Robert McNees “No playing D&D with the bears.”

Tech Stuff

Twenty five thousand dollars of funny money Every legacy(*) code base where this happen:

I had been at the company something like six weeks and had changed a line of source code to fix a bug (logging), to uncover another bug (wrong argument count), to enable yet another bug (wrong units, and zero type safety) that gave 25 grand worth of funny money to anyone who clicked! And I had clicked! And I got a friend to click! And other people got it too!

(* legacy — not any code you wrote recently)

bit.io PAYG serverless Postgres database, with 1/4 second cold start, dashboard, generous free tier, $1 per 100M rows queried. Doesn't support edge servers though (see below).

The on-boarding experience is just made for a PAYG database: upload your CSV or drop a link to get started with a new database. I hope the rest of the developer experience is as good.

PlanetScale I'm using PlanetScale on a current project, which is somewhat pointless given my dataset is minuscule, and PS is all about … well … scale.

What I was looking for is an SQL database I can use from edge servers, with their limited support of exactly one protocol (*cough*HTTPS*cough*). PlanetScale has a driver that users fetch. Would love to get it working with Prisma for more complex use cases.

An "interesting" features about PlanetScale is how it handles database schema changes. It needs to manage the schema so it can scale it, which means there's a process for deploying schema changes (aka migrations).

You need to branch from the main database, make and test your schema changes, do a deploy request, review and apply it.

This seems like the best solution at scale — when you need bulletproof migrations that could take long time to complete.

Improving React Interaction Times by 4x I don't work with number-crunching UIs, still love learning from other people's stress tests.

Sign in with Google, Apple, and other providers... and save it in 1Password Works like a charm!

1Password now remembers which social login I used to sign-in: was it Google? GitHub? Facebook? Why can’t I ever remember? And also which Google acount did I use?

Kyle Welch 😭

Just saw someone shorten Head of Engineering to HoE

I have never wanted a title more in my life.

Skware For when you UI needs 8-bit icons!

Business Side

It’s Time For ‘Maximum Viable Product’ The concept that software can be "done" and not adding any new features:

What if more developers developed a sense for the “maximum” number of things a product should do — and stopped there?

What if more software firms decided, “Hey! We’ve reached the absolute perfect set of features. We’re done. This product is awesome. No need to keep on shoving in stuff nobody wants.”

AWS and Blockchain Inside look at how AWS evaluated the "there must be a real use case" blockchain:

This week saw the cancellation of the Australian Stock Exchange’s long-running effort to build a blockchain-based trading system. Which, oddly, has me thinking of 2016, when AWS decided not to make a strategic investment in blockchain, with my input a contributing factor. It felt like a good story while it was happening. Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong

Machine Thinking

ChatGPT Goodbye Google Search!

• Gives you an answer faster than doing a search and hunting for links
• Results not any worse than what Google ranks
• Explanation and code sample are well written
• No ads! No popups!
• Ends with "I hope this helps!"

I hope so too.

(The results are not always correct, sometimes obsolete, but not much different from what I get from Google/StackOverflow and just so much easier to use)

Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT Did you know, that you can build a virtual machine inside ChatGPT? And that you can use this machine to create files, program and even browse the internet?

Riley Goodside

OpenAI's new ChatGPT explains the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm, with Python code examples, in the style of a fast-talkin' wise guy from a 1940's gangster movie:

#NotTwitter

Follow Link for Mastodon Single link so people can follow you on Mastodon from their instance.

Here's mine: follow me at assaf@mas.to

Movetodon Find your friends from Twitter and easily follow them.

Tim Chambers Mastodon at 8m is still a blip on the radar, let's see if this network effect carries momentum (PDF)

My team at work just launched new research on the #TwitterMigration: We analyze which platforms are growing - especially #Mastodon, #Tumblr & #Post. We look at which sites users are adding to their Twitter bios, posting to their friends about & downloading apps for. Please do boost this, and love to hear any comments or feedback on it!

Everything Else

Felicity Hannah “Did you know you can tell the age of a fake Christmas tree by counting the rings of tape?”

Bartender 4 The curse of having too many apps, and not enough screen space for a menu bar that can fit them all.

I previously used Hidden Bar, too flaky for me. Have not tried Vanilla.

zoehong “Why would you greenscreen yourself knowing the internet exists?”

Greg Young

"You will never make anything useful with that stupid 3d printer"

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