Dave Copeland :ruby:

Author of Sustainable Web Development with Ruby on Rails, The Senior Software Engineer and more. CTO @ Mood Health. Former Stitch Fix, LivingSocial. Posts about Ruby, Tech, Maybe Cats

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Last Notes

2025-03-09 15:49:03

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@nprofile…wych They said they are working on one!

2025-03-09 15:48:53

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@nprofile…4suk As I understanding it, Podman has no docker compose equivalent, and I use docker compose to run my app + databases etc.

2025-03-09 15:06:15

One of the reasons I got this Linux box was to really do dev on it to challenge assumptions in https://devbox.computer
Realizing that running as root is not ideal, since on Linux Docker is not a VM, so I'm really running as root.

2025-03-09 15:06:15

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I had been running on my Mac as non-root to see how it worked. It worked well, except Docker in Docker did not work, since it expected access to the /var thingy and my user-in-container didn't have access, but I think I can figure that out.

2025-03-09 15:00:54

Using Mastodon and Bluesky only as webapps: Mastodon seems to be able to seamless refresh with new content. Bluesky notsomuch.
I do miss Ivory and will likely buy TapBots Bluesky client. During the downfall of Twitter, I realized that TweetBot *was* Twitter for me.

2025-03-09 15:00:54

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Bluesky's "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" are OK. Ivory's equivalents are usually pretty good. Mastodon's explore seems OK (is this the same as Ivory's?)

2025-03-08 18:48:39

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@nprofile…2xxy basically what happens is when I press down to click, apparently my finger moves down slightly. Apple’s driver must reject that but on Ubuntu I’m missing a ton of targets.

2025-03-08 16:57:40

OMG three finger swipe changed workspaces!!! The bar is clearly low on Linux for me :)
What is the "Maps that is not google maps" alternative people use? OpenStreetMap seems OK, but also very, I dunno, "clinical" (<table>s of stats on locations e.g.)

2025-03-08 16:40:02

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I have ordered a mouse for the first time in probably 20 years to see if that is a better experience than the trackpad.
I plan to do all dev work next week with this and see how it is.

2025-03-08 16:40:01

I may be approaching the "fun because you can tweak things" phase of Desktop Linux. I wish I had been taking notes so I could apply all these changes to a fresh install, but I will at least remember what is and is not possible.

2025-03-08 16:40:01

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Additional victories I was not expecting:
- logitech webcam just works (though looks like hell)
- fingerprint-to-auth continues to work seamlessly
- On macOS, EVERY TIME I open it, my LG monitor is very dim and I must adjust brightness. Not so on Linux!!!

2025-03-08 02:53:19

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@nprofile…73ww @nprofile…73a2 interesting. Fedora was the other option framework said was officially supported.

2025-03-07 23:29:21

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@nprofile…5q8l I tried something similar but not exactly this. Will look into it. The security / usability tension is alive and well :(

2025-03-07 22:15:36

Since these sites have responsive views, it works well. Here's what it looks like:
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/114/123/455/567/230/571/original/372e3a100983bd23.png

2025-03-07 22:08:11

FirefoxPWA extension seems like a decent hack to run PWAs. I've been trying to run stuff like Masto, BlueSky, etc. as web apps, so I can alt-tab to them but also not have to have an app.

2025-03-07 20:31:29

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@nprofile…c435 @nprofile…m79g Yeah, I do think some of this stuff is just different, not "wrong". But one thing I love about mac is the culturally-accepted modifier key is Cmd which is not used by any terminal emulator at all and is right under the thumb. Most keyboard shortcuts are very easy to press. I can see why people map caps lock to Ctrl on linux, because I'm going through a lot of contortions.
Also, I think the hardware is generally working well - it's the software that's hard to adjust to :)

2025-03-07 20:28:25

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@nprofile…af7k Vanilla Ubuntu 24.04. This is one of two that Framework officially supports, so I figured I'd start there. Would like to explore other options at some point.

2025-03-07 19:29:41

Amazingly, my outboard USB headphone amp was detected by Linux and works AND the knob on my Keychron keyboard just worked as well!
Meanwhile, 1password is very fragile. The browser plugins can't connect to the app, but there's no obvious way to debug it.

2025-03-07 19:29:41

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I also discovered the joys of "app switching" vs "window switching". On macOS, you only switch apps and then only switch windows inside that app. On Linux, you can switch apps, sortof, but not all apps. I changed it to just switch windows, which is better, but not ideal.

2025-03-07 19:29:41

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A lot of this is just friction against what I'm used to and not always "the Mac way is objectively better". I think Mac has far more consistency and out-of-the-box working. It's SwiftUI/AppKit rough edges look smooth compared to "some of my windows have close buttons on the right, some on the left"

2025-03-07 18:00:21

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@nprofile…59y4 I cannot figure out which model I have (nothing specific in system report) - it's the only one apple sold a few years ago, thunderbolt and usb ports only. It does show up in settings and I didn't install any software. I can select it as an audio output device from the menubar widget thingy.

2025-03-07 17:28:59

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@nprofile…59y4 I have an LG Ultrafine and I can control brightness by holding Ctrl and the system brightness keys (F1/F2 I think?)
Maybe that will work for you. Otherwise, you are right on and it’s maddening how what used to be a cable and buttons has become shitty software that doesn’t work.

2025-03-07 16:50:21

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That said, this could be eminently usable for web dev. My https://devbox.computer based dev environment Just Worked. I installed git and Docker and that's it, and I am doing development without issue.
ExpressVPN mostly works, my dotfiles and vim config all work. yubikey worked. plex works.

2025-03-07 16:50:20

Way back when, I was moving back to the DC area from SF and my main criteria for a job was could I use Linux (instead of Windows). At that time, everything was configured in files, and GUI apps were few and far between. Wondering if that's how I should try using Linux again?

2025-03-07 16:50:20

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The stuff I rely on Mac that I don't see happening in Linux:
- _consistent_ and prolific keyboard shortcuts
- fantastical
- thunderbolt monitor charging
- photo editing/photos in general (too locked into Apple and Adobe to switch)
- trackpad
- iMessage

2025-03-07 16:11:54

gnome terminal is not fun, so I'm using Ghostty on Linux as it is way easier to configure and overall nicer. On macOS it's not better than Terminal.app and actually worse since it kills my battery, but it feels like a cool drink of water in hell here on linux

2025-03-07 15:13:49

My LG Ultrafine sometimes charges the framework laptop and sometimes not. Mostly not! Neat!
NGL, I think Apple gets a ton of credit for making these issues just go away.

2025-03-07 15:12:03

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@nprofile…dsew Yeah, my guess is that most Linux users are mouse-oriented so trackpads don't get a lot of attention. I've been digging through configs to see if scrolls speed and other stuff can be managed, but it seems like it just can't.
The "clicking moves the mouse" issue though seems REALLY tricky to avoid (and is where Apple is just really good)

2025-03-07 15:10:33

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@nprofile…evnt My keyboard is a Keychron and I can highly customize it in its own hardware. There's a web-based UI to use it, but only Chrome is supported and on Linux I can't access to the USB device no matter what I try.
This would be most ideal because the mappings would be in the keyboard itself and not relying on software

2025-03-07 14:31:00

Cool, Chrome can't access my keyboard to do remappings. Something about USB permissions. I gave them. I did not work. I feel like customizing my keyboard's firmware would go a long way here.

2025-03-07 14:27:59

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@nprofile…dsew This relates to another problem I don't know how to eliminate, which is that both the built-in trackpad and the Magic Trackpad move the mouse cursor slightly whenever you click, I guess based on how I'm clicking. I can't imagine three-finger click would work. On macOS I use a clipboard manager so having every Copy operation append to that list is really nice. The ephemeral "section" clipboard is just confusing to me at this point :(

2025-03-07 11:41:27

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@nprofile…dsew I seem to recall that only worked on some apps? Also I have no middle buttons :(

2025-03-07 11:40:38

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@nprofile…d3c2 not sure but I have no insert key on any keyboard :(

2025-03-07 11:13:29

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@nprofile…m79g Ctrl-c copies in Firefox. This cannot be changed. Ctrl-c sends SIGINT in terminal.
Meanwhile, “copy” doesn’t always copy to system clipboard. It’s app dependent.
Over on Mac, Cmd(Super) C copies everywhere to a system clipboard. Like it should.

2025-03-07 02:48:14

I do not know how anyone can use Linux with the copy and paste situation in such disrepair. Firefox requires ctrl-c/v it seems. Other apps can be customized on a per-app basis. No GUI to control remapping of keys, really. No GUI to control keymap per input device.

2025-03-07 02:48:14

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And to make this even worse, the trackpad is absolute garbage. It has "kinetic scrolling" which I guess cannot be turned off easily. Basically if I touch the trackpad, it just scrolls randomly. My magic trackpad works but each click moves the cursor down a bit before clicking. AUGH

2025-03-07 02:48:14

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As much as Apple is not great at application software, their sw/hw integration is very impressive. I never knew how good I had it. I think part of this is the integration - Linux, like windows, has to support a lot of hardware. Apple does not.

2025-03-06 23:18:22

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Trackpad/mousing is a complete nightmare. I don't know what macOS does for this but Linux is using the Windows version which is awful. _I_ am doing this partly to work on https://devbox.computer revisions and also was generally curious what life was like w/out Apple.

2025-03-06 23:18:22

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Since Thunderbolt display works, I am going to try using this in earnest and not peace out right now. But so far, it's still pretty rough.

2025-03-06 23:18:21

Got a Framework Laptop. Install and setup was easy. As for Ubuntu...a lot of stuff Just Worked, however there is so much Linux Nightmare still around: copy/paste doesn't really work, key remapping works only in some apps, sometimes, lots of requests for password w/ no context

2025-03-06 23:18:21

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windows being activated but not coming to the top (e.g. click on .deb in "Files", nothing happens until switch to "App Center"). Installing any software package takes 5+ minutes with fans on afterburner. I'm amazed how far Linux has come yet no regular person could ever use this in a million years.

2025-03-05 11:19:29

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@nprofile…639z it destroyed my battery life and I have no idea why nor what it was supposed to do for me.

2025-03-04 00:35:49

I always love spotting a sea cucumber on a dive. Never seen this type (way too deep) and I cannot imagine seeing them moving at all much less swimming. This is just wild.
https://digipres.club/@misty/114101284105974249

2025-02-28 23:01:30

Achievement unlocked! I got Plex to properly recognize the episodes in season 1 of Star Trek TNG! 🖖
It took like a half hour. If only there was a naming convention they followed (oh wait…)

2025-02-27 15:02:04

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@nprofile…nda6 Yeah, that stuff concerns me, too. I don't know why they couldn't just keep running a password manager business.

2025-02-27 14:55:20

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@nprofile…nda6 Ah, yeah I'm not ready to trust apple's software engineering with my passwords. Apple's software has gotten so flaky, and their internet services software has never really worked that well.
My wife does use it, and observing her, it seems like the 90% case is fine, but the 10% where it doesn't work is way worse than 1password's 10%.

2025-02-27 14:46:33

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@nprofile…nda6 I didn't know there was an OS level integration like on iOS. I wonder why they don't use it given that the safari extension pretty much doesn't work.
Are the password managers other than iCloud keychain that have OS integration on macOS and iOS?

2025-02-27 14:09:34

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To be fair, at least we have a list of them! I remember when the list was "The One Installed on Everyone's Computer End of List"
I honestly like Firefox/Ugly and Run By Morons, but it's continued existence seems unsustainable.

2025-02-27 14:09:34

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I was fine using Safari/Doesn't Work but the 1Password extension and the way to set up Kagi just SUCKS hard. I'm sure a lot of that is on Apple. Why can't I set any search engine I want? Why can't I opt into an extension that works properly?

2025-02-27 14:09:34

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The situation is somewhat less dire on iPhone and yet totally grim. Mobile Safari works a lot better than desktop Safari, and the OS integrations mean that stuff like 1password actually works. Kagi is tenuous, but currently working via a hack.

2025-02-27 14:09:33

Good time to update my browser list:
• Spies on You
• Spies on You CoPilot PC 365
• Ugly and Run By Morons
• Doesn't Work
• The One You Are Forced to Use on Good Phones

2025-02-26 17:09:34

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@nprofile…zr50 Without any additional context, #4. It's the most straightforward to me at explaining “a or b or a default”
#3 is a real doozy - reads like a challenge of how convoluted someone can make a conditional

2025-02-26 00:08:27

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@nprofile…xcnx Nope, it turns out you can only initiate a drag on certain types of elements. When I put an <a> inside the draggable=true, I can then drag it. Maybe that's the “accessibly right" thing to do anyway?

2025-02-25 21:31:58

The two things I like about this gem (that I created some or most of a long time ago :) that Data does not have are:
• If a field ends in a “?”, e.g. :new?, then it will be coerced into a boolean, e.g. active: nil will cause active? to return false
• If a field is a single-element array with a symbol, it will be coerced into an array—never nil.
I'm not sure these are strong-enough reasons to adopt it over Data, but I liked those features :)
https://ruby.social/@soulcutter/114066641156424488

2025-02-24 20:20:55

A great example of “Docker appears to provide repeatable builds but absolutely does not”.
I've been bitten by this before. It's incredibly frustrating and it's a hard problem to solve when you want repeatable builds but don't want a time-consuming process to audit dependency changes every time you want to update something.
https://ruby.social/@Ryanbigg/114049569373488254

2025-02-20 16:58:56

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@nprofile…zr50 Maybe this is one of my many old man yells at could, but I could never understand what they were for. I don't know why anyone would star a repo, or why I would care if my repos had stars.

2025-02-19 17:01:32

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Brought to you by the confluence of puma's DSL configuration and OpenTelemetry's automagic configuration:
Brought to you by https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ruby/pull/472/files

2025-02-19 17:01:31

One downside of Ruby's ability to make configuration easy in the base case is that you end up having configuration spread all over the place: initializers, env vars, command line flags, yaml files, etc.
All to avoid writing code to instantiate a class.

2025-02-14 16:53:43

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When an API in the world's largest, most successful platform is not that great, it means people don't use it. To use e.g. Honeycomb's front-end observability is 1MB uncompressed JS.
Meanwhile, performance.timeOrigin is broken on firefox. Meanwhile, Safari doesn't support most performance events

2025-02-14 16:53:43

Been digging into the browser Performance API. It's very clear why a lot of websites are slow and my Just Add More React™ doesn't ring alarm bells. The API is inconsistently supported across browsers and pretty difficult to use. Sure, I can install google's 300K library but I should not have to…

2025-02-14 16:53:43

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Meanwhile meanwhile, syncing browser and server timestamps to create a unified timeline is pretty difficult. And then, even if you can get all this info, and say your largest contenful paint is bad - WHAT CONTENT!?!?!? It's just no wonder SPAs are slow and flaky.

2025-02-14 16:04:54

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@nprofile…p3s2 @nprofile…lhul Yeah, @nprofile…63fz suggested something similar on BlueSky using to_proc and call.
Would be nice if Ruby had analogs for to_str and friends, e.g. from_str, from_int etc.

2025-02-13 18:05:35

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@nprofile…lhul I haven new raise exceptions a lot if the initializer args would create an invalid object.

2025-02-13 17:41:06

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@nprofile…uzec Yeah, that has a lot of conversion methods, so I would not override .new in that case since there are a lot of starting points for making that class

2025-02-13 17:40:14

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@nprofile…zr50 Yeah, the idea of "return nil if the arg is nil” is to contain nils and not let them leak into object state, i.e. if a header is a name and a value, the name should never be nil, thus no Header should ever be created with a nil name.
Depending on context, "return nil" could also be "blow up”, but same general structure works.
It would be cool if Ruby allowed TypeName(…) to be auto-defined as a conversion for types you define.

2025-02-13 17:32:49

When creating data types in Ruby, I often make a factory method that does 2 things you can't do in an initializer:
1 - if the argument is nil, return nil
2 - if the argument is already of the data type, return it
https://gist.github.com/davetron5000/1a6b394f4295f1b70062baab013d297f#file-factory-rb
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/113/997/772/730/535/425/original/8cd95ac1b3d377e6.jpeg

2025-02-13 17:32:49

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It occurs to me that you can override Class.new to do this and make a much cleaner API.
Any reason not to do this regularly? Feels weird to return `nil` from a constructor, but it would be darn handy a lot of times.
https://gist.github.com/davetron5000/1a6b394f4295f1b70062baab013d297f#file-new-rb
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/113/997/772/715/635/744/original/60973036ea52b288.jpeg

2025-02-13 14:41:47

OTel's docs are so relentlessly bad (impenetrable specs and oversimplistic examples + out of date API docs) that I had to use ChatGPT to understand how to use it. And, it's answers were mostly correct and super helpful. I would be at a standstill without it.

2025-02-13 14:41:47

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I don't know if this means that writing good docs is no longer important, or if it's more important than ever. I got more useful info out of 5 minutes with ChatGPT than several hours reading docs, specs, and source code.

2025-02-10 19:32:24

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@nprofile…83zn @nprofile…re22 @nprofile…y54p Oh, good point - in fact probably the main reason such a scheme wouldn't work in general.

2025-02-10 19:24:41

How much would life improve if a) this code was in Ruby stdlib and b) `nil?` was a protocol to control falseyness in an if statement? I can't imagine a single problem this would cause nor any way to abuse these features 😈
https://gist.github.com/davetron5000/e3fd4b90eadf22ca2bd192607769e918
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/113/981/225/677/197/033/original/1d2b4b14acb57451.png

2025-02-10 18:11:36

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@nprofile…re22 @nprofile…y54p When you leave a job, you usually are covered until the end of the month, sometimes longer, if the company provided it. After that, you always have the option to pay for it out of pocket for I think 18 months. But it's super expensive, like $1,000/month, so most people try to get a new job within a few weeks to avoid having to pay for it. If you choose NOT to pay for it, you are penalized when you do your taxes. It's a helluva system :(

2025-02-10 17:37:41

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@nprofile…re22 @nprofile…y54p In the US it's likely because of health insurance. No one would take a job for a short trial because they'd be on the hook to pay out of pocket for insurance until their company started paying, and it's extremely expensive.

2025-02-10 16:41:29

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@nprofile…y54p Yeah, that was a critical part, even though most people "passed”. We also had a fairly diverse team, which did suss out a few "dudes that are nice to dudes but jerks to women” types

2025-02-10 16:11:53

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@nprofile…vkmy I did learn a lot during my short tenure there, that's for sure - about tech, management, and product.

2025-02-10 15:34:09

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@nprofile…y54p Yeah, that can be really hard to screen for. At a past company, when people came onsite, they'd go to lunch with non-engineers. We had at least one person get rejected because they were such a jerk at lunch with non-engineers despite being incredible at all the other parts of the process. Felt like we dodged a bullet

2025-02-10 15:24:27

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@nprofile…y54p Practically, that matches my experience as well. But it doesn't have to be that way. I could imagine hiring for more general experience and then training new hires on whatever the tech stack and ways of working are vs. trying to see if they already know it and throwing them into the deep end on day 1.

2025-02-10 14:09:00

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At Stitch Fix, the original CEO did not do this. We hired only when there was something that we wanted to do that we couldn't do. But he always had pressure to hire more engineers. For what reason? I don't know. After a few years and some leadership changes, we also started hiring willy nilly

2025-02-10 14:09:00

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I've said previously, but about a year before I left, I would estimate at least a third if not half of the roadmap was utterly pointless work that would not truly help the business. But no idea was turned away. Just hire more engineers.

2025-02-10 14:09:00

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I think because hiring engineers is hard (possibly due to self-inflicted hiring processes), VCs/CEOs see big teams as a status symbol. Until now. They are realizing it's a massive cost that doesn't deliver an ROI. Thus, this is, sadly, a correction.

2025-02-10 14:09:00

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I worked at a startup where the CEO just wanted a big engineering team. So he hired one. No roadmap existed to justify it, and it made everything slower.
LivingSocial famously just hired every Ruby person around, and it was total chaos. No plans, just hire.

2025-02-10 14:08:59

I honestly think the continued layoffs in tech are not AI replacing programmers - it's a correction from years of overhiring. I interviewed someone that was a Dir of E at Twitter and they told me that a HUNDRED people worked on their mobile app. That's just not necessary.

2025-02-10 00:33:11

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@nprofile…h9c0 Doh. Another one is Piranesi. PG, not too heady, no real technobabble, really fun (I suppose I may have also recommended this one, too 👴🏻 :)

2025-02-08 20:58:15

Cool, the dems are going to the time-honored strategy that totally works and has won elections: SMS spamming the shit out me for money to be used for…I don't know what. WTF is wrong with these people?
Of note, I live in DC so have no senator and my rep is non-voting.

2025-02-08 02:56:42

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@nprofile…h9c0 All Our Wrong Todays is very fun, not grimdark, and a great time travel story.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27405006-all-our-wrong-todays

2025-02-07 06:05:38

I have tried to use the new image playgrounds twice. The first time, I described "Eddie Van Halen and Ronnie James Dio" and got an old lady. The second time I clicked on myself and got an absolutely horrifying and terrible caricature of myself. Who the fuck asked for this?!?!?!