If you're a Ruby developer and you've never been to RubyKaigi, the 2024 edition from May 15-17 in Okinawa would be a fantastic place to start. Despite being nearly thirty years old, Ruby is still ascendant in Japan—inspiring a diverse and enthusiastic community of Rubyists who are passionate about pushing the language further. Kaigi has played an important role in that success, gradually picking up steam over the last ten years as it travels between many of the best cities in Japan (owed largely to the organizers' impeccable taste in food and drink).

If you've ever considered coming to Kaigi but hesitated out of concern about Japanese language ability, transportation complexity, unfamiliar customs, or whether you'll like the food, Okinawa offers a uniquely comfortable on-ramp to first-time visitors:

• Okinawa's nature and beaches make it one of the most beautiful places in Japan, with the best weather in the nation in May—tropical and sunny, interspersed with brief heat-breaking rain showers
• Despite the laid-back island atmosphere, English is as widely understood and spoken in Okinawa as anywhere else in Japan (one silver lining of the continuous presence of the American military). Additionally, RubyKaigi's organizers try to schedule at least one English-language talk for every time slot and pay for live translation services into English for all Japanese-langauge talks
• While all of Japan is incredibly welcoming to foreigners, Okinawa is one of the few places in Japan designed to be a tourist destination—easy to get around and with the amenities people expect to see on vacation, while refreshingly free of the congestion and strain tourists' presence has placed on other cities like Osaka and Kyoto
• It's always been my perspective that to experience the full range of Japanese culture, one needs to escape the urban sprawl of Tokyo and visit more rural areas. Okinawa is unique in that it's every bit as accommodating to people unfamiliar with Japanese customs as Tokyo is, while still offering a broad and authentic view into Japanese culture and tradition
• If you're not sure whether you'll like Japanese food, Okinawa is such a melting pot that it's become home to a fusion of American and Asian cuisine that should satisfy any palate. When in doubt, there's always taco rice

For more information on what it's like to attend Kaigi, check out the field report I filed for Test Double last year in Matsumoto. It was easily the most educational and fun conference I've attended since the pandemic, with genuinely useful information about still-in-development Ruby features I wouldn't have found anywhere else and absolutely fantastic official and unofficial activities and parties. I'm sure this year will be no different! Tickets aren't on sale yet, but you can sign up to be notified when they go live.

I'm not planning to speak this year, but you should consider submitting to the CFP before it closes at the end of January. RubyKaigi's program is geared for giving open source Ruby programmers a platform to share their work along with their experiences and insights. In addition to straightforward presentations of new gems and language features, the conference also celebrates the joy of programming by highlighting creative and quirky talks like Shioi-san's Ruby fork to add a oft-requested i++ operator and @tompng's increasingly fantastical quines. If you write open source Ruby, I hope you'll consider submitting a talk! (And if you'd like some free advice on responding to CFPs, I published a video about speaking last month you might enjoy.)

Anyway, if you're thinking of going, drop me a line if you have any questions or concerns and I'll be happy to help. Hope to see you in Okinawa this May! 🏝️

Ruby's REPL, irb has gotten a ton of love over the past few years, essentially obviating most popular debuggers in the process. This year is another huge leap forward.

This is my favorite item in this list because I didn't even know show_source existed:

The show_source command has always been an essential tool for many IRB users, especially for debugging. This year it received two enhancements that will make it even more useful:

• You can now use -s to get the method’s super definition if it has one
• It can now display private methods too

Awesome!

Having a great REPL is essential in dynamic languages, so quality-of-life improvements have a direct impact on the speed and quality of feedback during development.

Rounding out what feels like six months of contemplative and retrospective blog posts over at the Test Double blog is this one on my own idiosyncratic approach to finding meaning in my work and how I wish more managers would approach their direct reports' career development.

To wit, I’ve never accomplished anything I felt proud of by setting a goal. In fact, the surest way to ensure I don’t do something is to set a goal. When asked to set goals for myself, I’ve found that expressing the goal (as opposed to achieving it) becomes my overriding objective. The moment a manager approved my list of goals, I felt that I had completed the work asked of me and I would instantly lose all motivation to pursue the goals themselves.

This explains why planting flags can succeed where goal-setting fails. If what I’m searching for is meaning in my work, setting a goal creates an expectation of where, when, and how my future self should find that meaning. High pressure. Focusing on doing my job well and reflecting on whatever I did in retrospect, however, has allowed me to sift through my experiences, identify patterns, and give meaning to them. Low pressure.

I feel like managers as well as employees find comfort in planning what their future state will look like, as if it reduces any of the fear-inducing uncertainty that lies ahead. It doesn't, but I can't imagine why else people would so quickly reach for goal-setting as their primary career development approach when it almost always fizzles and fails.

I need exactly two things to do great work: awareness of others' expectations of what they think I should be doing and a shared definition of what success will look like when I achieve it. Nothing more is necessary to excavate metaphorical tons of marble from which I can chisel sculptures to mark the moments that mattered along the way.

One more note on what people get wrong about ✨Thought Leadering✨:

But here’s the thing: I create these things for me and me alone. When a bunch of people read something I wrote or show up to one of my talks, do I find it encouraging and validating? Sure. But it’s not what drives me. I started creating things to punctuate my life’s sentences long before anybody took an interest in me and I wouldn’t stop even if everyone loses interest in me.

If the lack of an audience is the reason you've failed to apply creativity in expressing the meaning of your life's work, that's a real shame.

Kudos to Instagram for being so confidently unconcerned its creators would consider pushing back against the platform for saying this:

90% decrease in cost per person recalling seeing ads with a mix of virtual creator content and campaign video, compared to ads with campaign video only

I've talked to several people in advertising about the rise of "The Influencer" as a target for ad spend over the last five years and the one thing—literally, the only thing—ad executives seem to like about influencers is that they're cheap. If they like two things about working with influencers, it's that so many users are competing for so few dollars that moral scruples about aren't a factor.

I don't see how AI talent doesn't give ad buyers more of what they want (even lower prices and even fewer scruples) while also escaping many of the downsides of working with influencers (managing amateur talent, qualifying promoted content, ensuring brand safety). It will be interesting to see how durable influencers' place in the market turns out to be.

Welcome to the 2023 Buggies! The inaugural award ceremony in which I celebrate the most frustrating, hard-to-reproduce, and least-discussed software bug of the year.

This year's award recipient for Neatest Bug of the Year has been striving for literal years to climb atop the pile of apps that freeze on first launch after install, error pages that themselves trigger additional errors, and save buttons that do nothing until you clear your cookies. But as we say goodbye to 2023, this bug found a way to emerge on top of a more-crowded-than-ever field of hopelessly broken software.

So, without further ado, the Neatest Bug of The year is…

Turns out, there's more to it…

I was fighting with a home automation this morning and it required me to ping a few high-traffic websites and I got curious looking at the headers that Apple returns:

$ curl -I https://www.apple.com/
HTTP/2 200
server: Apple
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload
referrer-policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade
content-security-policy: default-src 'self' blob: data: *.akamaized.net *.apple.com *.apple-mapkit.com *.cdn-apple.com *.organicfruitapps.com; child-src blob: embed.music.apple.com embed.podcasts.apple.com https://recyclingprogram.apple.com swdlp.apple.com www.apple.com www.instagram.com platform.twitter.com www.youtube-nocookie.com; img-src 'unsafe-inline' blob: data: *.apple.com *.apple-mapkit.com *.cdn-apple.com *.mzstatic.com; script-src 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' blob: *.apple.com *.apple-mapkit.com www.instagram.com platform.twitter.com; style-src 'unsafe-inline' *.apple.com
cache-control: max-age=582
expires: Sat, 23 Dec 2023 12:49:53 GMT
date: Sat, 23 Dec 2023 12:40:11 GMT
x-cache: TCP_MEM_HIT from a23-218-251-35.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (AkamaiGHost/11.3.3-52660090) (-)
set-cookie: geo=US; path=/; domain=.apple.com

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

Summarizing a report on the top programming languages of 2023, and the impact LLMs have had:

We’ve been internally discussing how we’re going to address the impact of AI-based code assistants on our language rankings since GitHub released Copilot in October 2021. However, it was when ChatGPT hit the market on November 30, 2022 and went from 0 to 100M users in two months that we started seeing undeniable impacts on our source data.

The first chart is worth the click on its own. StackOverflow hasn't seen so few new questions asked since 2012. The decline looks less sudden than it is, because the number of questions being asked started declining in mid-2021, which is incidentally when GitHub Copilot was first released.

You can argue all you want about the quality of the code that AI tools produce (the results I've seen from a year of using them in earnest has been middling at best), but I can think of no better metric for GitHub to hang its hat on than questions no longer asked to other humans. That seems like incontrovertible evidence people are asking AI tools those questions instead and that they're getting good enough answers that they ultimately decide not to go ask a human.

This decline is dramatic, but let's play the AI skeptic for a moment: it would be interesting to learn what nature of questions Copilot is taking from StackOverflow's "marketshare." Countless questions asked on StackOverflow represent rubber duck pairing, in which the very act of articulating a problem carefully makes the answer become apparent. If 30% of StackOverflow questions are effectively solved in the act of the author being forced to cogently describe a problem in writing, then a 30% decline in StackOverflow questions isn't necessarily evidence that AI is providing good answers—only that people are now using LLM chatbots as their rubber duck pair partners instead of the text area of that particular web forum. (No matter how you slice it, though, less user-generated content and engagement is bad news for StackOverflow's business model, it would seem.)

I just added an /rss page to this web site to document which feeds I publish.

Because many people either never experienced RSS before Google killed it or don't have an answer to the question of "how would I go about getting back into RSS in 2023", I also included a step-by-step explainer on setting up a feed reader application to subscribe to this site and sync its subscription via iCloud.

If you fell out of the habit of getting your news from an RSS reader during the Twitter era like I did, I really encourage you to give it another go. It is refreshing to be in total control of what, when, and how I consume articles. The best part is that the only friction to unsusbscribing from a feed is the time it takes me to ask, "am I enjoying this?" which is a much lower bar than the social pressure I would always before clicking "Unfollow" on a social network.

What if I replaced myself with a chatbot?

Filtering iCloud Shared Photo Library by Contributor

This self-described "30 year history" of ChatGPT is a fantastic overview of the history and literature of AI research that led to the creation of large language models and, eventually, the innovations at OpenAI that enabled the revolution that was sparked by last year's launch of ChatGPT.

If you're interested in the history and the technical underpinnings of AI (which seems like a topic worth understanding if you either use this tools or exist in the world quickly becoming absorbed by them), this video provides a great survey of the landscape.

From the Supabase blog:

Fly's current Postgres offering is unmanaged. This means that you're responsible for handling scaling, point-in-time backups, replication, major version upgrades, etc. We'll run Fly's managed Postgres, which means that we do all that for you, and you can concentrate on building.

Fly and Render are the two alternatives to Heroku I hear mentioned most often, but as much as I love Heroku as a platform to run my application code, being able to trust my data with its managed Postgres add-on is what has always set it apart from the competition. I've heard less-than-encouraging reports about Render's managed Postgres capabilities and reliability, so it's interesting to see a major vendor partner with Fly to check this box.

I wonder how Craig Kierstens at CrunchyData would compare this coupling to their own offering. We reached out to Craig for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

[Content Warning: '90s farming simulator video games.]

Way back in 2010, an executive from the stateside publisher of Harvest Moon, Natsume, poured cold water on the idea of there ever being a digital re-release of Harvest Moon 64 in an interview with an outlet called "Nerd Mentality":

Nerd Mentality: We have some huge fans of Harvest Moon 64 on our website, and we are wondering if it will ever come out on Virtual Console?

Graham Markay: It will not. It will not. And it’s not from lack of trying. Unfortunately, the code of the game is not… it’s not an easy transfer. It would be really time-consuming and long, and we’ve looked into it, and we’ve tried to see if there’s any way around certain things, but the conversion to virtual console, it’s just… I shouldn’t say it’s never going to come out, but there’s just a really, really, very small chance that it would ever come out. Which is unfortunate because we know that for a lot of dedicated, die-hard fans, that’s their favorite.

Nerd Mentality: So it’s only the technical issues holding it back?

Graham Markay: Oh yeah. Just the technical issue.

This interview took place 11 years after the game's initial release, so in the intervening 13 years of scientific improvement, they apparently discovered how romsites worked and licensed the ROM dump to Nintendo for its Switch Online service service.

I sold my HM64 cart during the post-pandemic nostalgia collector boom, but I remember playing this game straight through Christmas break in 1999, so maybe I'll fire up the Switch release for old time sake. 🧑‍🌾