Travis Fantina

Apparently Netanyahu is telling residents of Gaza to “leave now”. Sorry, but where the hell are they supposed to go? They’ve been blocked from leaving for 20 years.

I work from home, in the basement; my 1 year old cries whenever I go downstairs. My wife has to stand with her at the top of the stairs and they wave me down as I go. It feels like leaving for the office but like 10 times a day.

Is learning Vim actually faster if you then spend multiple hours a week tweaking your Neovim config?

From the morning walk.

Finally took the plunge and decided to start paying for Micro.one… Very good chance I will upgrade to the full service soon.

Before sending that email to hundreds of thosuands of customers… ask yourself, is announcing “we now have dark mode” broadcast worthy?

It’s been a rough couple of weeks in world news. A lot has been going on that I’ve felt moved to comment on but haven’t had the heart to actually write it down. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC primary is a ray of sunshine in otherwise very dark times. It’s a powerful reminder that progressives can win even against massive entrenched interests. In the final weeks of the race billionaires and powerful centrist democrats such as Bill Clinton were pouring millions of dollars and coveted endorsements, respectively, into Cuomo’s campaign in what amounted to an attack on Mamdani. The attack failed. The voice of the people could not be silenced. Big as New York is, on the scale of everything else going on in the world this is kind of small potatoes, but a win for progressives anywhere is a victory for progressives everywhere. I’ll take it.

I’ve been on a Colson Whitehead tear in the past year having started five of his books, finishing four of them. This year I raced through the Ray Carney series (Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto) and I just finished The Underground Railroad. While not my favourite of his books The Underground Railroad was still a compelling read. Whitehead has this talent that I struggle to explain. He’s very good at writing historical fiction that makes you sad or angry at the history without feeling sad or angry with the story. That’s what buoys up books like The Underground Railroad; it was a fantastic read, I daresay a borderline fun read but it also served as a poignant reminder of the atrocities of chattel slavery to the point of being physically moved. This is undoubtedly a hard balance to strike but Whitehead has managed to do it in nearly every book I’ve written.

Full Title: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Although it’s a short read this book was dense. That’s not to say it was a difficult read; quite the contrary, it was extremely approachable but every single page was so laden with facts each paragraph served as an essay unto itself. White Fragility asks left-leaning progressively minded folks to examine their own attitudes towards race; are we more concerned with being racist or being perceived as racist? Do we only think of racists as “very bad people” the kind who form lynch mobs or march with tiki torches? Or are we able to see how our own race has given us an unfair advantage? Are we able to see how we silently perpetuate racial disparities to suit our own needs? Do we do this in subtle subconscious ways or more overtly by proclaiming that we are “colour blind” and therefore race doesn’t matter?

Not only did White Fragility implicate me in my own racism, it also gave me e pause to reflect other areas in which I have blindspots. Benefiting from the various privileges I have, not just as a consequence of my race but also my gender, sexual identity, appearance etc. What things have I said or done over the years that uphold and reenforce the patriarchy? Am I excluding disabled people in my actions (a very salient question for somebody who designs and builds websites, I reckon this site is not fully WCAG compliant).

Definitely worth a read, likely a second in a few years.

It was a week of state machines. Two separate Rails projects, two separate state machine libraries (state_machines and aasm), both sending emails. One is a fairly straightforward project for a department of education, it’s an old codebase but Objective built it and has been working on it ever since. As such, it’s fairly clean and straightforward for it’s age. I think that the more contractors and firms a codebase passes through the more muddled it gets. I’ve been working on this codebase for about two years now. The entire time I’ve been working to convert an old paper process to a digital one, it’s not an overly ambitious project but the budgeting has necessitated a slower pace of development. With only a few months left in the yearly budget (in education I guess the fiscal year ends with the school year) I was asked to quickly implement a form that allows users to draft a custom email message and attach a PDF. It’s been a while since I’ve done this with Rails, my last experience doing so was in the Paperclip days and that was not too fun. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with ActiveStorage, it’s much more plug-and-play then I recall (I’ve also been developing a lot longer now).

The other project is far more involved, my new full-time at gig at Built. It’s been exciting to work in tandem with another developer who has been handling the front-end work. Coming from a small agency I’ve always developed features full stack. Part of why I wanted to switch to a dedicated product team was to have experiences like this one where a greater degree of planning and coordination between developers was required. I started by creating a model last week and writing as many tests as I thought would be relevant. I’ve been through TDD phases in the past; but I think in small teams and projects TDD offers diminishing returns. It makes a lot of sense in a scenario like this, even on a fairly small team, since I’m developing features that I can’t be able to test in the browser until the other developer has her features in place. She in turn won’t be able to know if the front end works until my code is merged into her branch. This feature was the bulk of my week but it came together in time for some Friday afternoon QA of which I’m sure there will be several things to fix on Monday morning.