Peter Bhat Harkins ✔️

For my cat, that pose is always "I want attention". Usually to play fetch, but sometimes just some petting.

Getting Lobsters office hours started now: twitch.tv/pushcx

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in an hour. Drop in to talk about the site, or hang out as I pick back up the last stream's work on flagging. Also a couple small PRs to merge, maybe a commenting display bug. More info at push.cx/stream

Big news -- @jremsikjr.bsky.social of Flagrant has officially announced XO Ruby! 💫

Taking place across six U.S. cities between September and October, XO Ruby is a series of traveling events that, for locals, won't require a plane ticket and hotel stay...

In 2016 I gave a talk about how ActiveRecord sometimes leaves behind bad data that can't even pass model validations. Still caremad. Everyone thinks it's only their db. I've since learned it's all tools and there are no silver bullets, perfection is too expensive. But mostly perfect is doable.

Jim Resick, the organizer of Madison Ruby, is Johnny Appleseeding the regional Ruby conferences back to life: https://www.xoruby.com/blog/why-i-am-taking-events-on-the-road-this-fall/

I'm thrilled to be speaking in Chicago on Sep 6: https://www.xoruby.com/event/chicago/ Tickets open right now.

It happens ~monthly and again this morning: the most common bit of code people tell me was useful to them in the Lobsters codebase is the CI workflow. I guess don't write a language in yaml; edit iteration speed matters.

https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/main/.github/workflows/check.yml

Guy presenting at a tech conference; the title is 'Next 3 Months in Coding' and the top bullet point is '"AI writes 90%" of code becomes obviously true to everyone except lobste.rs' and yeah the weird quotes are in the original.

Heck, we haven't even settled our argument over what to call it.

(Photo is Quinn Slack, speaking at HeavyBit DevGuild. I sent him an invite. Photo by @mikejulian.com.)

Alright, feeding the cat as the stream warms up, going live in a minute: twitch.tv/pushcx

Lobsters office hours streams one hour from now. I see there's a PR for a bug that has annoyed me for years, but otherwise the code front is pretty quiet, so please do bring your questions or queries. Maybe I should lose another battle with logrotate? More info: push.cx/stream

Tried a few things, now I've had a carbon fiber money clip from liquidcarry.co for ~10 years. It looks like they no longer stock them but many others do. I carry four or five cards and some cash, very light and easy.

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

I cut Recheck 0.5.0 with some more docs + generated checks for length validations. ("Checks" are a missing tool for finding bad data in prod and keeping bugs fixed.) The rehceck beta already finds real bad data; DM if you'd like a pairing session to try it.

Thank him for his interest in sponsoring Anubis along with an invoice.

Fireflies dance across a park with the Chicago skyline in the background

summer nights lit by fireflies

bioluminescence is so incredible, I just stand in awe of nature and watch these tiny creatures create light to find each other.

#firefly #nightphotography #chicago #scape

I've gotta cancel Lobsters office hours streaming tomorrow. Nothing bad, one of those things where a rare appointment slot opened up and it saves a ton of waiting.

Email header from Gravatar to me reading "Subject: FG2FAG is your Gravatar code"

Periodic reminder that if you generate random alphanumeric codes, you probably want to avoid generating naughty words by leaving out the vowels.

I gave a talk 9 years ago about how invalid data is unavoidable in ActiveRecord: push.cx/talks/kcdc2016

I now know it’s all tools, all dbs, and my tool for finding and fixing bad data is in open beta: github.com/recheckdev/r...

screencap of Elrond in lord of the rings, captioned with his line "I was there that day, 3,000 years ago. The day the strength of men failed."

web.archive.org/web/20051212...

I had a sentence about how I was ok with methods with one positional arg but cut it to fit my question to Dave into 300 chars. Your examples and DSLs are a great rebuttal.

measured improvement in server performance

Yeah, a classic code smell: wiki.c2.com?DataClumps

Twitch Twitch is the world

Warming up the Lobsters office hours stream now, I'll start in a minute: twitch.tv/pushcx

I've found myself thinking that if Ruby had started with kwargs it probably would never have added positional.

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in about 10 minutes. Drop in if you have any questions about the site or want to look over my shoulder on maintenance. I have a couple PRs to merge but otherwise the schedule is pretty open. push.cx/stream for more info + stream archive.

So, not your topic, but I saw a style quirk and poked around a bit to see it seems consistent. I've been experimenting with always exclusively using keyword args in Ruby. The a(b:) passing pushes local vars to be consistent, or have meaningful renames. How's it for you?

Check the HN guidelines, they delete/hugely penalize links when people publicly encourage voting.

In today's stream demo'd the beta version of Recheck, my new tool for finding bad data in Rails apps. I talk through some of its uses, find 3+ real bugs with it, and explain why I think every prod system needs something like this. Starts at 2:41:00: push.cx/stream/2025-... DM if you can beta test?

@excid3.com Because you click 'like' every time I mention Hatchbox, I wanted to send you the link to the finished instructions: github.com/lobsters/lob...

Starting the office hours stream now: twitch.tv/pushcx

In about 90 minutes I'll stream Lobsters office hours. I'm doing commonmarker off-stream (suuuper dry work, now 25% done) so I'll start with Hatchbox and then go into the Recheck demo that didn't fit in the last stream. push.cx/stream for full info, or bring your questions and I'll see you then!