Travis Fantina

Whether or not they can ever make this thing safe for children… just don’t buy AI toys. Kids are happy to play with a cardboard box and some paints for hours and hours they don’t need AI.

I’m sure git worktrees have their place, perhaps in large compiled projects, but in Ruby and TS I find them to be more a foot gun than not. Not being able to run specs or the server always becomes a hindrance. I’m often tempted to git worktree add when reviewing a PR or doing a quick bugfix on one of my branches but inevitably I’ll get to a point where I want to make sure it works and more often or not at that point I’ll have forgotten I’m even on a worktree. Just last week I spent about 15 minutes trying to debug a TS error before realizing that I was on a worktree and, therefore, the paths were confusing the TS compiler.

I’d love to take full advantage of worktrees but based on the above experiences I can’t see the benefit over something like gwip && gs some_other_branch. Which is pretty snappy. (If your not familiar gwip and gs are just aliases for git add -A; git rm $(git ls-files --deleted) 2> /dev/null; git commit --no-verify --no-gpg-sign --message "--wip-- [skip ci]" and git switch from the OhMyZsh git plugin).

Marketing in dev docs is super annoying. I was just combing through the docs for a gem, and 50% of each page was “oh it does this” and “wouldn’t it be great if you could do this? now your can!” I like a bit of that on the “Getting Started” page so I clearly know what the library is promising but after that just tell me how to use it!

The Guardian is running an op-ed: “Trump shrugged off Khashoggi’s killing. This is a new low”; but is it really? I’m so tired of all the “firsts” with Trump, does anyone have the capacity to still be shocked or surprised at anything this man does?

I’ve been slowly rebuilding my personal site, from the ground up, with Tableau. My goal is to include as little JS as possible and keep the payloads as light as possible. The main thing is that I want to be working in Elixir as much as possible, which Tableau allows me to do. It’s a lot of fun and, currently, the Tableau project is in the early stages so anything I tweak may be a nice little PR I can open in the future.

My daughter is going to a birthday party today, somehow this means making and writing the card falls on me.

Finished reading: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 📚 - is it cliche to give this 5 stars? Such a great book. I haven’t read it before, but I grew up watching the movies (in particular the 1995 mini-series). It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve seen any of them though. This was, actually, a delightful way to read the book; I found that it was familiar, but I remembered so little that the plot wasn’t betrayed by my memories.

First snow

I’m pretty disillusioned with the state of US politics; but last night gave me a great deal of hope. Specifically Zohran Mamdani’s victory in NYC. It underscores something I’ve been feeling (and trying to practice) for the past year; the key to political success lies in local government. As individuals we have almost no control over who the president is; we have a bit more influence on senators and governors but at a local level within our cities individuals can exert a great deal of control. Of course NYC is a bit of an anomaly because of it’s size but in any city or town anyone can get involved by calling their city counselors, campaigning for what they believe in. It’s a sad fact but local politics have such low levels of engagement that it only takes a few phone calls for a city counselor to prioritize an issue. If we all focused less on national politics and put our efforts into making our home towns more equatable, safer, more affordable, et al. our impacts would be multiplied.

I firmly believe in the grassroots idea that making our hometowns better will create an upwards momentum at a state and, eventually, national level. People need to feel safe, healthy, and happy in their hometowns and if they do they won’t need to vote for strongmen.

Last night I watched: White Noise 🍿 I didn’t see a trailer, I didn’t read the book. It’s so much more fun to go in blind. I had no idea what it was or where it was going. Thoroughly enjoyed this film.