Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
Ruby on Rails is such a good framework. There, I said it.
There’s only one problem: no static types. Better said, no explicit types.
In Ruby, you have to rely on your brain to remember the type of each variable. And if you’ve ever been to the supermarket without a shopping list, you know how that ends.
That’s why I started playing with TypeScript. However, in the process of preparing a monorepo skeleton for future projects, I realized how Rails removes a ton of decisions with all its batteries included.
With TypeScript, I don’t have to think about types, but I have to think about composing packages coherently. One step forward, one step backward.
Am I alone in this conundrum?
Elsewhere on the Web
How to use undocumented web APIs by Julia Evans
A couple of days I wrote about tiny personal programs, and I mentioned that it can be fun to use “secret” undocumented APIs where you need to copy your cookies out of the browser to get access to them.
(Riccardo: copy as cURL is the new copy from StackOverflow.)
A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS by Aditya Siram
The recent surge of interest in secure memory management has sparked a renaissance of type safe systems programming languages. ATS is a statically typed ML that compiles to C and offers what almost no other modern systems language including Rust has: type safe pointer arithmetic.
(Riccardo: Prepare to be both overwhelmed and entertained.)