Rebase dependent branches

Taylor Blau at the GitHub blog points highlights a new feature git (v2.38) that I am super excited about. You can now git rebase --update-refs. Since reading that, I’ve already saved a lot of time (and minimized mistakes) when working on a set of branches that build on each other.

Partitioning in Postgres, 2022 edition

Brandur highlights that Postgres has made great usability improvements to partitioning over the last few years. It is now relatively easy to take advantage of it.

Add Data class implementation: Simple immutable value object

An new immutable value object, Data, has been merged into Ruby for release soon. It’s stricter than a Struct, which in many cases is exactly what you need from a value object.

git recently shipped some performance improvements when working with large repositories, as announced on the GitHub blog.

I tested in a large repository. With default configuration:

$ time git status
On branch master
Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 686 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
  (use "git pull" to update your local branch)

nothing to commit, working tree clean
git status  0.40s user 8.55s system 429% cpu 2.082 total

We then configure fsmonitor and untrackedcache:

$ git config core.fsmonitor true
$ git config core.untrackedcache true

And run twice, to warm up the cache:

$ time git status
On branch master
Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 686 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
  (use "git pull" to update your local branch)

nothing to commit, working tree clean
git status  0.38s user 1.43s system 159% cpu 1.141 total

$ time git status
On branch master
Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 686 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
  (use "git pull" to update your local branch)

nothing to commit, working tree clean
git status  0.13s user 0.03s system 92% cpu 0.178 total

The improvement is quite significant. The end performance is under 200 ms, generally considered to be perceived as instantaneous by users. I’m thrilled!

Signing Git Commits with Your SSH Key

SSH keys are more common than GPG keys, by far. I don’t know many developers that have GPG keys, but all of them have SSH keys, if only to use GitHub. However, the support for the signatures seems a bit rough at the moment.

Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres

The article explains well how background jobs that run outside of a db transaction can have several categories or problems. However, job queues driven by relational databases sometimes don’t scale well, when compared to other queues. For example see DelayedJob, or Que vs Sidekiq. The article presents a pattern that keeps the transactionality, but regains much of the performance by using a staging table for jobs, which drains into the actual job queue that will do the work.

Understanding GenStage back-pressure mechanism

Really concise explanation of what the concept of back-pressure means in Elixir, and how it can prevent overflow and the capacity of the system being exceeded.

Your Makefiles are wrong

make is a very powerful build tool, but it has sharp edges. In this post Jacob Davis-Hansson explains some best practices to improve the experience. The key insight is that each make target, by default, is suppose to generate a file, and execution is determined by laying out dependencies between files.

Why are you so busy?

as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.

Tom Lingham writes about being busy in software engineering teams. The quote above gets at the crux of the problem: You can only do so much. Asking for more, means that you need to work more or take shortcuts. Both of those lead to non-sustainable work. The appropriate response is to push back and have the tough conversations.

Ten years ago I published my first post in this blog. Let’s look back.

I’ve published 210 posts:

$ ls src/_posts | wc -l
     210

Relatively evenly over the years:

$ ls src/_posts | cut -f1 -d'-' | sort | histogram | sort
           2012    11 ######################
           2013    12 ########################
           2014    19 ######################################
           2015    30 ############################################################
           2016    22 ############################################
           2017    21 ##########################################
           2018    18 ####################################
           2019    21 ##########################################
           2020    20 ########################################
           2021    22 ############################################
           2022    14 ############################

(See my post on World Player Age if you are curious about histogram)

And even more so if we count by month:

$ ls src/_posts | cut -f2 -d'-' | sort | histogram | sort
             01    19 ####################################################
             02    17 ###############################################
             03    17 ###############################################
             04    18 ##################################################
             05    22 ############################################################
             06    17 ###############################################
             07    16 ############################################
             08    19 ####################################################
             09    19 ####################################################
             10    16 ############################################
             11    16 ############################################
             12    14 #######################################

I’ve written almost 87,000 words (roughly 193 pages)

$ wc -w src/_posts/*
   86919 total

Some of the blog posts I am most proud of, are also the longest (wc -w src/_posts/* | sort -r | head -n 10):

And if you create a world cloud out of the categories, I write about these topics:

Here is to the next 10 years!