to get a lot out of it. Afterwards I sent out some extra reference material, including this Linux-oriented list of investigative debugging tools!

Resources May 23, 2020

Share .netrc with your devcontainers

I do almost all my development inside devcontainers these days. (I take the term “devcontainer” from VS Code’s .devcontainer/devcontainer.json. I think it’s a useful term, and I’ve adopted it into my vernacular for the general case of “development-specific container”)

Some developer service clients, such as Heroku’s CLI tools, store their sensitive API keys in a ~/.netrc file. This is a semi-standardized (or at least conventionalized) file used by a number of UNIX utilities.

How-to May 23, 2020

SIGAVDI #85: Picnic Edition

Hello friends,

I'll Trade Ya!

First off, a special invitation: I’m throwing an experimental two-evening pop-up workshop on Investigative Debugging next week. The Big Idea is to stop hypothesizing about how code is working (or not-working), and instead leverage surveillance tools like strace, mitmproxy and docker diff to understand software behavior with hard data. I’m not an expert in these tools, but I’ve used them enough to get to the bottom of some mysteries. You’re invited to come explore them with me!

SIGAVDI May 12, 2020

Run Rails 6 System Tests in Docker Using a Host Browser

The problem: we wanted to get Rails system tests running using a browser on our development machines.

How-to May 11, 2020