This is a story that begins with airplane wifi, and ends with the recognition that everything is related in web development.| island94.org
With AI, in my context we’re talking about LLMs (Large Language Models), which I simplify down to “text generator”: they take text as input, and they output text.| island94.org
This essay is a little bit about me and how I solve problems, and a little bit about AI from the perspective of a software developer building AI-powered features into their product.| island94.org
To briefly catch you up to speed if you haven’t been minutely tracking Ruby on Rails performance errata: the Puma webserver has some mildly surprising behavior with the order in which it processes and prioritizes requests that are pipelined through keepalive connections; under load, it can lead to unexpected latency.| island94.org
If you’ve had reason to use internationalization in Rails on Rails, you’ve probably used a nifty feature of it: Keys with a _html suffix… are marked as HTML safe. When you use them in views the HTML will not be escaped. Authoring HTML within translations can be a pain because HTML is quite verbose and easy to mess up when maintaining multiple versions of the same phrase, or paragraph, or page across multiple languages. It would be nice 💅 to have something like this: Keys with a _md s...| Island94.org
The following is the bones of a half-written essay I’ve had kicking around in my drafts for the past 3 years, occassionally updated. I recently read two things that said it all better anyways, but if you read through you get my perspectives as someone in software cooking the goose.| island94.org
There’s overlapping terminology that describes the act of packaging up some new behavior for Rails. I think of two gems I maintain that are of vastly different scales| island94.org
We have a new fridge; it is the same model as the old fridge because only that model would fit in the cabinetry. The installers also discovered that the water valve was broken and couldn’t be shut off; subsequently, the plumber determined that only the handle had snapped. I ordered a completely new water valve to unscrew its handle and attach that handle to the existing valve. In this economy. This week in Rails, I went back and replaced most of the places I was using turbo-broadcast-refres...| Island94.org
There’s overlapping terminology that describes the act of packaging up some new behavior for Rails. I think of two gems I maintain that are of vastly different scales| island94.org
Big business news for my startup: “Frontdoor Benefits Receives $2.1 Million Investment to Improve Access to SNAP and Public Assistance Programs”. My cofounder Charlotte also added some details on our blog too. Big milestone, and onto the next milestone and so forth. --- We went to a Golden State Valkyries basketball game last week. It was a lot of fun, and a nice seat was the cost of a substantially-less-nice seat to see the Golden State Warriors. We bought sweatshirts, so that means we...| Island94.org
I got this nice email from Defector, an online publication I pay for (along with De Programmatica Ipsum, Garbage Day, and Today in Tabs. I think that’s it, though I guess I can include Rubyland.news and Short Ruby Newsletter too). I yearn to share something like this for everyone who actively, if not always monetarily, supports my own work. The feeling is there, though not words this nice.| island94.org
Frontdoor Benefits, my new startup, posted our first newsletter/update. In doing our “planning” for it I took a lot from how I apprach this blog: We are writing to a single individual (”Dear treasured friend” not “Hey friends”). We are writing from each of our personal voices (”This is Charlotte. I have… ” or “This is Ben. I have…”) Tone is casual and informal, we are sharing the things we’ve done or are thinking about with a close and curious person. We write about ...| Island94.org
Update: Rails v7.1 will introduce a new configuration method config.autoload_lib to make it safer and easier to autoload the /lib directory and explicitly exclude directories from autoloading. When released, this advice may no longer be relevant, though I imagine it will still be possible for developers to twist themselves into knots and cause outages with autoloading overrides.| island94.org