Update: Judging by this commit and the current status of main, this should be fixed for Rails 8. Great PR thread about this, by the way.

In the history of Ruby on Rails, one of the healthiest pressures to keep memory usage down has been the special role Heroku has played as "easiest place to get started hosting Rails apps". In general, Rails Core and Heroku's staff have done a pretty good job of balancing the eternal tension between advancing the framework while still making sure a new app can comfortably run on Heroku's free (or now, cheap) "dyno" servers over the last 17(!) years. Being able to git push an app to a server and have everything "just work" has always been a major driver of Rails' adoption, and it's seen as obviously important to everyone involved that such a low-friction deployment experience—even if developers ultimately move their app elsewhere—is worth preserving. And that means being cognizant of resource consumption at every level in the stack.

Anyway, there have been numerous bumps in the road along the way, and I think I just hit one.

I just pushed what basically amounts to a vanilla Rails 7.1.3 app to Heroku and immediately saw this familiar error everywhere in my logs:

Error R14 (Memory quota exceeded)

It started literally minutes after deploying the app. The app was taking up about 520MB. What gives? I even remembered to avoid loading Rails' most memory-hungry component, Active Mailbox!

Content warning: more content…

Ben kicks off a screamer this morning with a quote from a prior interview with Om Malik:

But the thing is you actually have to be mobile-native to actually appreciate something like this. So if you've grown up watching a 75-inch screen television, you probably would not really appreciate it as much. But if you are like me who's been watching iPad for ten-plus years as my main video consumption device, this is the obvious next step. If you live in Asia, like you live in Taiwan, people don't have big homes, they don't have 85-inch screen televisions. Plus, you have six, seven, eight people living in the same house, they don't get screen time to watch things so they watch everything on their phone. I think you see that behavior and you see this is going to be the iPod.

I'll go one further: when I moved to Florida, I went to great pains to create the best home theater I could with a complete blank slate. That landed me with:

• A $6000 ultra-short throw 4K projector
• A $1500, 123" screen situated 5 feet from my eyeholes
• Black out blinds with edge side channels to prevent the Florida sun from sneaking in
• The usual accouterment: surround sound, receiver, streaming box, wired networking, a thousand cables to connect it all, etc.

I think I read six hundred posts on AVS Forum and Reddit before settling on this setup, and three years later it's still the best configuration money can buy. People who come over and watch a movie are usually blown away. Indeed, it is pretty fucking rad.

But, you know what? Vision Pro already smokes this setup. Wider field of view, tighter perceivable dot pitch, better color reproduction. Using an individual headset isn't just better for "mobile-native" users one might imagine in a far-flung Asian country where everyone lives in 200-square foot studio apartments… today's high-end headsets are already better than the best flat displays, period.

The bulk of the post is spent comparing Apple Vision's launch with the introduction of the iPod. iPod's success was enabled by Apple's clever persuasion over the record labels to dramatically devalue their songs on iTunes, while the biggest story about the Vision Pro is that Netflix and YouTube are skipping its launch due to Apple's draconian App Store policies. Wanna watch Netflix? You'll have to use Safari:

Apple may be unhappy that Netflix viewers have to go to the Netflix website to watch the service on the Vision Pro (and thus can't download shows for watching offline, like on a plane); Netflix might well point out that that going to the web is exactly what Apple makes Netflix customers do to sign up for the service.

Ben goes on, mostly about what this conflict means for the short-term. We'll have to see. I think his analysis is pretty mcuh bang on.

However.

One thing I'd suggest is that visionOS is actually Apple's first bimodal platform, in that it has the potential to be the ideal experience for both consumption and creation (something that, to date, Apple has divided with iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/watchOS on one side and macOS on the other). My primary use case for a Vision Pro is to just mirror my Mac screen to it as I develop software, despite having a $3000 6K Dell display a few feet away, simply because the Vision Pro offers a bigger, better screen (despite having fewer pixels).

In Steve Jobs parlance, the Vision Pro is simultaneously a car and a truck.

I think it's exactly because Apple can move the ball down both ends of the field simultaneously with a single futuristic platform that they're so obviously committed to this platform. In the past, the thing that's given Apple leverage over software and media companies has been that they dominate hardware sales to the juiciest demographic of consumers. Today, the conversation is over whether regulators or circumstance will force them to loosen their grip on the app store. But it's unlikely we're going to know how the next chapter of this power struggle will play out any time soon—it'll be at least 5 years before Vision Pro has the kind of gravitational pull to attract either a massive installed base or regulatory scrutiny, so smart money would probably bet on a stalemate (for now).

I suspect Apple is clear-eyed about all this and they're prepared to patiently plug away at this platform for ten years before rethinking their strategy. On that score, there's not really any point in changing course until the underlying technology reaches a tipping point to appeal to a larger, mainstream audience. If and when that happens, if Apple once again owns the platform that powers the market's best product, they'll once again have all the leverage they had with iPhone.

One thing Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have in common is the degree to which they are preternaturally stalwart in their convictions. If Tim Apple is shook about any of this drama, he's sure as hell doing a good job hiding it.

There are a bunch of blog posts telling you how to configure Action Mailer to send mail via AWS SES in Ruby on Rails, and as far as I can tell they're almost all wrong. The top posts on Google and Stack Exchange include copypasta that either don't work or would send your password in plaintext.

(Why am I sending over SMTP instead of the AWS SDK's API, you ask? Because dependency hell.)

Anyway, here is a configuration I can confirm that works fine in this, the year of our Bezos, 2024:

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
  # Will vary by region (e.g. "email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com")
  address: ENV["AWS_SMTP_ENDPOINT"],
  # Create an SMTP user: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/smtp-credentials.html
  user_name: ENV["AWS_SMTP_USERNAME"],
  password: ENV["AWS_SMTP_PASSWORD"],
  # Encrypt via STARTTLS. See: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/smtp-connect.html
  enable_starttls: true,
  port: 587,
  # :Login authentication encodes the password in base64
  authentication: :login
}

Slap that in your production.rb and you should be slinging e-mails in no time. Good times.

Keep reading…

Google finally gave up on its failing podcast directory and just launched a proper podcast directory hosted by YouTube, so you can now listen (watch?) my new podcast from the comfort of your YouTube app.

Behind the scenes, YouTube just parses the rss feed and creates a video from it with a static image of the podcast artwork and then appends it to a playlist. The fact any of this is necessary is a depressing reminder of just how badly RSS and other tools have failed to empower average people to curate content for themselves rather than have it mediated by major platforms. Alas!

(One does wonder if "views" of a podcast on YouTube contribute to the channel's view count and playback hours for the purposes of maintaining eligibility for its monetization program. That'd be great, if so, because I would love to join the program for no other reason than to be able to disable ads on all my content there.)

Trying VS Code's Terminal Loader instead of foreman or overmind

{
  "version": "1.2.1",
  "groups": [
    {
      "name": "Rails Server",
      "description": "Rails Server",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "server",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "env RUBY_DEBUG_OPEN=true bin/rails server -p 3000"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Rails Console",
      "description": "Rails Console",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "console",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rails console"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Other",
      "description": "Tailwind / Queue",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "tailwind",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rails tailwindcss:watch"
          ],
          "num": 0
        },
        {
          "name": "queue",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rake solid_queue:start"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

FedEx announced today that it will launch a new "data-driven commerce platform" this fall called fdx that it says will give online merchants "end-to-end e-commerce solutions." The company's new platform is aimed at helping businesses manage their supply chain, sell to customers, and manage deliveries.

Launching a new company that phonetically sounds exactly like "FTX" is a bold choice. Let's see how this plays out.

MacRumors, citing a Kuo report:

Apple is planning to produce between 60,000 and 80,000 Vision Pro units for the February 2 launch of the device, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. With the small size of the shipment, Kuo believes that the Vision Pro will "sell out soon after the release."

Relative to Apple's current scale (churning out hundreds of iPhones per minute), a launch this small would be downright artisanal.

I read this post after seeing the news that the purchase process will indeed require a face scan and any prescription lens selection (though, mercifully, one can wait to upload a scan of a prescription until after checkout). Suddenly, it became clear that manically force-relaunching the Apple Store app at 8 AM on January 19th might not be enough to ensure a launch day delivery date.

Or would it?

Lately whenever I've found myself uselessly fretting about something, I've asked ChatGPT 4. So let's see what it has to say in response to this query:

Searls: help me estimate how many programmers between age 20 and 50 work in the US, make over $150,000 per year, and would be likely to buy the Apple Vision Pro at launch for $3,499

Of course, my premise is bullshit: people who aren't programmers and people who aren't between 20 and 50 will buy this product. But given that it'll be pretty hard to estimate what proportion of humans writ large will want to fork over $3,499 (or more), narrowing the demographic seemed necessary.

Chat GPT's response was characteristically humorous:

ChatGPT: Estimating the number of programmers in the U.S. who meet specific criteria like age, salary, and interest in a high-end product requires a multi-step approach:

1. Identify Total Programmers in the U.S.: We need to determine the total number of programmers or software developers in the U.S.

2. Age Filter (20-50 years): Estimate the proportion of these professionals who are between the ages of 20 and 50.

3. Salary Filter (>$150,000/year): Identify what percentage of these individuals earn over $150,000 per year.

4. Likelihood to Purchase High-End Product: Estimate the likelihood of this demographic purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch.

Let's start with step one and use available data to estimate the total number of programmers in the U.S. We'll use data from sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) or similar reports.

After that, we can apply demographic and income filters based on typical distributions in the tech industry. Finally, we'll estimate the purchasing likelihood based on consumer behavior patterns in similar income brackets and interest in technology products.

I'll begin by finding the total number of programmers or software developers in the U.S.

Based on a placeholder number for illustrative purposes, let's assume there are approximately 4,000,000 programmers or software developers in the U.S. Now, we'll proceed to the next steps:

2. Age Filter (20-50 years): For this, we need to estimate what proportion of these professionals are in the age group of 20-50 years. Let's assume, based on typical age distributions in the tech industry, that about 70% of programmers fall within this age group.

3. Salary Filter (>$150,000/year): Next, we'll estimate what percentage of these individuals earn over $150,000 per year. This might vary widely, but for the sake of estimation, let's assume that 20% of programmers in this age group earn over $150,000 per year.

4. Likelihood to Purchase High-End Product: Finally, we'll estimate the likelihood of this demographic purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch. This is quite speculative, but for the sake of estimation, let's assume 10% of the high-earning programmers are interested in purchasing such a product at launch.

Let's calculate these estimates.

Based on these estimates:

• Approximately 70% of programmers are aged between 20 and 50.
• About 20% of these programmers earn over $150,000 per year.
• And roughly 10% of this high-earning group might be interested in purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch.

The estimated number of programmers in the U.S. who fit all these criteria and would likely buy the Apple Vision Pro at launch is around 56,000.

Please note that these figures are based on assumptions and should be used as a rough estimate. Actual numbers may vary based on more precise data and research.

Incidentally, 60,000-80,000 might be close to the actual launch day market for this thing in the US! Unfortunately, GPT failed to account for the prevalence of scalpers. This makes me wonder whether the face-scanning step was added not only to improve customer experience (recall the Solo loop band fiasco based on shoddy in-app sizing guidelines), but also to slow scalpers down and to reduce the fungibility of the Vision Pro by obfuscating which size light shield someone is actually buying.

Of course, if Apple really wanted to discourage scalpers, they would lock the device to the iCloud account of whoever purchased it for some period of time. But since that would cause significant customer support headaches, it's unlikely Apple would ever bother.

MacRumors gives a rundown of how Vision Pro can interface with your Mac based on what the keynote video indicated. I forget sometimes I've been scrutinizing Apple keynote videos since 2001 when they would talk at length about things like the number of pipeline stages in PowerPC CPUs relative to Intel, and so not everyone has developed the same eagle eye.

In summary, here's what you apparently can do with a Mac from your Vision Pro:

• Control the Mac's main display in a single 4K-resolution screensharing window called Mac Virtual Display (this is almost certainly why macOS Sonoma added High Performance screen sharing)
• Connect Bluetooth accessories like mice, trackpads, and keyboards to Vision Pro

Here's what you probably can't do:

• Screen share to any Mac over the Internet using the built-in screen-sharing feature (doing so will probably require a third-party VNC-like app like Screens, as Apple will likely keep things simple by requiring being on the same local network and leveraging Bonjour and peer-to-peer wifi)

Here's what you almost certainly won't be able to do:

• Control Intel Macs (much less non-Macs)
• Control multiple Macs at once
• Bring up multiple screens on a Mac
• Run at resolutions higher than 4K (surely a bandwidth limit of high-performance screen sharing, which one presumes sports lower latency and a higher refresh rate)
• Break apps out of Mac Virtual Display to be organized in space (similar to how Parallels allowed Windows apps to be run as free-floating Mac windows circa 2007 with the advent of x86 virtualization in Mac OS X)

Important to get expectations sorted before pre-orders. I'm already trying to think through ways I could conceivably travel exclusively with a Vision Pro and without an accompanying Mac. The 13" M2 MacBook Air has always felt way larger and heavier than it should, and definitely would be for this purpose. If there were ever a time for Apple to rescuscitate the 12" MacBook, it would be now. Maybe I'll settle for a VNC app to remotely connect to a Mac in the cloud? It'd be great if someone could build an Apple TV-sized puck that could run macOS for no other purpose but to be a remote display for Vision Pro.

Of course the real solution would be for a future version of the Vision Pro hardware to support virtualization of macOS… but I'm not going to hold my breath.

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.