justin․searls․co

Drive-by Active Storage advice

This post is also available in Japanese, care of Shozo Hatta

I'm working on a conference talk and there won't be time for me to detail each and every piece of advice I've accrued for each technical topic, so I'm going to dump some of them here and link back to them from the slides.

Today's topic is Active Storage, the Ruby on Rails feature that makes it easy to store user-generated assets like photos and videos in the cloud without clogging up your application or database servers.

Before you do anything, read this absolutely stellar post describing how to get the most out of the feature and avoid its most dangerous foot-guns.

Here goes.

You'll never guess what happens next…

Breaking Change artwork

v20 - Mandatory Stealth

Breaking Change

There have now been 20 major versions since the initial release of Breaking Change, but this is one of the less bad ones. It was substantially improved by friend of the show, Eric Doggett, who helped out with mixing!

If you have strong feelings about anything you hear, you know where to stuff those feelings (other than "deep, deep down"): podcast@searls.co.

Spicier-than-usual show notes follow:

Show me them show notes…

Extremely interested to know how the Apple Watch Series 10 loses 1.1 grams of weight when you add a cellular modem to it

36.4 grams (aluminum, GPS)
35.3 grams (aluminum, GPS + Cellular)
41.7 grams (titanium)

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Lotta grumbling about Apple's "Glowtime" teaser tagline to tomorrow's keynote as being an inapt description of the new Siri interface.

What if the Capture button is translucent, has an LED beneath it and it glows? Remember the breathing iBook/PowerBook LED? Maybe it lights up with notifications or while operating the camera to indicate some UX state?

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Something people misunderstand about "ball hogs" is that they assume they hog the ball because they're better than other players.

It's the opposite! Ball hog is a personality type (and I am one of them). I want to be in control as much as possible, and as a result I spend time getting really good at what I do. Almost all of my own skill acquisition can be explained by this impulse.

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How do people write prose in code editors, with vim movements, and insist on softwrap? Drives me up a fucking wall not being able to navigate up and down reliably with j and k. #TeamHardWrap80cs

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TIL that Amazon's shortened links (and all affiliate links) are CASE SENSITIVE. Any web app that normalizes urls by transforming them to lower-case will break Amazon affiliate links and I finally understand why they don't work on half the web.

God dammit all to hell.

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The key to making friends as an adult is to identify people you want to be your friend and then acting like they've already been your friend for years and eventually they get used to it.

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Realizing that the majority of clever Keynote slide tricks I've accumulated over the last 15 years have been to make intangible topics feel more concrete and easy-to-follow. Because my next talk is essentially an annotated demo of real, working software, I'm finding myself discard most of my own tropes to save time.

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New User of the Month

Why should you come to my Rails World talk about building an app? Look no further than my latest credential. Hotwire user of THE WHOLE MONTH.*

*Apparently there are actually two of us.

The Course Reader project

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on September 2, 2024.

By reading this you have demonstrated two things: you have at least a passing interest in hearing from me and you know how to subscribe to a thing. That being the case, you might also enjoy subscribing to my podcast, Breaking Change. Right around 20 episodes, and it's settling into a biweekly format that reminds me of the drive time radio talk shows I listened to as a kid to pass the time. If you're interested in the kinds of things that surround me—independent software development, theme parks, Japan, tech news, games and movies, and hypercritical observations about everyday life—you might like it. You also definitely might not like it. No way to know until you try.

Who wouldn't fall in love with that face

Turns out, there's more to it…

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