Today I was sending a client some 404 Error pages for reference (at the moment their site defaults to the standard Rails 7 error page). GitHub has for years had an excellent 404 page (likely something we all will be encountering a lot more in light of recent events); so of course I wanted to reference that. The first thing that popped into my head was “blahblahblah” ie github.com/blahblahblah: unlikely to return anything, I thought. Incorrect: fair enough, GitHub’s simple URL scheme resolves the page path to any existing account.
Turns out blahblahblah is a GitHub user. They Joined in November 2008 and, from what I could tell never made any contributions. So I moved to the next logical path: blahblahblahblah while three “blah"s is a common English expression four is not. Turns out blahblahblahblah joined GitHub in 2010 and has made no contributions since.
So I tried, 5, 6, 7 iterations of “blah”, I began to worry that this was some sort of bot that was just joining GitHub with the next available number of “blah”.
The last user is: blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah which is 36 characters, 3 less than GitHub’s username limit of 39 characters. Sadly we will never know what could have been if there was no restriction on username lengths.
Donald don’t threaten us with a good time!
Asked late on Thursday whether he would consider pulling US troops out of Italy and Spain, Trump told reporters: “Probably …"
Leaving Vercel
I recently discovered the photo of Guillermo Rauch with Netanyahu, I guess this was bigger news in tech circles about six months ago but until yesterday I was entirely uninformed. I have subsequently removed all my projects from Vercel (the platform Rauch founded and serves as CEO of) and written this letter to the Vercel team:
Vercel is, and has always been one of the best products I’ve used, the developer experience is flawless and over the years I’ve hosted half a dozen personal projects on the platform as well as bringing on a long-term customer.
It saddens me to leave and I did so only because I cannot in good conscience continue to support or use the product in any way. Although the original post was over six months ago I was just made aware of CEO Guillermo Rauch’s post on X posing with Benjamin Netanyahu. At that point Netanyahu had an international arrest warrant, had presided over the genocide of 60,000 people (at least a third of them children) and wholesale destroyed 80% of a city that was home to 2 million people. I believe individuals are entitled to their personal opinions but Rauch is not just an employee, as the founder and one of the original authors of the flagship product it’s hard to separate Rauch’s actions from the company. Also it’s one thing, I suppose, to post “I support Israel” in your personal socials and entirely another to actually meet and pose with a war criminal then post it on your public X which you have used for years to promote your company.
For these reasons I can no longer continue using Vercel.
Updating some Backbone.js code… What a blast from the past, over the year’s I believe I’ve worked on three Backbone projects. It’s fun to dig into legacy hotness from 10 or 15 years back it allows you to judge the code with more clarity. The code today was pretty clever, the Backbone stuff I worked on a year ago; not so much.
New script to kill the rails s: lsof -i:3000 | grep "ruby" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -15
I’ve set that as a workflow in Alfred that runs when I hit command-control-r (⌘⌃R). I set this up last year because I find Rails gets hung up and control-c isn’t enough to kill it. However, prior to right now I was using lsof -i:3000 | xargs kill -15 which would also kill Firefox (Zen), grep for Ruby and then grabbing the specific processes fixed this.
Args and Params
I think I’ve always used args and params interchangeably; TIL parameters are what the function accepts and arguments are the values passed in. For example in Elixir:
def my_func(name, age) do
...
end
# above name, and age are parameters
# then at the call site:
my_func("Travis", 34)
# "Travis" and 34 are arguments
Just read the term “React Engineer”, I know it’s cliche but I need to scream into the void on this: there is no such thing as a “React Engineer”; engineers are licensed professionals and highly regulated, slapping components together to “make the graphql look pretty” is not an engineering job.
I get that these terms are conflated, but I never call myself a “software engineer” because I didn’t do an engineering program.
Whenever I get a spammy text my first move is to run:
loadtest -c 50 -n 1000000 --rps 10000 https://spammy_url.com
They generally don’t use beefy servers so it’s fairly easy to crash them at least for a few minutes. Thinking of creating background script to run this constantly for any spam texts I get, might be enough to spike a Lambda or Vercel bill a bit.
I’m a firm believer that 40-60% of jobs in the modern world do not need to exist. AI is driving those jobs out of existence, unfortunately it is not doing so by creating a simpler more utilitarian world, instead it serves as a multiplier for that waste and will likely create even more layers of pointless abstraction.
I’m a firm believer that 40-60% of jobs in the modern world do not need to exist. AI is driving those jobs out of existence, unfortunately it is not doing so by creating a simpler more utilitarian world, instead it serves as a multiplier for that waste and will likely create even more layers of pointless abstraction.