OP here.

It’s a legacy Rails app from 2011. Moving the whole chunk to something other than the AR pattern is not feasible, nor will it ever be.

The best we can do is to rewrite pieces of it at a time with better patterns, and that’s exactly what we are doing now.

Much of the perceived productivity wins that out-of-the-box Rails provides are derived from the tight coupling between ActiveRecord (or at least ActiveModel) and the rest of the provided libraries. I agree it is a hindrance, but choosing not to use it in the initial phases of a project causes other sorts of friction unless you really know the ecosystem and know what you want to do instead. After all, isn’t ActiveRecord almost half of the lines of code in Rails in the first place?

With respect to tests, the community’s preference for factory libraries (instead of the built-in fixtures) exacerbates the performance issue quite a bit.

Have you looked at Qo at all? If so, any strong opinions about where it’s lacking? (Admittedly, it’s a giant hack, but it’s a pretty good giant hack.)

Usually the best approach was generating html and have it rendered to PDF by some of these libs.

Aren’t there any good PDF libraries in Ruby?

It functions the exact same way in the Ruby ecosystem, with several of the most common libraries (e.g. wicked_pdf and pdfkit) using wkhtmltopdf to achieve this, which is probably what you are used to in Python as well.

It does feel like a pain to get a PDF looking just right when created from HTML, but it’s probably just a relative thing? That is, PDF generation is just a more fiddly/clunky process in general, but since so many other tools in Ruby feel easy/seamless, having PDF generation not meet this expectation makes it stand out.

The elm package manager will refuse to publish a package that violates semantic versioning. So if you’re a malicious actor, changing the API of some package for nefarious purposes, you’d be doing a bit of a hard job because since functions can’t change their signatures without you bumping the major version and since most elm-packages.json files will not update major versions automatically, it becomes harder to ship evil code. Also, a simple elm-package diff command would tell you what changed between versions, making it easier for you to audit the code. There is a lot of beauty in it. It is not evil proof, but it makes it a bit harder.

I just took a look at the Gemfile for one of my websites and there are a lot of gems but ~80% come from the rails team and most of the rest are trusty sources like amazon. This is not even close to as bad as when I created a blank Vue project that already had thousands of packages many about 3 lines long.

What I do in my Python work is generally be willing to depend on large, tested projects with well established, thriving communities that have a good history of responding to security incidents. These packages usually do not depend on other packages or when they do, on well established ones (e.g. requests library).

I might include other, less known packages, if I intend to use most of their functionality and if it is not easy to replicate on my own. Otherwise I write my own version or copy with attribution and license only the relevant parts.

This is not perfect, but gives me some confidence that things will be fine.

It is also an approach that completely breaks down in my Javascript/Typescript work because of so many packages being pulled in and everything seemingly depending on everything else (yes, I am exaggerating).

The problem already starts with licenses. For many apps for example you’ll have to list the licenses of all used libraries, and the libraries, including all transitive dependencies in the UI.

For my Android app that’s a few dozen overall, and it took only a few hours to do this. For even the smallest Angular project, this is insanity.

So if you want compliance, you’ll need to throw the entire ecosystem out right now. Or you just violate the licenses. Often even projects such as angular have dependencies that have no license.

I think it’s usually because “that’s what work is buying me”.

Can anyone show me a laptop that doesn’t lose to a macbook in any of these categories?

• performance
• price
• form factor
• fit and finish

I’ve run Linux on a Macbook because my employer wouldn’t give me anything else. Reason was: effort of IT team vs my effort of running Linux.

But pretty sure my effort was extensive compared to what their effort would have been :)

16:10 screen, wide-gamut display, correct ppi (X1C is too low, and the high-res Dells too high).

The last ThinkPad (of which I have many) to have a 16:10 screen was T410, which is now 8 years old.

Personally, there’s no other modern laptop I’d rather use, regardless of operating system. To me nothing is more important than a good and proper screen.

If anybody comes up with a laptop that has a 4:3 screen, I’ll reconsider.

I don’t think many people buy new Apple hardware with the intention of immediately wiping it and installing Linux.

My MBP, for example, is running OSX because I need it (or Windows) to use Capture One photo software. When I upgrade to a new machine I’m going to put Linux on the old one and use it for everything else. I did the same thing with my iMac years ago.

I personally still think the build quality of Apple laptops are better than the alternatives. The trackpad in my old MBP, for example, still feels better than the trackpads I’ve used on newer machines from other brands. The performance and specs are less important to me as long as it’s “fast enough” and the build is solid.

All that said, I’m not buying any more Apple products because their software quality has completely gone down the toilet the last few years.

In this case I didn’t really have a choice. I had tried asking for a PC before I started this job; but they tried to get me in really fast and provisioned a Mac without even asking me. My boss made up some bullshit about how you have to have them for developers laptops as the PCs the company bought didn’t have the specs (16GB of ram and such). I’m really glad I got Linux booting on it and not have to use it in VMWare (which does limit your max ram to 12GB and doesn’t give you access to the logical HT cores).

But yea if it was my personal laptop, I wouldn’t even bother buying a mac to being with. My recent HP had everything supported on it with the latest Ubuntu or on Gentoo with a stock kernel tree right out of the box.

I got given a macbook so I had no choice what laptop to use so I installed linux on it and it works well enough.

Why does it seem that way to you?

Square peg;  
Round hole;  
Hammer hammer;  
hammer.Hit(peg, hole);

your use of a real world simile is hopefully intentionally funny. :)

That sounds great, as an AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean is not a real-world thing, though if I can come up with a powerful and useful metaphor, like the “button” metaphor in UIs, then it may still be valuable to model the code-only abstraction on its metaphorical partner.

We need to be cautious that we don’t throw away the baby of modelling real world things as real world things at the same time that we throw away the bathwater.

You need to write say a new air traffic control system, or a complex hotel reservation system, using just the concepts of data structures and algorithms? Are you serious?

I thought we had a normal ratio for a Ruby/Rails application that has thorough test coverage, but I’d love to hear from others on what their ratio looks like. We didn’t aim to have a certain ratio or anything. We write tests as we’re writing code, and that’s what we ended up with. Lines of code isn’t a consistent metric across different projects since style and conventions come into play, but I thought it was something I could share to convey the size of our application.

I think it depends tremendously on how you write tests.

EG: If your tests are mostly high-level integration tests it seems quite high; if they’re mostly low-level unit tests it seems low.

Similarly, If you’re using a terse style (eg via DSL / metaprogramming) it seems high; if you’re using a verbose style (eg the recommended rspec approach) I’d say you’ve mostly tested the ‘happy path’.

If you’re really serious about testing, especially more end-to-end stuff and interacting with the front-end, it’s pretty easy to end up needing 10 lines in a test to check a feature that only required 2 or 3 to implement.

There’s some cross-checking too of course, but if writing 3x as much code meant basically no regressions, that’s a decent deal

I depends a lot on the code. For example, in my current codebase I have something like:

Maybe(resource).fmap(&:author).fmap( ->(n) { n[:full_name] }).or(Some('Somebody'))

This is part of a method that gets a hash that, ideally, looks like this:

{
  author: {
    full_name: 'John Doe'
  }
}

However, there might be some cases where the hash is nil or the hash does not contain the expected keys. So for a line (actually two, since the line is too long for my taste) of code you easily end up with four test cases (hash is nil, hash does not have the :author key, the :author key returns a hash without the :full_name key and the ideal scenario where all the data is present).

Then again, you most likely have a bunch of lines of code that are just doing simple things, like check if a property is set or something like that, where the test cases are a lot simpler so you might not end up with a 2x test/code ratio.

Yes, I agree entirely. I wrote about this a while ago:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/

Which I based off the “Hostel E-mail Landscape” blog post that’s references at the bottom of my post.

I can understand why spam filters are so aggressive. I’ve looked through my spam trap and found some crazy good phishing sites, some carefully crafted Javascript ransomware and lots of other terrible things. Some of it makes it through, but at least I can identify and know what to do with it. Many average Internet individual cannot.

It an attempt to keep people safe, e-mail is now terribly terribly unreliable, unless you’re one of the big players like Google, MS or Mailchimp. It’s the slow death of the distributed and federated web.

I rather hoped you’d chime in. ;)

Mozilla has it’s missteps, on the other hand, they are still better than the other Browser Vendors out there and I haven’t seen a viable Firefox Fork out there that works for me. Plus it seems the Looking Glass addon was inert unless specifically enabled by the user, so I don’t see the harm tbh.

“Atleast [they are] the prettiest pile of shit.” ~ Some quote I heard somewhere

I would add Mozilla Persona to this list, which was a great idea, but was mismanaged and shut down by Mozilla before it could do anything good.

I pretty much lost my faith in Mozilla having any idea what it is doing at that point.

Original Pocket introduction was mishandled, but since Mozilla owns and operates it now, integration with Firefox makes sense.

You missed ‘Quantum.’ (The one where they broke their extension API for the sake of alleged performance).

For the most part, when it comes to these sorts of ads, you’re looking at either pricing at a keyword/slot level or in”real-time bidding” with blind auction. Basically, despite having all this data to target (which honestly could happen way better with Google’s dataset) most of it gets destroyed by the heavily-skewed financial incentives of advertising.

Some of the misfires I’ve seen:

• “He searches a lot about programming and reads a lot of programming stuff… let’s advertise coding bootcamps!”
• “He just wrote a case study of how his employers use X and the pros and cons of that. I know, let’s send him ads for X!”
• “He JUST bought Spotify. Let’s advertise Spotify more. And Google Play.”

A few years ago I did a bunch of research into various robo-advisors and in the end decided to stick with Vanguard. I still get robo-advisor ads (and payday loan ads…) to this day.

For professional reasons I want at least some awareness of the current state of advertising, so I will occasionally disable my adblocker. When doing so, I am always shocked at how irrelevant the ads are. Similar to @hwayne, many of them are for things I have already purchased, and for which a near-term repeat purchase does not make sense.

Funniest of all is YouTube, where I consistently get ads in five languages, only two of which I could be said to understand.

Absolutely! This probably is the biggest secret in the world kept in plain sight. To this day, I’ve never really observed two searches with the same terms from two different google accounts differing in any meaningful way.

Maybe not a skull, but I could see a girl’s head with a bow on one side, and a little whisp of hair on the other side, looking sideways, kind of like a certain Japanese food company mascot.

To try and keep it on topic, I still don’t know if I’m sold on GNOME, but I’ll definitely at least try it when 18.04 comes out. There’s a big pile of little things across the interfaces that don’t gel with me, but I could see myself switching away from Cinnamon if they (and/or Wayland) got their HiDPI features working better. I don’t see much hope on Cinnamon’s side for the particular issues I am facing as long as it is still on X, but I put up with those because everything else works so well.

At some point in the early aughts, I told Google I lived in Australia. Like you, for years, it would bounce me through google.com.au when in a new country or doing SSO. At some point in the last handful of years, it has decided I do live in the US, and stopped doing that.

I currently have an AMD RX580 and use dual 1440p monitors without issue. I have also tested another 2x 1080p simultaneously with those 2x 1440p. All at 60Hz. So it can definitely push the necessary pixels for 4K on Linux. You need a more recent Linux kernel (4.8 or above iirc, I’m on 4.12) for the newer AMDGPU driver. There are some improvements to be made on certain codec playback support (I get occasional tearing on VP9 at 1440p for instance) but ever since the switch to the AMDGPU stack I have a lot of confidence in AMD fixing things as time goes on.

My previous Nvidia card was supposed to support 2x 1440p, but wouldn’t run the second one at the correct resolution, instead limiting it at some odd resolution of 2160x1200 (iirc?). Would not work in nouveau, would not work in the latest proprietary drivers.

As for HDMI audio on the RX 580, I am traveling but will try and test when I return home. I don’t know if I have an HDMI audio device though.

I have an R9 390X that drives 3840x2160 + 1920x1080 all at 60Hz in Linux without issue. I’d do some research, though; I don’t even come close to stressing it in Linux, it’s there so the Windows install on that machine can run games.

No idea about sound, my monitors are connected over displayport and dvi, respectively, and my speakers are plugged into my sound card.

Even my old intel i915/i5 testing setups can push 60Hz@4K, it’s likely that it’s not about your card but rather about the combination of (GPU, connector, cable and display) or bandwidth saturation. KVMs and similar stuff in between can mess with the negotiation. For 4k@60Hz you want a chain capable of HDMI-2.0 or DisplayPort. It might simply be that Xorg probes the connector, gets the choice of 2k@60Hz or 4k@30Hz and picks the former.

AMD cards won’t give you HDMI sound on the open source drivers unless you manually integrate their HAL patches. The relevant fixes are slowly trickling in, and chances are that in 4.15 the support will get there. But really, “recent” features like display-port chaining, event-driven synch like FreeSync etc. all have spotty support and its a gamble if it will work on any given card.

Please excuse the late reply. Also, Wayland is not currently my daily display server.

However, from my limited use and knowledge, the traditional divide between Window Manager and Desktop Environment that we are used to in X-based environments does not look the same in Wayland. From what I have read, it will be more common to build them monolithically. This is just the sense I have gotten from reading about various Wayland compositors and window managers, though I am not aware of the specific technical details as to why.

So sway would be used in a standalone manner, providing both a compositor and window manager. This as opposed to being able to use, say Openbox as the window manager for XFCE or i3 as the window manger for for GNOME.

And now that I say that, since it has been possible in X-GNOME to replace its window manager, I wonder how GNOME in Wayland is constructed differently to either allow or disallow this?

except that you then have to deal with HiDPI on Linux which is no fun

But it is currently improving very quickly. I am running the latest stable GNOME on Wayland on Arch with 2x scaling (fractional scaling is still experimental) and most stuff seems to work now. I am using a MacBook Pro most of the day, but Linux has really gone from years behind to close enough to be usable in just a year.

(I hear that X.org is a different story altogether, no different scaling for different displays.)

Second, the website is not made for fast scrolling, it looks totally broken if I scroll to the bottom of the page, possibly because of some fancy lazy loading.

And the moving wrinkles are as annoying as the <blink> tag.

just got the 5th gen x1c (wqhd) and am very happy with it. I disabled scaling though and use i3. Some stuff still seems messed up (vlc is HUGE, i don’t know if it’s still scaling or the scaling factor reset on reboot or something).

I just increase the font size on firefox and in the terminal and feel fine without scaling.

They are offered as a service because you have the library wrapping your feature, but can inevitably end up with lots of supporting infrastructure. By supporting infrastructure, I mean things like feature group management, automating roll out of the feature to a larger cohort etc. If your support team needs to replicate a customer issue they might need to be able to report on users that have a feature flag, and ensure they see the exact same feature set too. In many cases you don’t need all this, but some people do.

For others though, having it as a service can be an easy way to adopt feature flags, although in practice they could probably have achieved the same result as your approach. The founders of LaunchDarkly and CircleCI produce a podcast (https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/to-be-continuous/), so it’s unsurprising that they use eachother’s products.

I can understand using Pusher (even though there’s a lot of open source self-hosted solutions for that as well), but A/B testing and feature rollout? Why are these things even offered as-a-Service?

Different companies have differing amounts of engineering resources, different patterns to their revenue (e.g. to hire more engineers… or not), and different levels of legacy cruft in their products. Stemming from these differences, and especially for anything infrastructure- or process-related, the “build vs buy” conversation will also differ greatly between companies.

I have had this same conversation with people regarding Heroku and SendGrid. That is, I know people who cannot fathom why anyone would need (or want) to pay for that category of PaaS in that way. Meanwhile, I shudder to imagine how much more difficult my company would have had it without them.

Feature flagging seems a bit extreme to me.