Travis Fantina

It’s encouraging to see heads of state around the world condemning the video of Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting detainees; but they don’t get it. The international community’s abject failure to act during the genocide of the last two and a-half years has taught Israel and Israeli leaders that they are 100% immune. If there have been literally 0 consequences for the deaths of over seventy thousand civilians and the total destruction of all hospitals and universities then what do these leaders with their “strongly worded” condemnations expect is going to happen?

Early December, 2023, I had a rare night by myself walking around the city. Picking something up from on the West End followed by a meeting past Olympic Village; generally a transit worthy-distance but I had over an hour to kill and the night was warm. Not unseasonably warm, but comfortable. It had been raining all day; not a steady downpour, just the fine mist that seems to vacillate between fog and rain. Walking along the waterfront the streets glistening with the sheen of the rain, trees were still, halos formed around the pricks of streetlights. My feet carried me effortlessly through Yaletown toward False Creek. Walking through a city helps to create a mental model in a way that a car or transit does not; not only do you learn the geography, it also has the odd effect of shrinking the city. Somehow things that once seemed quite far away feel close. Cutting across parks, allies and walking paths that route you around congested streets. You’re apt to get lost a few times but it’s a worthy trade to know the city.

The lights around me seemed to dim as I entered a park along the water; pricks across the inlet and a glow behind me. Along the promenade coming from the opposite direction, a father and a young boy leisurely made their way across the street and along my path. They looked happy, the boy was skipping, and the father was encouraging him in some kind of game. Laughing and talking the two made their way past me and I felt such an overwhelming sense of calm. I thought of my own child, my daughter at home, likely already asleep, had we not done something like this that very afternoon? Would we not the next afternoon? In that brief moment I felt like this was the place I belonged most in the world.

My thoughts turned to other fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, walking together. My mind went back to the fathers who may have spent their nights looking for food or shelter for their children. The genocide in Gaza was in it’s second month, most media hadn’t yet started referring to it as such. I was constantly preoccupied by the fear, the sadness, the anguish that a civilian population was feeling as their homeland was, yet again, besieged and everything they had ever known, worked for, dreamed of was decimated in front of them. Are the children who survive the lucky ones?

This contrasting sense of calm and rightness that I felt on my walk and the emotions I had been having for the previous two months. Feeling at home on the waterfront where the only sounds I heard were a young boy and his father laughing, the slight dinging of boats in the harbour, the lapping of the waves. I felt hopeful for the first time in weeks, I was hopeful that if this boy and his father were enjoying a laugh together on a quiet night; hopefully children elsewhere were doing the same. Perhaps even amidst the chaos in Gaza a young boy and his father there were laughing and having fun making their way back “home” whatever that looked like at the time. War is dehumanizing, it has no regard for the dreams of youth, the anguish and the joy of a mother going through labour, the first steps taken, the last few years spent with grandchildren. War and the men who make it don’t consider these things. We are human, we are all human, and even in the midst of a devastating war, a conflict, genocide, ethnic cleansing whatever you call it people will claw back whatever humanity they can.

People living under occupation, growing up in war zones, are resilient people with an impressively stubborn resilience that builds rather than diminishes over years, decades, and generations. No one should have to live like that, but those who do have a determination to live, a determination to claim their land and to protect it that I can’t being to understand. This resistance comes in many forms; acts of “terrorism”, acts of courage, and sacrifice; these are the ones that make the news. Humanity without resistance will lead to extinction but resistance without humanity has nothing to save.

I began to circle the ramp up the Cambie Bridge, the view from up there was spectacular. Science World’s lights had just, finally, been turned back on and were glittering off the inlet. The calm serenity of the night did not leave me; I don’t remember a single car on the bridge as I walked across. The sun had long set but a lite fog rose from the streets as if the moon took over the shift from the sun and continued drying things out. Someday I hope to feel that peace again, I hope everyone does.

My daughter uses the same backpack I did 30 years ago! Hail to the once great, and again trendy Jansport.

I also love that she’s adorned it with some finger knitting!

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 …"

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…

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.

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.