Travis Fantina

PostalBox

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 10:35:17 -0500

With the holidays around the corner you may have a lot of physical correspondence to send. Might I Postalbox my service for sending physical mail. Submit a letter and I will personally mail it to any address in the world, fees are relatively low standard Canadian & international postage and ~$1 processing fee.

postalbox.xyz

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 09:43:10 -0500

This system doesn’t get heavy usage, but for a legacy Rails app that I’ve spent the last year upgrading and adding features too it’s nice to see this right in the peak of “busy season”.

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:13:45 -0500

Fall in the Japanese Garden.

Code BEAM Europe

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 08:14:31 -0500

About two weeks ago I attended and spoke at Code BEAM Europe. My talk, “Ruby Crimes in Elixir Codebases”, will be available in early 2027; at some point I may expand some of the ideas in the talk as blog posts here or post a condensed version but that may not be for a few months if at all.

Conference speaking, and tech conferences in general were new to me. I’ve always aspired to both attend a conference and, eventually, speak at one. Being a consultant contracting, primarily with a small dev shop means I don’t have a deep-pocketed overlord willing to send me off to technical conferences far and wide. I reached a point where I figured I could make it happen myself or it likely wouldn’t. Because I had several topics that I felt I could develop into full talks and to somewhat defray the cost of attending I started pitching to conferences (Sessionizer makes this easy) and was overjoyed in early June to learn that Code BEAM had accepted me.

Held in Haarlem’s Philharmonic (Phil.) which, like most of Haarlem, is a beautiful old building that would feel like walking into history if it hadn’t been so thoroughly modernized. From an organization perspective, everyone was super on top of things, Monika and the whole team from Trifork/Erlang Solutions were extremely communicative and helpful. During the conference I came in the morning and left in the evening; effortlessly drifting between sessions and breaks. This frictionless experience at an event only comes from an inordinate amount of prep and behind the scenes work from organizers; I give a lot of credit to the team who made for such a smooth experience.

I’m somewhat myopic in my web-world of Elixir/Phoenix building, mostly, CRUD apps and APIs. Going to a conference where people were using the BEAM for music production, embedded systems, local-first applications and more was inspiring. I left with about 4 projects I want to dig into in the next year (sadly, this conference was unable to magically grant me more time to pursue side projects). What inspired me the most was the number of people who were coding for the fun of it, limiting their use of LLMs or eschewing them entirely, at least in hobby projects. Regardless of your feelings on AI it’s refreshing to find pockets of technologists who are still in it for the love of code and not satisfied to simply write prose, pull a lever and see what the pattern machine spits out.

The economics of intercontinental travel, family life, likely means I won’t be able to attend in 2027 but if I can make 2028 work I’d be thrilled to!

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 09:07:44 -0500

Writing raw SQL queries and having something complex work rekindles those early highs I got when I was first learning to program with Ruby back in the day.

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:39:49 -0500

Katie Zacharia is “stepping down” after 5 days… That’s just about half a Scaramucci for context (anything to not use the metric system).

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:10:25 -0500

My youngest, who just turned two started doing these drawings. She spends twenty or thirty minutes on each and everything ob the page is something. She will point to a spot: ”thats monkey!” Or ”thats Pumpkin” (our cat). I’m here for it… and the final product is a pretty cool pattern.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:34:43 -0500

Wonder how many commit messages end with some variation of :wq?

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:51:40 -0500

Diffs like this make me proud… Admittedly I also wrote all those 1365 lines; no regrets! They worked in production for about three years, the client switched vendors, the process is more streamlined now my work around was no longer needed.

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:14:26 -0500

“I don’t remember signing up for this” is an option, but you did not include “I DID NOT sign up for this” as an option. You must understand, nobody in the history of the world has ever signed up for a mailing list.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:49:41 -0500

Got a notice from Google that my Chrome plugin was removed from the web-store. Which is a bit of a laugh. I wrote it about 8 years ago when I worked at an insurance company, I can’t remember the details but it correctly formatted pasted URLs from various policy documents. That is to say, niche.

Something something research, working for things, instantly gratified by shit

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:47:27 -0500

I accidentally stumbled across the OpenAI store not because I wanted too it was a link chain I followed blindly (don’t be mad!) I couldn’t help but notice that the hucksters at OpenAI are selling a $40 t-shirt with the words “Good Research Takes Time” which is not only sadly ironic but also tone deaf. The people who are working tireless to destroy or reasoning abilities, think for us, and remove any kind of academic inquiry or curiosity about the world are loudly proclaiming “good research takes time”. I mean I agree but it seems antithetical to their entire brand.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:18:02 -0500

I gotta stop going on Linkedin, sometimes I genuinely want to see what a colleague is up to or I need to post something I’m working on (speaking at a conference this fall gotta rep it). My feed is now, essentially 100% rage bait, the unhinged toxic “rise and grind” people are out of control and somehow it’s all I’m shown!

Where to go from here…

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 10:28:03 -0500

For the past 25 years, 71% of my life, computers have been a daily thing for me. When I was a teenager I spent countless hours drawing, animating, and “programming” ActionScript in Flash, later those energies were channeled into editing films in Final Cut Studio, building websites tinkering with HTML, CSS, and PHP.
Much of my university work was done on the computer and yet I still came home, sat down, and “forced” myself to learn Ruby and Rails. Although, forced is not the word it was fun. Yes it was hard and frustrating but the reward was worth it, the dopamine hit of figuring something out made the hours of frustration worth it. For nearly seven years now I’ve made writing Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, and others my career, I’ve done it all day long, and still had an insatiable desire to work with these technologies oitside of work. Of course having a wife and children, volunteering, and living some semblance of a “balanced” life always slowed my pace. I didn’t finish as many side-projects as I wanted, learn as many new languages as I wanted, open-source contributions were virtually non-existent but to the extent life allowed I was using the computer in one way or another almost all the time. If it wasn’t programming, it was writing, or making art. I think it would have been unfathomable for me to conceive of a career not centered around a computer.

Within the last six months this has shifted dramatically. I clock out on Friday at 4 or 5 and I’m happy if I don’t have to open the lap-top until 8 AM on Monday morning. Three day weekend? All the better. My total lack of enthusiasm actually hinders pursuits totally unrelated to programming or the web, I’ve been working through a first draft of a novel for a while; since it’s on my computer, I have no real desire to work on it on the weekends. I’ve joked with my wife about getting a typewriter so I can do some creative writing.

What shifted? AI. AI has made my job as a programmer totally meaningless, but it’s not just my fun job where I get to solve problems. It also means that I take a lot less enjoyment in discovering and using other people’s software. Whether or not it was built with AI is sort of academic at this point, knowing that it could be taints the entire idea for me. Sure there are some incredible apps out there still being written by hand by talented developers who are, in most cases, ethically opposed to AI (as they should be) but it doesn’t really matter. AI has proven too good at creating great apps easily and cheaply, code and therefore the programs it compiles to is just fairly meaningless.

Years ago when the enigmatic Rubyist Why the Lucky Stiff abruptly quit programming he parted with some words which have haunted me my entire career:

programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.

I couldn’t help but think about that quote anytime I questioned whether or not I was doing something meaningful with my life. However, I used to be able to tell myself, I’m not building something beautiful, curing cancer, or making art but I’m making useful tools that people use to get their job done. Moreso, I’m fortunate, I’ve gotten to work for non-profits, government organizations, sustainable packaging companies and I think the secondary effects of my work actually have made an impact in the world.
These days, increasingly clients can just ask an AI “make a cool marketing website to educate people about recreating safely in the mountains and avoiding avalanches” it means that all my efforts are not only going to be “replaced… in a year” as Why said. Not perhaps “replaced by superior ones” but replaced by ones that we have collectively called “good enough” to the point were companies and organizations are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on “tokens” to do this when they used to spend that on “developers”.

What am I even doing now? What am I for? More broadly, if the internet is going to be produced by AI agents, I don’t see any reason to hang out there.

Speaking at BEAM Europe

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:07:59 -0500

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at BEAM Europe in October. Would love to see you there and/or if your in the greater Haarlem area, happy to meet up!

Tickets are on sale now over at https://codebeameurope.com/ . Drop into my session if your interested in looking at how Ruby/OOP patterns can sneak into Elixir code bases when first adopting Elixir and how to refactor/avoid these.

Block Editors

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:24:26 -0500

It just clicked; I can not stand block based editing. I’ve been looking for a replacement for Bear Notes (love Bear but the combination of paying for access to my own iCloud and my eventual desire to switch off of Mac is necessitating some changes). Shopping around I stumbled across a sleek promising looking app I was almost sold then I realized I wasn’t looking at markdown. Then came the dreaded line “block based editor” nooo! I find block based editing to be so cumbersome and brittle. Blocks are always flowing into one another, any time I want formatting I have to open some weird command pallet.

They are sleek, I’ve flirted with Notion many times over the years, but I always come away feeling like I’m playing with a toy rather rather than a workhorse. Gutenberg, WordPress’s block editor, has made editing content on WP an incredibly joyless experience it’s no wonder most installs I’ve seen have some plugin to disable it.

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:22:17 -0500

Dear Dash Docs, You are incredibly useful as an offline documentation viewer for the languages I use… I paid once and the product does everything that I paid for and continues to be a delight. Please stop asking me to upgrade; which, from what I can tell gives me the same features I already paid for with the added bonus of paying a yearly subscription.

Thanks!

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:26:26 -0500

I don’t follow the WWDC at all but this is a great write up morrick.me/archives/…

AI, and so much “technology” - or we’ll say services (ie. Uber Eats) seem designed to “take the friction” out of our daily lives; you don’t need to hail a cab, you don’t need to go to the record store, you don’t need need to talk to another person, you don’t need to leave your house- for anything, ever.

What are we doing? When you take all that “friction” out of your life, you may find that those individual points of connection and sometimes frustration were the things that punctuated a fulfilling life. What keeps you so busy that you can’t pick out the ten best photos from your last trip to send to a friend? What keeps you so busy that you can’t draw a beautiful picture? What keeps you so busy that you need an AI to give you ideas for how to spend time with your kids. What is this saving you from? What are you going to do now that you’ve freed up all that time?

I recall about 15 years ago it was fashionable for people who thought they were important to only wear one outfit to free up mental energy to make “big decisions”. I’ve always been skeptical of someone who had too much going on mentally to pull out a pair of pants; but now this thinking seems to permeate every facet of our lives. Don’t let finding the right book stand in your way, ask an AI, or have GoodReads select your next book! Hell, don’t let reading the right book stand in your way, just get it summarized by ChatGPT and say you read it!

Public Funding and Your Tax Dollars at Work

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:01:42 -0500

In the technology world, where I spend my days, Elixir v1.20 was just released. It’s exciting to have the gradual type system now fully baked into the compiler, which was the result of years of research and effort from the Elixir core team and a group of academics. One of the most insightful comments on this release came from a user on Lobste.rs:

This post is an occasion to advertise for long-term public-funded research… We benefit from this work, collectively, thanks to the bright people working in public service, the academic values of sharing our work as widely as possible. (source)[https://lobste.rs/s/wq1csk/elixir_v1_20_released_now_gradually_typed#c_2eppte]

I’ve seen Guillaume Duboc and Universite Paris Cite cited on Elixir related papers for years but never made the direct connection between taxpayer dollars and the work being done at a public research institution in France. Taxes cover a lot of tangibles: infrastructure, services, healthcare (in most first world countries), but there are intangibles that are less focused on keeping you safe and healthy today looking, instead, to the future by funding education and innovation. A new typing system for a “niche” programming language may not seem like an earth moving innovation, and perhaps not. Yet none of this research happened in a vacuum, researchers talk cross disciplinary thinking happens, and it leads to real outcomes for real people. My work is going to be improved, directly, because of the work that was impart funded by the French Government for Duboc’s research.

For me this is a microcosm, there are countless impacts of greater importance brought about in my life through publicly funded research. Often the thread from funding, to research, to proof, marketability and production is far too circuitous to point too in a causal kind of way. Life saving drugs, better public health outcomes, breakthroughs in engineering: this is why have a “society” and I believe it’s all well worth funding!

Of course “funding” gets thrown around by a lot of different groups and interests. The real magic; however, is public funding. It’s transparent, the results are there, for anyone. I’ve read Duboc’s paper; good luck reading whatever research a private company like OpenAI or Anthropic is producing!

Fri, 29 May 2026 07:38:46 -0500

Sad to hear about the death of Marc Johnson; he was an incredible skateboarder who I grew up watching. Perhaps more than any other skater; he was the epitome of being incredibly talented and hardworking but also never taking things too seriously just having a blast being different and weird. His skating was like a cocktail of Mullen’s technical abilities and Gonz’s weirdness.

Still an insane part:

www.youtube.com/watch

Wed, 20 May 2026 15:29:50 -0500

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?

An Evening in December

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:26:33 -0500

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.

Tue, 12 May 2026 08:43:39 -0500

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!

Infinite Blahs in a GitHub username

Thu, 07 May 2026 08:15:33 -0500

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.

Fri, 01 May 2026 06:57:43 -0500

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 …"