@wj@ruby.social
@wj@ruby.social avatar

wj

@wj@ruby.social

CTO @ Impactive. Rails upgrade and performance consultant. ex. Rubytune, 37signals/Basecamp and Engineyard. Sailor. Opinions are not my own.

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wj, to random
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Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use microservices." Now they have 503 problems.

wj, to random
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@jwz it’s not only rich people who own boats/sail just like it’s not only rich people who run nightclubs.

https://todon.eu/@RadicalGraffiti/110669674756818651

johnl, to random
@johnl@mastodon.social avatar

We happen to have travelled out to very dark rural Wales for a weekend in the van just as the amazing aurora borealis light show is on. Easily visible to the naked eye. Pretty much the whole sky. First time seeing it in my life and can't have asked for a better setup! Saved us a trip to Iceland too! ;)

wj,
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@johnl where have you ended up?

wj,
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@johnl ah, I see Conwy valley. We’re in Pwllheli.

cstross, to random
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Welp, woke up this morning, went downstairs, and suddenly my lower back is in agony! Guess I shouldn't have gone foodshopping and filled a backpack on two consecutive days.

Welcome to my sixties, arriving six months early.

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@johnl @threedaymonk this is the real world, it’s still normal for people to give unsolicited advice. If people don’t like it then they can explicitly ask for none or just ignore it, there’s no need to be a dick about it.

wj,
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@johnl @threedaymonk just because some people don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s something we need to avoid, it just means those people have something to ignore. I’m not risking not being able to help some people just because some people are overly sensitive to it.

wj,
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@johnl sure, if someone said they didn’t want to get any. So far in real life, and real life mastodon/twitter, no-one has objected (not that it happens much) though and I’ve not seen any data to suggest that most people don’t like it.

wj, to random
@wj@ruby.social avatar

Hey all, I'm (still) looking for a new contract. I'm most at home doing Ruby on Rails performance and scaling work, including Postgres scaling and optimisation. I also do Rails upgrades and tech leadership stuff.

More details here: https://willj.net/about/hire-me/january-2024-ian8ah/

wj, to random
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Anyone know of any companies or recruiters hiring for US Ruby/Rails, Postgres or scaling roles?

christianp, (edited ) to random
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I'm severely colourblind - my eyes can hardly detect red light at all.
So, working in web development, picking colour schemes is hard.
There are tools around to help you pick accessible colour schemes, but they assume that you can tell by looking that a colour is the one you want, and the only information you need the computer to calculate is the contrast ratio.
I realised I need a tool that will take the name of a colour and find a shade that gives a target contrast ratio.

Here it is: https://colourblind-palette-maker.glitch.me/

It uses the new APCA perceptual contrast algorithm and the Oklab colour space to help me find colours that people with better colour vision will interpret correctly, while ensuring there's good contrast for as many people as possible.

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@christianp have you seen the colour blindness glasses out there? I’m sure you have, but in case you haven’t here’s an example https://enchroma.co.uk/collections/colour-blind-glasses

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

The last 10 years or so of tech:

2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!

wj,
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@thomasfuchs @freeformz VR Wasn’t “like monitors” and was pretty great.

wj, to random
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The great thing about AGI is that the efficiency savings, on human time, the ability to do so much of the day to day organisation, planning and so on that people do means that humans will be freed up to work fewer days so will be able to exercise more, make more art, think, and generally be happier.

AH HAHAHAHAAH no, it will be used to reduce costs so billionaries can become richer.

rebrafsim, to random

it should bother you more than it does that analog clocks have three “hands,” and that the third hand is called the second hand. we all just let that happen

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@rebrafsim @jgarber surely for consistency the American time display standard is minutes:seconds:hours, making the second hand the second hand ;)

searls, to random

Zoom wins this decade’s Dropbox Award. A trailblazing app that never escaped the “feature not a product” trap, doomed to be eclipsed by larger platform holders who could include its hallmark feature “for free” as part of a bundle of related functionality.

Everyone I’ve asked has either dropped Zoom or is in the process of dropping it to save money and complexity.

wj,
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@searls What are the alternatives? Slack calls are OK but you need everyone in slack. Microsoft Teams is awful, and Google Meet seems to be very low quality, most Google meets I get invited to end up switching to Zoom for this reason.

I pay for and use Zoom because it works. It's really simple to set up a call and the UI is mostly simple and easy to use.

searls, to random

Anyone have some recommended wrist and grip exercises? Getting the "Max" size iPhone for the first time since the iPhone 7 Plus, which was significantly smaller than the non-max iPhone 14 Pro.

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@searls practice with a regular sized iPad, they’re similar sizes and weights.

searls, to random

One of my favorite uses for LLMs is to lazily copy-paste a playlist from Apple Music and ask it for songs that'd go well with the others. (I can't believe Apple Music still doesn't offer this, only the equivalent of generating Genius Playlists or stations from a single song)

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@searls that’s a neat idea. I still want a recommendation algo that recommends based on what a song /sounds/ like, not the artist/genre etc. there’s plenty of single tracks by artists that are nothing like the rest of their catalogue but I want to find more like it. Eg Summer Madness by Kool and the Gang.

searls, to random

Older, wiser, neckbeards warned me when I switched to VS Code last year that this would happen to me at the worst possible moment, but it finally has: even with all extensions disabled, VS Code is now so laggy on my computer that I literally have to stop and wait for it to render each word I type. Talking >200ms per character.

How do I fix this if it's not an extension causing it?

wj,
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@searls Oddly that's not happening for me. Are you running the rosetta version, or the arm version? Have you rebooted recently?

wj, to random
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So, it turns out I'm looking for a new contract unfortunately, my main contract (CTO Impactive) came to an end this week as the company has been suffering from the economic situation.

If anyone needs Rails/Postgres performance, scaling, optimisation or upgrade work doing then I'd love to hear from you.

johnl, (edited ) to random
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Hej Hej Stockholm! Been here a couple of hours now and somehow haven't had a hot dog. But also, where are all your actual dogs?

wj,
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@johnl gotta make hotdogs out of something John.

fasterthanlime, to random
@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io avatar

fighting my conflict-averse ass to reply "no I won't pay $100 for that missing HTTP header you found with a vulnerability scanning tool, even large companies don't pay for that" to some e-mail

wj,
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@fasterthanlime I'm selling these fine leather weak SPF reports.

mjg59, to random
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Let's not cheer for a company that attempted to assert that APIs were independently copyrightable

wj,
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@mjg59 what’s the context of this?

wj,
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@mjg59 I got that from the thread but not why people are now cheering for them.

fasterthanlime, (edited ) to random
@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io avatar

Ok here’s a list of things I think everyone should try at least once:

  1. Active noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds. Great for anyone under the right circumstances, but LIFE CHANGING if you’re a lil’ neuroatypical like that. It’s not the worst way to find out.

Tested and approved:

✅ Sony WH1000-XM3 (the 4 are out, and I’m assuming just as good?)

✅ AirPods Pro 2nd Gen (first earbuds to fit my weirdly shaped ears, also you can find aftermarket foam tips)

wj,
@wj@ruby.social avatar

@fasterthanlime I stopped setting an alarm years ago. I just get up when I wake up naturally. It’s great.

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