Avdi Grimm, Code Cleric
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!
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.
Hello friends,
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?
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!
The problem: we wanted to get Rails system tests running using a browser on our development machines.
A Rails 6 system test is a test that exercises your application in a way that, as much as possible, simulates a real user interacting with it via a browser. More than any other kind of tests, system tests verify that the whole app does what it’s supposed to do.
The household where I’ve been spending stay-at-home has one of the most pragmatic kitchen organization schemes I’ve ever run across. For instance, there’s “the drawer of things that scoop”, and the “the drawer of things that cut or stab”. As a result I rarely have to ask someone where to find a tool.
I’m told that the “drawer of things that cut or stab” was once “the drawer of things that cut or stab or burn”. This posed problems during power outages, however. When you’re rummaging around in the dark for a candle and a lighter, you’d rather it not be in a drawer full of blades and sharp points.
In 2015 my family and I fulfilled a longtime dream by moving to a big house in the woods in Eastern Tennessee. And as is customary for upper-middle-class white technocrat exurbanites, we decided it would be fun to do some lite “homesteading”. Including raising chickens for eggs.
Hello friends,
It’s strange to think it’s already the 298th day of April. It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating the 5th aeon of March. There are some people who say that the COVID lockdown is messing with our sense of time, but honestly well pretty coping I’m think I.
Booknotes from Domain-Driven Design and Reactive Design Patterns, and some notes on mentorship vs sponsorship.
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The other night Jess & I drank vodka mango drinks while she showed me Alloy, which is “a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them”, according to the website. I think of it as a model checker, although that may not be the correct term. The truth is there’s a lot I don’t understand about Alloy, but Jess did a great job explaining to me why this kind of model analysis matters.
Check out the stream recording (and bonus cocktail recipe) below!