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Weeknotes: 5 February to 9 February 2024

a painting of a landscape with trees and clouds
Blue and silver, Pas-de-Calais, 1929, by Algernon Talmage, Painting from Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Parsing an RSS feed before extracting it to create a web app with a tool providing a detailed documentation is refreshing

  • Reviewing the differences between projects in Hanami 2.0 and those in Hanami 2.1 is informative

  • In Python, the zip function aggregates elements from two or more iterables

#25
February 9, 2024
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Weeknotes: 29 January to 2 February 2024

a lake with mountains in the background
Image by 12019 from Pixabay

What I have found gripping

  • RSpec expectations define expected outcomes

  • A diff is the part of a failure message showing the differences between data structures

  • Domain-Driven Design relies on business requirements

#24
February 2, 2024
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Weeknotes: 22 January to 26 January 2024

A cliff and boats stationed near it
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Each Hanami view contains a class and a template in v2.1

  • Domain-Driven Design involves collaboration between developers and domain experts

  • Picking a technical solution that will meet almost all of a project's requirements can make a difference. Being aware of tradeoffs matters too

  • Adding a requirements.txt file to a Django project only requires using this command

    pip freeze > requirements.txt
#23
January 26, 2024
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Weeknotes: 15 January to 19 January 2024

A view of mountains and a river
Painting by Francis Towne: Grasmere from The Rydal Road, Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#22
January 19, 2024
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Weeknotes: 8 January to 12 January 2024

Sunrise on the horizon in a forest landscape
Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash

From now on, these weeknotes will be hosted on Buttondown.

What I have found gripping

#21
January 12, 2024
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Weeknotes: 11 December to 15 December 2023

photo of mountains and a night sky filled with stars
Photo by Arto Marttinen on Unsplash

#20
December 15, 2023
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Weeknotes: 4 December to 8 December 2023

a painting of a field with trees and clouds
Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Ruby Object Mapping (ROM) is an open-source persistence and mapping toolkit for Ruby

  • In Hanami, confirming that the database_url setting is working as intended requires running the command bundle exec hanami before calling the database_url method on the application's settings object

  • Building a RESTful API in Go means carefully considering which database to add to it

#19
December 8, 2023
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Weeknotes: 27 November to 1 December 2023

gray abstract rose petals
Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Adding double-quoted strings helps process escape sequences. For example when printing an addition with the print method:

    print "addition\n"
  • The .to syntax defines positive expectations in tests

  • The .to_not/.not_to is for negative expectations in tests

  • Wildly Explicit Tests can be handy in RSpec

#18
December 1, 2023
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Weeknotes: 20 November to 24 November 2023

waterfalls painting
Photo by British Library on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Creating a new programme in Python from scratch with a new method leading to the output I’m looking for is fascinating

  • Documentation providing detailed guidance about how to use a tool is a brilliant source of information and supports various levels of autonomy

  • A prosumer is someone that purchases very high quality technical products or equipment. It’s also an individual who helps a company design and produce its products

  • Trying out a new tool with a very different interface with a focus on relevant and more accurate information is pleasant

#17
November 24, 2023
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Weeknotes: 13 November to 17 November 2023

a painting of a wooded area with trees
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Tools integrating with the framework LangChain include Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, AWS, Microsoft etc.

  • In LangChain, agents use a language model to choose a sequence of actions to take

  • Running the command python -m pip install -r requirements.txt in an integrated terminal installs dependencies based on a file named requirements.txt

  • Garbage collection in Ruby is a memory management system

#16
November 17, 2023
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Weeknotes: 6 November to 10 November 2023

a landscape with hills and trees
Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#15
November 10, 2023
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Weeknotes: 30 October to 3 November 2023

a painting of a landscape with a body of water in the background
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#14
November 3, 2023
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Weeknotes: 23 October to 27 October 2023

a painting of a lake surrounded by mountains
Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#13
October 27, 2023
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Weeknotes: 16 October to 20 October 2023

green grass field near snow covered mountain during daytime
Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#12
October 20, 2023
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Weeknotes: 9 October to 13 October 2023

brown mountain under white clouds and blue sky during daytime
Photo by innayat anhar on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • An each loop in Ruby is a way to “repeat until done”

  • Not having a CLI command to set secrets before deploying a Rails app to a new host makes for a more complex deployment process

  • Using this Rails command is a necessary step in the process: EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit --environment production

  • In Rails 7.1, it is possible to generate a Dockerfile by typing this Rails command in the terminal at the root of the project folder: bin/rails generate dockerfile

  • Adding CSS to a Sinatra app involves a DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) approach

What I have read

#11
October 13, 2023
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Weeknotes: 2 October to 6 October 2023

blue yellow and red abstract painting
Photo by Mayur Deshpande on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • In Rails 7, you need to run bin/dev to load your CSS from TailwindCSS, you cannot simply use bin/rails server

  • The prose tag is a class applying a few default styles to a page

  • Reading then parsing a CSV file requires two different class methods in Ruby

  • Setting secrets for production is essential otherwise it’s not possible to deploy especially when using a Dockerfile and a new hosting provider

#10
October 6, 2023
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Weeknotes: 25 September to 29 September 2023

blue, yellow, and brown wall decor
Photo by Photo Boards on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Polyglot programming is about writing code in several languages. According to TechTarget, it is “to capture additional functionality and efficiency not available in a single language”

  • Testing case statements with RSpec meant working through error messages before getting tests to pass

  • Building a small server using Node.js before launching it with the command node index.js took less time than expected

#9
September 29, 2023
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Weeknotes: 18 September to 22 September 2023

blue yellow and red abstract painting
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Git annotate is a command annotating the lines of a file with commit information

  • Choosing to start a Rails project with a PostgreSQL database instead of a Sqlite one allows for scalability in the future

  • Learning and experiencing community at a welcoming technical event (albeit remotely) makes a difference

  • Enabling force_ssl to serve a Rails app over HTTPS and use secure cookies by simply uncommenting a line in the production.rb file can take little time

  • Deploying a new version of a Rails app with the help of clear technical documentation is a joy

  • Receiving specific feedback is helpful. Thankful for the folks providing it thoughtfully

#8
September 22, 2023
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Weeknotes: 11 September to 15 September 2023

red blue and white abstract painting
Photo by Robert Keane on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

#7
September 15, 2023
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Weeknotes: 4 September to 8 September 2023

white red and green textile
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What I have found gripping

  • Reading traceback messages to resolve invalid syntax in Python requires diligent investigating

  • Creating a unit test in Python and executing it with a test runner like unittest differs from creating one in Ruby with RSpec

  • Feeling a sense of belonging is dependent on the quality of experiences within any given context

  • Connecting across differences starts small

  • Cross-cultural learning is continuous

#6
September 8, 2023
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